Brace Hemmelgarn-USA TODAY Sports

You don’t, do you?  I mean, I remember what my hands look and feel like, because I spent so much of the year sobbing into them.  I remember being in the market for a new TV and explaining to the teenage Best Buy staffer that this TV is going to take “… a lot of punching.”  I remember having similar conversations with the guy repairing the holes in my wall.  I remember the dental hygienist telling I was the first life-threatening case of teeth grinding she’d ever seen (“Seriously, you’re gonna force them up into your head.”)

But in a way; the main, reality way; Phillies baseball in 2012 was sobbing, and punching, and gnashing of teeth.

It was bad, guys.  It was real bad.

By comparison, in the context of the history of Phillies baseball, it was actually pretty positive.  It wasn’t even one of our countless losing seasons.

But the problem with a five-year divisional flag run is that it starts to become expected, and everybody spends a lot of time waiting for the other foot to drop.  Everything that goes wrong, people rush to assume that it is the end in order to win at that traditional Philadelphia game, “Being a Cynical Prick.”  That way, if things do go to shit, they can say how right they were all along, and they will be celebrated in one of our town’s heralded “This Guy Was Right  About Sports” parades.

You’d think the disappointment that their favorite team was losing would outweigh their desire to be correct about sports in front of strangers–usually on the internet or radio–but hey, they don’t throw those parades for just anybody.

So, in that vein, I guess, the Phillies slapped together a 2012 Year in Review Thing and have put it back on their site, hoping this collection of 2012′s best Phillies moments is enough to get you to forget the worst ones.  There are a lot of clips of Jim Thome blasting dingers.  It’s nice.

But the best way to remember 2012 will be as the precursor to 2013, when the Phillies’ ragtag bunch of reinvigorated core players, talented youngsters, and Michael Young’s came back from the brink and took down this league once and for all.

Until the next season.

That’s the exhausting part about all this.  If everybody could just take some time off after the Phillies win the World Series, none of this would be too big a deal.

But Charlie Manuel doesn’t have to worry about that, because he and Roy are buds.  That’s why he was the recipient of Roy’s latest epic thing. (more…)

Like you, I am unable to focus on anything but the failures of the previous season until the promise of the next one arrives.  Well, it has, and I will be henceforth releasing my hostages from this Starbucks. (more…)