Phillies Beg Kyle Kendrick to Stay in Rotation

At this point, you’ve got to be wondering what it would take to kick Kyle Kendrick out of this rotation.  If you assumed that each of the starters being healthy would be enough, you were wrong.  Dead wrong.  Kyle’s not going anywhere.  Possibly.

"“We might, we might.  That’s not out of the question.”—Rich Dubee"

Slowly, the Phillies are realizing that their starting pitching staff is not indestructible, and all it took was a slight Cole Hamels implosion to perk their ears up.  Like the “tall guy” in an army platoon whose sent out to draw sniper fire,  (EDITOR’S NOTE: This does not happen.  Stop using it as your excuse for going to Canada in the event of a draft, coward) Cole was ordered out the mound to throw until his arm died.  Which it did.  

So now one of the bejeweled contributors to this blessed staff has a corpse hanging off the left side of his body, and though he may never will certainly pitch again, it worked as a reminder that these are four human beings we’ve been slobbering over all season, and though their bodies may be in far better condition than our own, they are still human bodies, and not cybernetically enhanced supersoldiers from the future like we joked about and secretly believed.

The solution?  Get Kyle Kendrick on the phone.  It’s okay; he’s just sitting in the bullpen, thinking about LEGOs or something.  Sure, he falls victim to comical miscues on the field, and from time to time to time to time will get a “shutdown inning” confused with “giving up two singles and a double, then hitting a guy, walking a guy, and overthrowing first.”  But he is a starter, and he can lighten the load of the pitchers whom we decorate with ridiculous hyperbole and frenzied praise.

KYLE KENDRICK AND THE SIX MAN ROTATION

PRO

• Increased nap time for starters
• Self esteem boost for Kyle
• Provides a good laugh when he falls down or voice cracks when cursing or demands to be taken seriously
• Kendrick shirsey sales spike; whether he does well and people want to celebrate or he does poorly and people want to burn in effigy
• Vance Worley and Roy Oswalt given more time to compose hilarious pranks and lively dugout anecdotes

CON

• Roy Halladay forced to wait extra day to pitch, accidentally releases pent-up intensity on dancing Wilson Valdez
• Convinced he can do anything the rest of the rotation can, Kendrick contracts “dead arm” himself when his arm commits suicide
• With more time on his hands, Vance Worley no longer derives thrill from simple pranks and begins building complex mindgames to play on his teammates that span several years
• Joe Blanton feels left out and grows increasingly irritated, culminating in a Kool-Aid-man style outburst that destroys an entire clubhouse wall
• Kendrick would be pitching more, which is statistically when he is at his worst.