Jesse Biddle Shaken After Assault From Win-Starved Phanatic

For awhile, Philly was spoiled by a harmonic blast of  sunshine.

Roadkill boiled in the mid-afternoon blaze, dudes without shirts ran freely in the streets, and people with malfunctioning A/C in their cars burned alive.  Truly, this was god’s country.

The, Wednesday morning, Philly woke up and the world had gone gray.  The relentless deluge of rain which followed was… a poor sign.

And as Patrick Kane hoisted the Stanley Cup over his  head, a little more of the city died, and Roy Halladay, somewhere within its limits, craned his neck to the sky and, with a subtle grimace, the rain stopped.  As a token of apology, even the clouds dissipated.

Hours before, we had sat on our couches, assuming a Flyers win would be prefaced by an extension of a Phillies revival.

“Tonight’s Phillies-Marlins game has been postponed,” Comcast Sports Net informed us.  “Here are some underfunded local commercials featuring a penguin who inexplicably talks like a duck.”

And it was so.

Phillies-Marlins, 7:05pm, Citizens Bank Park

The Marlins have lost four straight and the last time they faced Doc they made baseball history by being the 20th team to ever be the victim of a perfect game.  So, all we really need to do is hit Josh Johnson.  Ha ha, yeah.

You know what always helps a team that keeps comically faceplanting in the face of fruitful opportunities?  A highly publicized argument.  A healthy dose of spatting between player and manager is just the shot in the arm this terror-train to hell needs to pick up a few additional issues.

Well, I hate to disappoint you, and so does Jayson Werth, but not in the 3-for-38 way that you’re thinking.  Charlie Manuel recently painted the walls with this profanity-laced cloud of vile, toxic hostility:

“I think something like that has to affect him. . . . He really got off to a tremendous start and when things started going a little bad for him, he thinks about it. But he’s going to be fine.”

Wow.  That was so offensive I can’t even sit down.  Or stand up.  I’m currently just doing some sort of weird-sit-stand hybrid stance at my computer because of Charlie Manuel’s world-destroying comments on Jayson Werth’s ability to strike out 10 times before breakfast.

Nice try, newspapers, but it’s going to take more than the most god-awful baseball Philadelphia has seen in three years to cram a rift between these guys.  Charlie and Jayson hugged it out, verbally, and everything’s cool.  So the next time you want to make a big deal about something, why don’t you take the mature route and photo shop somebody wearing a dress who wouldn’t normally be wearing a dress.

Now that’s professional journalism.

In other news, Jesse Biddle met the Phanatic, finally, and it did not go well.

Biddle:  Hey, Phanatic.  I’ve loved you since I was a kid.

Phanatic: *Makes terrifying scream-honk noise from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and attempts to suck out his brain with funnel-nose.*

All photos of the Phanatic being wrestled to the ground and electrocuted to a furry pulp by heavily armed SWAT members were confiscated.