Folks, I’ve shouted “BOMB!!” in a movie theater so many times, it’s almost impossible I’ve been mistaken 17 times in a row. But that only proves that my instincts to panic are precognitive to actual emergencies.
For that reason, the news that Cliff Lee has suffered a “mild strain” of his side is exactly the chance the bony fingers of death needed to caress the back of his neck, despite the Phillies saying he “…feels great now and he should be fine.”
Yes, the Philadelphia Phillies Spring Training camp to a turn for the NOOOOOOOOOOO when Cliff Lee came up a little short on his regiment–shorter than the other pitchers in the rotation, that is; which is still an ungodly amount of stair-runs than any normal human pitcher. Upon investigation, it has been revealed that Cliff has suffered an injury.
I can’t imagine how fervently Bob Brookover’s fingers shook as he typed his report. “Cliff Lee’s Carpenter Complex side sessions have been a little bit shorter than his pitching peers,” he opened, the keyboard now soaked in a mixture of tears and vomit.
He had to have been picturing the cataclysmic chaos into which Philadelphia would undoubtedly descend. Cliff Lee was here for just a moment; long enough to suffer a dramatic, impossibly poorly-timed injury, and then he was gone. Exactly where he could have gone, no one knew, but this was obviously that big terrible thing we were all expecting.
A lot of people would refer to a mild side strain as a “minor setback,” or “barely a problem,” but why do that when we can throw this panic-mobile into high gear and take it screaming down the Holy Fuck Highway? It’s over. The rotation. The legends. The season. Down the drain, because of a small cluster of soreness.
Team management suggests paying attention to any of the many other Phillies players available for our praise–even on the rotation alone–but fuck it, what’s the point?