Delmon Young even managed to almost crack the top 475 (#476).  John Lannan got as high as #462.  But Brown couldn’t buy a vote and sunk over 100 ranks from his 2012 status, proving once and for all that Ruben Amaro essentially runs ESPN.

Was it the walks?  Brown is second only to Chase in free passes, which as we all know are the most valuable, most despised statistic of Ruben Amaro’s overall plan.  Is it the hitting?  Is it “a little much?”  Are they scared of him?  That he’ll gain too much confidence and blast one of their analysts over the batter’s eye in center field?

We’ll never know the reason why Brown is lowly ranked.  I mean we could guess it’s because he’s never really been too effective between his first AB ever and this spring.  But if we put that reason aside, we’ll never know!

Delmon Young, on the other hand, is a mystery.  476 seems awfully high for a guy who has zero stats to judge him by because of an ankle/weight problem that is destined to make/has already made him a basically talentless defender.  He hit a bunch during last year’s ALCS, but not every series is that brief frenzy of games he played once in 2012.

And John Lannan!  He’s all “John Lannan” about everything.  What’s that about.

In a way, though, this is a backhanded compliment.  I mean, here we are in the musty sub basement of MLB and there are only three resident Phillies.  Who knows what the next hundred rankings hold!  Who knows how they’ll rank Ryan Howard – it will either be way too low or way too high; there’s no such thing as adequate judgment of his current skills.  Who knows how far Roy Halladay’s barfing has dropped him out of the national spotlight!

Also: who cares.

Learning from that, ESPN has bumped up the Phillies-Braves Opening Day Hullabaloo to its Baseball In Your Face Prime Time Special Thing Narrated by Orel Hershiser Probably.

A #Phillies item: ESPN confirms that the April 1 Opening Day game at Atlanta will in fact be an Opening Night game on national TV at 7 p.m.

— Philly.com Sports (@phillysport) January 3, 2013

It’s been somewhat of an opening day tradition for most of us to use our super awesome computer skills to hack a mainframe and get a super sexy livestream of the Phillies game on our work computers.

Howard Smith-USA TODAY Sports

Then, using the beer behind the toilet in the unisex bathroom, we celebrate in style as the Phillies grind our nerves down to a truly unhealthy level, then react way too positively to avoid suspicion or way too negatively to avoid the police.

It’s just part of spring time in the Delaware Valley, and if someone tells you they’ve never heard of any of this and it mainly just sounds like the confused diatribe of a person with a serious problem, then they’re just covering for their neighbors, because we’re all friends here.

And now ESPN has taken this age-old tradition away from us, with their hair gel and their Tim Kurkjian’s and their slick graphics and clear screen that don’t rely on a dial-up connection or feature announcers that may or may not be speaking in Italian and talking about a soccer game because the internet is hard sometimes.

So I guess ESPN is doing us “favor,” technically, but something about their cold maneuvering of our schedule feels impersonal and self-serving.  Sure, it’s an honor to be handpicked by the Lord and Master of Physical Sporting, ESPN, but it seems like  like they don’t even care about us folks in the trenches, looking for any excuse to hack the mainframe.

I…

I’ve said too much.

So now, ESPN–the worldwide leader in sports, remember–is going to let him talk  about the Phillies, because apparently they couldn’t find stock footage of a dog running around in a circle to post instead.

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