Phillies Face Noticeable Preseason Absence of Jerkoff Media Coverage

Sure, the Phillies still have players and coaches and fans.  They still have a front office and a GM and a stadium to play in and high expectations for a young season.  But what they don’t have this year is a room full of journalists forgetting that Joe Blanton has a World Series ring.  And there’s no denying the toll this will have on the team.

How will the Phillies fare without reporters dangling from ceilings like starved orangutans in fashionable slacks, desperate for one precious sound byte from the most historical team to ever not win the first round of the playoffs?  The better question is, how will we the fans know that the Phillies are ready to win without national media outlets spewing mindless chatter at us over the course of the next month?

We could always just, you know, assume it.  They are the Phillies.  They’re pretty good.  They all get along pretty well, if the good natured joshing we get a glimpse of in the DVD retrospectives are any indication.  And they all seem to have positive attitudes, especially since Jimmy Rollins still plays on the team.

But last year, we didn’t have to make any assumptions.  Everything we wanted to know was brought us.  Everything we didn’t know we wanted to know was brought to us.  The internet barfed forth a bounty of Phillies-centric media above the usual fairly sane amount from the beat writers and blogs.  This season, however, it seems despite our best efforts–we did sign a closer for $50 million–the national media just doesn’t want everyone thinking about us all the time.

So, if we aren’t the big, popular pick, then what are we?  You guessed it.  The scrappy underdog.  We the Phillies will be the ones sneaking in under the radar this year; we’ll have the quirky nicknames and the star player who is basically a living meme and we’ll win the division on the last day of the season thanks to an alignment of the stars not seen since the Mayans invented baseball over a hundred years ago.

Yes, it is our time.  Finally, we are back to “skilled enough to win it, unknown enough not to jinx it.”  With low profile players like Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Ryan Howard, it’s hard to imagine anyone showing interest in us until it is, of course, far too late.  Until then, we shall exchange shifty glances in the shadows, knowing what we are capable of, and relishing in the chance to accomplish it unseen.