Reading Phillies Need Some Time to be Themselves, Says Tearful Message Left on Phillies’ Voicemail

Double-A team wooed by charming businessmen from San Diego

“The plans say this whole section needs to be trampolines.” Bruce Thorson-US PRESSWIRE

If the Reading Phillies tell you anything, which they probably will being open, friendly people, it’s usually “GET OUT OF THE WAY MASCOT STAMPEDE OH GOD OH GOD.”

But if they tell you anything on a day that that intern Gerald didn’t forget to lock the mascot pen, it’d probably be that they and the Phillies have the longest running minor league affiliation in all of baseball.   It’s got all the beauty of a long term relationship; trust, appreciation, admiration, spicing things up by adding men in body suits, and apparently, a healthy need for distance.

Yes, despite pride in their longevity, the R-Phils will be rebranding over the course of the next month.  The days of light blue and bubblegum are over, as the team moves away from emulating their big club, and starts in a direction that will honor their own longstanding legacy.  Not many minoir league clubs can claim the history of baseball in Reading, or “Baseballtown,” and there is no reason for them not to celebrate themselves, for once.  After all, anybody whose been a core contributor to the Phils in recent years has come through Reading, whether on a path to the Majors of just stopping through because they strained something.

So, the Reading offices will be filled with workers and sawdust and properly caged mascots this time, Gerald, as over the next month they prepare for a new era.  Behind the change is a company called Brandiose, who invented the glow-in-the-dark hat and the on-field rally cap for other minor league teams.

The San Diego-based enterprise probably wow-ed Reading with slick, SoCal suits and a dazzling power point presentation, leading them to believe that their old logo was sluggish and old and uncool.  The R-Phils, intrigued, quietly let a phone call from the Phillies go to voicemail.  After all, this is the company that worked with the IronPigs recently, too.

But there’s no west coast ad exec that could break the bond between us and our Double-A squad, no matter how many tranquilizer he sneaks Screwball because he freaks him out.  In the end, it doesn’t matter what colors they wear.  Just that they keep cultivating players into having surprise-Triple Crown caliber seasons.