Phillies Ask You to Not be Curious as they Forbid Everyone from Ryan Howard Workouts
By Justin Klugh
Bob Brookover, notorious troublemaker/Phillies beat writer for the Inquirer, was kicked out of the Bright House Complex last Wednesday for spray painting curse words on the outfield wall and peeing on Charlie Manuel as he slept. No, actually, Bob was walking around, looking at stuff to write about. Naturally, the sight of this well known mainstay of the Phillies media corps cover the team infuriated the guys upstairs and they had Bob tossed out of the complex twice.
Why? Ryan Howard was about to take BP, and although Bob had been told he wouldn’t be speaking to Ryan, he could at least watch.
The Bright House Complex is of course where the Phillies are hiding the bodies of Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, looking at each frantically, and screaming “TELL THEM WE DON’T KNOW!” when the phone rings. It’s not weird for a reporter to want to get in there, but the Phillies didn’t want Bob to Tweet anything about Ryan before they knew about it.
Refusing to acknowledge situations is one thing. That’s the main way Ruben Amaro communicates with people. But publicly denying insiders? Join us, why don’t you, as we speculate wildly. Or don’t, if you said a good reason when I said “why don’t you.”
The Phillies are not good at convincing you that they are not totally up to something. What could they possibly be giving or force-feeding or welding to Ryan Howard that requires so much secrecy? Are they giving him the Phanatic’s leg? Will he bleed candy now? Should we even try to come up with some other reason? I really like that one.
On any given day, we in Philadelphia like to re-live our own painful memories just to be sure our personalities remain nice and corrosive. We were just sitting around, thinking about Ryan Howard’s Achilles rupturing on the last play of 2011, eliminating us from the playoffs and turning our famed slugger into a writhing mess. When suddenly, someone presented a possible reason for this: Ryan and the Phillies had taken a chance injecting cortisone into his Achilles that may have weakened it to the point of snapping.
How fun it is to discover the Phillies and Ryan were taking a chance injecting that part of him with cortisone! How shocked we are that Ruben Amaro would circle the wagons after any of this! Yes, this fabric of lies is quickly being sewn into a pee-stained quilt of distrust hanging on a clothes line on a rainy day.
It simply clarifies that the image of the Phillies as a shadowy collective, keeping us in the dark and controlling our every move, may be slightly more real than we’ve realized. And if that’s the case, then… we will probably continue going to baseball games as these problems continue to not have solutions. Or, they’ll have us all killed systematically.