Phillies Honored to Have Opening Day Game Switched to Opening Night by ESPN

If this Philadelphia sports year will be remembered for anything, it’s the sheer volume of teams that national TV outlets went ahead and scheduled for intense, prime time match-ups, only to realize that instead of even competitive squads, these Philly teams were complete abortions of what they were supposed to be.

Learning from that, ESPN has bumped up the Phillies-Braves Opening Day Hullabaloo to its Baseball In Your Face Prime Time Special Thing Narrated by Orel Hershiser Probably.

It’s been somewhat of an opening day tradition for most of us to use our super awesome computer skills to hack a mainframe and get a super sexy livestream of the Phillies game on our work computers.

Howard Smith-USA TODAY Sports

Then, using the beer behind the toilet in the unisex bathroom, we celebrate in style as the Phillies grind our nerves down to a truly unhealthy level, then react way too positively to avoid suspicion or way too negatively to avoid the police.

It’s just part of spring time in the Delaware Valley, and if someone tells you they’ve never heard of any of this and it mainly just sounds like the confused diatribe of a person with a serious problem, then they’re just covering for their neighbors, because we’re all friends here.

And now ESPN has taken this age-old tradition away from us, with their hair gel and their Tim Kurkjian’s and their slick graphics and clear screen that don’t rely on a dial-up connection or feature announcers that may or may not be speaking in Italian and talking about a soccer game because the internet is hard sometimes.

So I guess ESPN is doing us “favor,” technically, but something about their cold maneuvering of our schedule feels impersonal and self-serving.  Sure, it’s an honor to be handpicked by the Lord and Master of Physical Sporting, ESPN, but it seems like  like they don’t even care about us folks in the trenches, looking for any excuse to hack the mainframe.

I…

I’ve said too much.