What Is a Garfoose?

A Garfoose was perhaps involved (and not harmed) in the taking of this picture.

We ponder the difficult questions here at NotG. What should it be like to attend, get dressed for or even play in a baseball game – these questions have occurred often so far in these pages. One thing we have yet covered is what sort of wild animals should be allowed loose in the bullpen.

Good thing Dirk Hayhurst, relief pitcher and author of the Bullpen Gospels, was out there imagining things for us before we ever existed. Well, what is a Garfoose? Hayhurst explained in an interview with DRaysBay arranged after the news that he’d be joining the team for spring training at the very least.

…I started kind of fleshing out this character. What would he look like? What would he be like? And so I started drawing pictures of it and wrote a story about it. Then it kind of caught on from there, and people started asking me to draw pictures of Garfoose on their cards or their baseballs and stuff like that, and I just started doing it.

All the sudden everyone wants this autograph from me. And it’s like, “Okay, sure, I’ve got like this really popular autograph now,” and it’s not because I’m a good player; it’s because I draw this thing on my autograph. It kind of came from that.

Now, the Garfoose of the present is nature’s perfect predator. He lives in the Tibeten mountain groves that you can’t find unless you were born there, or something. And there’s these tops of trees in this grove were the MLB gets its perfectly grown baseballs — because the best baseballs in the world are organic-grown from trees in the baseball grove. And the Garfoose protects the grove from intruders. Very few people that have seen the Garfoose in the wild live to tell about it.

The more you know.