Less than ever, right?  Imagine you have to suit up, stretch out, and go play for that team.  Impossible.

Chase Utley and Carlos Ruiz have my sympathies, except for their awesome lives.  I don’t pity them for those.  Just in this case, that they are both at the moment injured and unable to play.

May 7, 2013; San Francisco, CA, USA; Philadelphia Phillies second baseman Chase Utley (26, right) is congratulated by catcher Carlos Ruiz (51) for scoring against the San Francisco Giants during the first inning at AT

Chase and Chooch will be rehabbing in Lehigh Valley this week, along with the Phillies of the recent past and near future.  The whole system is in a state of flux as catchers are reassigned based on the Erik Kratz injury.  Cameron Rupp bumped up to Lehigh from Reading (Meanwhile, Sebastian Valle has been chucking dudes out for 48 hours).

The Phillies are saying the dynamic duo could be back as early as June 18 – at least, that appears to be the goal.

Of course, the Phillies could very well be out of it by then, in a little over a week.  We may have lost 10 straight!  Ha!  Ha.

So, yeah; you may notice that despite the imminent return of two stars, nobody’s doing the “They’re playing .500 ball and they don’t even have Utley and Ruiz back yet!” thing because it’s pretty obvious that this year isn’t a year like that.

So far this season, Morgan had struck out 29 batters in 41 and two-thirds innings giving him a 6.3 SO/9.  Last season Morgan was striking out the opposing batters to the tune of 9.6 per nine innings.   What a difference a year can make.  I am getting pretty sick of this injury nonsense.  I guess that is just how this prospect game works though.

Naturally, instead of wondering at the majesty of modern technology and baseball melding together to make this the greatest country on earth, you all rushed to your blogs and started making smarmy remarks.  ”Ha ha ha pee comes from my penis!” said you, giggling.

Well maybe before you judge the IronPigs for constantly innovating their field, you appreciate what it is they’re offering – as if we aren’t the generation that’s spent our adult lives peeing inaccurately because we’re leaning out the bathroom door with an Xbox controller in our hands.

There was a time in this country when men walked to the facilities during a game.  Only the game was the Revolutionary War and the bathroom was everywhere.  History is full of men urinating without being entertained, usually while fighting wars that kept our country united, safe, and strong, so that our industries could keep out churning out the greatest technological achievements the world has ever seen.

Just yesterday, we still lived in that world, only without the constant threat of being gutshot by a small lead ball held by a snarling British soldier.  Our world has less wars on American soil and more internets and fart noises.  And it’s terrible.  

Every day, stories come out of the news wires, we churn them through the blog cycle, and when we’re all done making our remarks and little comments, they disappear forever.  That’s how we’ve chosen to spend our days.  And then the IronPigs go and create something baseball has never seen before, and you all act like they just created a video game you control with your pee did some kind of joke of a thing.

I guess you all just want to live in a country with normal old wall-mounted toilets with no video games attached to them in which human urine is the controller.  I’ll bet you’re the same people walking around in 2013 demanding to know where all the flying cars are and not noticing that we have air planes or whining that you should be able to colonize Mars but didn’t bother submitting an application.

This is the future we were promised for our urine.  Do you think our grandfathers ever dreamed they’d be able to alpine ski virtually while emptying their bladders during the seventh inning stretch?  No, they got home from saving America abroad and immediately began impregnating their women so they could give birth to the future of this country.  And we are that future - gazing up at video boards around Coca-Cola Park, seeing if we finally logged a higher video piss game score than our fathers.

Not only will we experience the simultaneous fun of urine expulsion and pretend snowmobiling, but the games are designed to educate us.  On our prostates.  So we can fight diseases.  

Yeah.  Laugh it up, people.

The IronPigs are once again revolutionizing baseball, but this time, they’re doing it while simultaneously educating people and encouraging the healthy frequency of biological excretion.  If this is such a joke to you, maybe you should be using the only toilets you deserve – the ones in the past.