Choking on the Whine

I write this for all the whiny WIP fanboys who will be up early this morning pissing and moaning about how the Phillies choked last night.

You know who you are. You are the 35-year-old wankers who lived in mommy's basement like spoiled brats until the age of about 27, when you finally moved out and got your new yuppy apartment and your meaningless corporate cush job that pays you way too much, where you use a lot of buzzwords to make yourself sound smart in your endless meetings. 

You are the little punks who got your participation trophy at age 12 despite the fact that your crappy little league baseball team went 1-11. That's the last time you played any kind of baseball, let alone the competitive kind where you stand 60'6" from a big, mean, talented SOB who's only goal is to get your skinny butt out even if it means throwing a pitch right down your throat. 

Lesson are learned, my immature friends, when you LOSE. Any moron can win. It's easy to win. Everybody smiles, hoists up glasses, brags, and goes home happy. 

When you lose, you see someone's true character. Do they handle it with grace and thoughtfulness or do they, like you, call out their teammates and whine on the radio like babies for weeks on end?

The Phillies stomped a Marlins team that was simply not ready for prime time (hint: they likely WILL be next year). They then rose up and beat a Braves team they had no business beating, a team that was talented and deep, but whose pitching happened to be thin at the wrong time (just like the Dodgers, amazingly).

They beat the Braves in a pressure-cooker situation in which they played pretty good baseball in a short series. There were cracks in the façade even then, which you would have noticed if you were really paying attention, but I'm sure you were too busy celebrating, name-calling, and pounding your hollow chests. 

So here in the midst of your arrogant reverie come the Arizona Diamondbacks, a team that is well-coached, young, hungry, and on a post season roll, playing well at the perfect time. To opine that the Phillies easily navigated the pressure cooker of the Braves series, but then "choked" against the lesser known Diamondbacks just doesn't make an ounce of sense.

The Phillies got the best of them early, but even in those moments the DBacks were learning where the chinks in the armor were and how to penetrate the fortress.

The Phillies were out-pitched, out-run, out-fielded, and out-hit over the next four of five games. They were solidly beaten by a team that was simply playing better than them. The better team won no matter how you wanna rationalize it. 

Guys like Costellanos and Turner went cold at a bad time, helped along by a Diamondbacks pitching staff that was consistently on point but for a few instances. Harper had several key at-bats where he JUST missed and left balls on the warning track instead of in the seats. Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in professional sports, which is why the very best players in the world fail 70% of the time. 

Have YOU ever been in an ill-timed baseball slump, jackals? I'll answer for you: no, you haven't been. 

Well, it's a frustrating, horrible, helpless feeling. The baseball somehow shrinks. The bat you've held in your hands for something like 100 years suddenly feels like a foreign object. Every first pitch is a strike. Every close pitch goes against you. Every pitch they throw you is perfect. You feel like you'll never get another hit. 

There is only one way to get past it: time and extra hitting. Do that and eventually everything will go back to normal again. The bat will once again be your friend. The pitchers will return to their prior status of "human" rather than superhuman. And the world will be right again. 

Unfortunately for Nick and Trea, this absolution will come too late. The series is over, the season is over, and the anguish of a long winter spent wondering what could have been lays ahead like a deep fog just around the bend. 

My message to you idiots is simple: grow up. There are times in life when you lose. You don't have to like it, but you have to accept it and learn from it. Then you have to figure out what steps you need to take to keep it from happening again. 

That's what the Phillies will be doing in the months to come: figuring out what they need to do to prevent this from happening again. They'll be doing this while you guys are on the radio whining like babies, calling Craig Kimbrel names, blaming the manager for the players' performance, and generally embarrassing yourselves. 

The manager is not at fault in this. He wrote the same names down in April as he wrote down in October. There were no magic potions he could have pulled out to stop this. Arizona played good. The Phillies played bad. They lost. It happens. Live with it. 

I was here in '64. I was here in '77 & '78. I was here in '83. I was here in '09. I know the pain and suffering of being a Philadelphia Phillies fan, and yes, I also reveled in those couple of successes we had in 1980 and 2008. But I will wake up tomorrow and still be a Philadelphia Phillies fan. It's what I am, and no amount of disappointment is going to change that simple fact. 

I hope you guys eventually grow up and learn how to lose gracefully. With me, it did come with age. In my youth, I was as big a hothead as anyone, and every loss was like a thorn in the bottom of my foot. But I eventually realized that losing, like death itself, is simply a part of life you need to come to grips with. 

I recommend you learn this lesson sooner rather than later. It will save you a lot of grief. 

As for WIP, I stopped listening to those idiots decades ago. They thrive on motivating the masses to new levels of hysteria to drive ratings and make money. 

Well, I ain't ever helping their cause. My dial is never, ever turned to that channel, and I've begun blocking them on Twitter so u don't even have to read their endless whining and second-guessing.

Who needs it?