I know what you’re thinking. “Hey, don’t the omens come before the apocalypse?”
And in most cases, yes. However, the Phillies proved once again, this time via a double header-sweeping by the visiting Rays, that they are a special kind of awful. The kind that collapses so hard and so fast, that they beat the omens of their own destruction to the punch.
Justin De Fratus, crawling for a moment off the fractured anonymity of the disabled list, tweeted a picture of the Phillies’ Bright House Field in Clearwater, where only mere months ago, the Phillies hadn’t given us as many reasons to be emotionally devastated, and where currently, the Clearwater Threshers are trying to play a season of Florida State League baseball as the Phillies place and pluck rehabbing Major Leaguers in and out of their lineup.
Tropical Storm Debby has no care for the Phillies roster moves, however, and plopped a big mess of itself on Clearwater as part of a rampage through Florida and Coastal Alabama. Bridges are closing, towns are evacuating, and baseball fields are being destroyed. In a way, it’s the perfect metaphor.
The Phillies are burning the bridge to their past success, their stadium is being evacuated as restless fans grow weary of a team without any spitfire, and the legacy is quietly being destroyed. See? If you force it, anything can be a metaphor. Unless I’ve dangerously misunderstood what a metaphor.
In which case, who cares? Our team is losing and our stadiums are flooding. Those don’t have to be metaphors to be true.