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Sources confirmed earlier today that the producers of the highly acclaimed new “Magic/Bird” musical have inked a deal with Bobby Valentine to create a future musical concerning the battle for the fifth spot in the 2012 Boston Red Sox pitching rotation.

Valentine isn’t exactly sure when he realized the subject turned from mere spring training debate into an epic struggle indicative of humanity’s unending plight.

Known for his flair for the dramatic, Bobby V. believes the drama of the fifth-starter competition will translate beautifully onto the Broadway stage. (Photo via Reuters).

However, as spring training wore on and Valentine continued to speak words out of his mouth, sparking endless debate, “I started to realize there was something essential going on here. Something that rose above the simple search for a guy who can pitch five innings every fifth day. This is about human dignity, suffering and effectively repeating your arm-slot and delivery motion for 100-plus pitches.”

“That’s when I thought, why don’t I work to put my name on something meaningful that will immortalize this thing? I thought, WHAT ABOUT A BROADWAY MUSICAL? How great is that!”

The show will consist of three acts that will be separated by two intermissions, which will be referred to as, what else, Bobby V. says, “7th Inning Stretches.”

“I think extended musical numbers regarding strikeout-per-nine innings ratios are going to translate pretty well to the stage,” he said. “Then of course, second act will move beyond the statistics. The second act is a commentary on mental fortitude and that internal struggle that anyone, let’s say any old set-up man or long reliever, must go through to transition the mind to being used to pitching on a set routine. There will be some emotional turmoil on display for sure.”

The third act, predictably, will be simply the “Daniel Bard” character standing on top of a dirt mound pontificating on his new job and the potential for a long-term big-money contract if he succeeds.

“We may further dramatize the action by putting the ‘Alfredo Aceves’ character and perhaps one based on Aaron Cook at the bottom of the mound. The two aspiring starters will be kind of playing King of the Mountain. You know, trying to knock Daniel down from this tenuous perch.”

Valentine played it coy when asked whether he planned to insert an autobiographical “Manager” role into the production. “Oh, let’s just say the main character of the musical will be a handsome older gentleman with a perfect tan and an intoxicating smile…”

Critics are already recognizing the show’s potential to become an iconic success.

“Yeah, this is going to be huge,” said one renowned Broadway observer. “The team’s  fanbase is consumptive by nature and I believe that the cross-section of diehard Boston Red Sox fans and theater aficionados is much larger than we think.”

Said one historian, “Even if the stage direction is a disaster, the sets uninspired and the musical numbers off-key, this is going to be an important entry into the long and storied history of the Boston Red Sox. It will ensure that this epic debate that took place for a few weeks never gets forgotten. Never.”

PBS has already been granted backstage access to any rehearsals and the pre-production process.

ESPN.com’s Joe McDonald is generally considered a solid beat reporter. Alas, he too has fallen under the apparent irresistible spell:

Reaction: Presumably, @ESPNJoeyMac is being tongue-in-cheek here. But it’s still discouraging, particularly on a day when CSNE’s Sean McAdam (perhaps the only other decent Sox beat guy) also fell victim to the ridiculous Chicken Narrative, penning a column outlining why Red Sox players need to apologize for 2011 before moving onto 2012. Boston fans have already been here, in 2012, for about seven weeks now. It’s a shame none of the sports media cares to join us.

Literary Devices Employed: It was a Tweet. So…zero.

Final Grade: F-minus. Next time, Joe, leave the low-hanging fruit for guys like Peter Abraham.

Third in a series celebrating the Boston sports media’s refusal to abandon a dead storyline. Please send submissions to fenwaypastoral@gmail.com.

It was Boston.com’s Eric Wilbur’s turn with the ol’ Red Sox Chicken torch today.

In “Red Sox sweeping regret under the rug” an edgy, primed-up Eric Wilbur takes his best shot:

No more jokes about chicken and beer. We’re talking about the health and nutrition of players here, people. Don’t you feel badly now that you laughed all winter about the human players’ right to eat? Why do you feel the need to pile on a laughingstock? Let’s see you go three hours without greasing up your hands and pounding some swill.

Some have opined that the “chicken and beer” story line was simply symbolic of how this team tanked down the stretch. That’s unfair. Have you ever had Popeye’s and Bud Light together? That’s a heart-stopping recipe not to be denied to anybody.

