He probably carried his own bags.

That’s the kind of guy a guy like Alex Sanchez is: a bag-carrier. A bagman.

Bagged.

Alex Sanchez was bagged the other day by the lousiest team in the east, the Tampa Bay Devil Worshippers–er, um, I mean Devil Rays. I guess. Because, honestly, if they were prancing around a graven image with cloven hooves down in St. Pete I wouldn’t be half surprised.

After all, they worshipped Alex Sanchez, didn’t they?

Sanchez, the bagman who was dropped by no less a baseball dynasty than the mighty Detroit Tigers, ended up in Tropicana Field after testing positive for…gee, can you guess?

Was it: a) sportsmanship; b) intelligence; c) baseball played the right way; or d) steroids?

Gee, what do you cogitate?

Yep, it doesn’t take Kreskin or Einstein to guess the answer to that one. Strike one.

So what do these Beelzebub Rays do? Snap him up faster and nastier than Valerie Buttinelli snaps up a twenty-dollar bill in the champagne room.

Strike two. Can you smell the brimstone?

Now, to prove that sometimes evil is not punished quickly enough, the Tampa Bay Scumsucking Pigs got a lot of drug-addled production out of Alex the Bagman Sanchez. He was at .346, hitting the heck out of the ball. Knocking it around like Iceberg Slim in a back alley. Slapping it like a schoolboy with a lock on his door. Smoking it like a marijuana doob, which he probably did a lot of before sliding down the hallway to the hard stuff.

There’s a reason they call it a gateway drug. The gate has a sign over it. The sign reads “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.”

Sanchez gave the good hardworking ticketpaying folk of Florida a lot of hope. But the Rays are in the (fish)tank now, their hardworking right-way-guy manager Sweet Lou Piniella gone nutty from the heat and the strain of trying to play ball with a hardcore drug addict like Alex Bagmanchez, or whatever he’s calling himself now.

When a good guy like Piniella, one of the game’s true treasures, loses his cool…well, let’s just say the Bagman has a lot to answer for.

But he won’t be answering anyone anytime soon. He got his walking papers. The pink slip. The boot in the butt. The cleat in the seat. The shoe in the shinola. The Devil Rays — shouldn’t we call them the Angel Rays, now? — finally wised up and told Sanbag not to let the teal and pink door hit him in his chemically-enhanced gluteus maximus on the way out.

You see, sometimes, it doesn’t matter that a guy is hitting .346. Sometimes, a fella’s worth is calculated just a little bit differently. Not with numbers…but with a little thing called baseball smarts.

So the Bagman had to pack his bag once more. Don’t shed any tears for him; he’s done it before, plenty of times. That’s why they call him the Bagman, isn’t it?

Personally, he makes me sick to my g_d d_mn stomach. But that’s just my opinion. And who am I?

Just a man. But not a bagman. I’ll leave that job to the Bagman.

Skip Bayless is a columnist for E$PN and a frequent correspondent on the hit E$PN2 morning show “Cold Pizza.” He is well-known for his tough stances about Mike Tyson being not such a nice guy and for Mark McGwire not being such a great hero after all. He has also written restaurant reviews for the Dallas Morning News, and if you think that’s an easy gig then he’s got news for you, bub: it’s not.