Ruben Amaro Goes Back in Time Using Darren Daulton’s Time Machine

by Ryan (@petzrawr)

one

The GM twisted uncomfortably in the lawn chair in which he was sitting. He wasn’t happy to be here, and he was even less happy about the circumstances that brought him here but, as his predecessor taught him, desperate times called for desperate measures. The air hang heavy with the scent of Hawaiian Tropic Bronzer and stale High Life as the TV that was balanced precariously on top of a stack of milk carts blasted in the background. Somewhere from another room, the man The GM had come to see yelled “I found it! I found the fucker!” The GM grimaced; partly because he was hoping that this lunatic was full of shit and partly because he was pretty sure he sat in some mustard. This was an $800 Hawaiian shirt. Ruined. Fucking Daulton. (more…)

Pat, the second half of The Citizens Bankers, spills his guts with some bold predictions for Ben Francisco.  A whispering wind heard only by a few, Benny Fresh’s role has been secluded to backup duty, pinch hitting, and seeing his name next to the word “platoon.”  But is he going to be the next Jayson Werth?  Hell no.  He’s going to be the next William Penn.

The Cult of Benny Fresh

by Pat from The Citizens Bankers

The Citizens Bankers was founded on the premise of “the ordinary man’s blog.” Our goal at TCB is to inform the casual fan with what they don’t know about their Phillies, or perhaps what they don’t realize. Fans develop favorites and put other players in their doghouses. We at The Citizens Bankers aim to dilute these prejudices to give an accurate and more precise idea of the players who we all love. The following is presented by The Banker.

The other day I received a text message from a friend of mine:

Dom brown broke his hand, crap.

I had already heard the news at the time so I wanted to respond with, “This is the best news possible,” but felt it would be too confusing to explain via-text message.  The truth is, there are plenty of good things about Dom Brown breaking his hand and getting sidelined for 4-6 weeks. (more…)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The 2011 PHREAK SHOW, where people who know and don’t know anything about the Phillies are brought together to create a thunderstorm of guest blogging, lightning strikes of nostalgia, and relentless downpours of snarky comments.

Today, we open our celebration with an old friend:  Bureaucratist.  Hello, Bureaucratist.  Please water us with your thoughts.

FEAR AND REMEMBERING IN PHILADELPHIA

by Bureaucratist

It is a strange, disorienting time to be a Phillies fan.

I was born in 1975, on a significant historical anniversary, just as the baseball season was beginning. (Mike Schmidt would go on to hit his 500th homer on my twelfth birthday.) Through 1983, the Phillies and their Eagle/Sixer/Flyer brethren enjoyed a run of success that shaped my life as surely as the Delaware shapes New Jersey.  In those eight years, my four hometown teams made the playoffs in 27 out of 36 possible seasons, with championships for everyone but the Eagles (of course).

The names associated with those teams are still like magic to me, like giants out of fairy tales:  Schmidt, Carlton, Rose (oh, yes–Pete Rose will always be a Phillie to me), McGraw, Luzinski, Jaworski, Bergey, Montgomery, Carmichael, Erving, Malone, Cheeks, Clarke (who lived down the street from me), the messianic Parent.  What a roll call, and I tingle even now, three decades on, alone in my crappy studio apartment, naked from the waist up with my gut spilling over the top of my pajama pants at two in the afternoon, to the thrill of recall.

But memory is so strange.  Do I really remember sitting in the Samolis’ living room in Deptford, New Jersey, in October 1980 as the room exploded to its feet when Rose snatched Bob Boone’s bobble out of the foul air? or Kenny King’s 80-yard initiation of disappointment in Super Bowl XV? Or even Moses Malone’s famous “Fo’ fo’ fo’,” uttered when I was eight years old?  Surely this is is old enough to remember specifics.  Surely my insatiety for breathless children’s athletic biographies complemented my memories but did not create them.  Surely this strength I feel, this sense of destiny, this certainty that I am a winner, is real, as real as my DNA of which it seems a part.

It must be so, for even now, after all this time, there remains an irrational part of me that cannot understand how anyone could deny that the Philadelphia teams are quite literally and objectively the best teams ever. (more…)