Reaction: Get some, Wilbur! Get some!

Literary devices employed: Thick sarcasm, audience-engaging rhetorical questioning, the daring use of subject/verb agreement.

Takeaway: Wilbur appears to be initiating an attempt to lead Adrian Gonzalez (the team’s best player) toward the woodshed for actually giving a reporter the time of day by issuing a benign answer to a question about something that happened five months ago. Boston.com is essentially the graveyard in which insightful baseball analysis goes to die … before being memorialized in 50-page gallery format. Wilbur is no stranger in a strange land. Here, he proves himself something of an apprentice Masserotti, getting paid by the pound to shovel low-grade fertilizer onto the site’s Red Sox content farm.

Final Grade: D-minus.

Second in a series celebrating the Boston sports media’s refusal to abandon a dead storyline. Please send submissions to fenwaypastoral@gmail.com.

In this Boston Herald file photo, a perturbed, sleep-deprived John Lackey storms off the mound and can be clearly seen verbally berating a ball girl.

The frustration in John Lackey’s beet-red face was all too visible during his first start of the homestand.

In the first inning, a foul ball caromed off the padding on the wall that juts out at the corner of the left-field box seats, landing 30 feet in front of Josh Reddick. Twenty-five seconds later, Reddick had finally retrieved the ball and returned to his position.

In the third, a twisting liner short-hopped the cement bottom of the wall near the camera well on the first-base line, rolling right past a 16-year-old local varsity softball star and settling into no-man’s land in shallow right-center. Forty seconds later, play resumed and Lackey was finally allowed to throw his next pitch.

Certainly, some of the more surehanded, veteran ball boys and girls around the majors may have scooped up the same chances with relative ease, sparing Lackey the disruptions. But these are the hazards of employing high school youths from the Greater Boston area to man the scarce foul territory that horseshoes around the baseball diamond inside Fenway Park.

Normally a pillar of stoicism on the mound, Lackey is finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the deficiencies of the ball girls and boys stationed down the left-field and right-field foul lines at Fenway Park.

Earlier this week, the pitcher finally broke his silence.

“I’m not trying to show anyone up, but I mean, c’mon. These kids are pretty much just waving at these balls as they carom off the padding of the walls into the outfield,” he told reporters during batting practice earlier this week.

“As a pitcher, it can really affect my concentration when I have to hold the ball and wait for Darnell McDonald or J.D. Drew to retrieve some errant foul ball that makes it into the outfield.”

Baseball scouts agree that foul ball caroms in Fenway are a significant problem – particularly when Lackey is on the hill. Opponents have routinely been peppering both fair territory and foul ground with loud, ringing hits off the righthander for the better part of his Red Sox tenure.

“The line drive rate tends to be pretty high when major league hitters are seeing 91-mph fastballs grooved into the upper-middle part of home plate,” said one scout. “If Jose Canseco or Bo Jackson were still in the league, I’m convinced we would be talking about some gruesome fatality in the left field stands during a Lackey start.”

Lackey, however, refuses to let the team-chosen ball girls and boys off the hook.

“They are on a major league field and they’re wearing gloves – they need to catch the baseballs. It’s not complicated. I can tell from where I’m standing on the mound that these plays are routine. The team had some honorary ball boy here last month and I swear his UZR must have been like negative-a-hundred…pathetic.”

The pitcher was understandably not interested in acknowledging the small sample size or doling out any leniency based on gender.

“Look, these kids are afraid to get in front of the baseball. They don’t respect the fundamentals. I’ve never seen one of these kids leave his or her feet to make a play on a ball. They sit in chairs all game, they don’t look grounders into their gloves. They are the most lackadaisical fielders I’ve ever seen.”

Club officials balked at the idea of making a trade before the July 31 deadline to fill the holes Lackey speaks of with such rabid disdain.

“At this point, we think it would be best – given the amount of money we have invested elsewhere – to continue to develop some of the younger ball girls and ball boys within the organizational ranks,” said ever-diplomatic general manager Theo Epstein. “If another club were willing to, say, absorb the remaining three years of John Lackey’s contract, we might have more wiggle room for a deal and our outfielders could probably stop worrying about retrieving errant foul balls in the middle of at bats.”