Hi, Uncle Coggin here! Gang, have you ever wanted to enter the exciting world of Philadelphia sports talk radio, but you have no discernible talent, journalist integrity, and absolutely no ability to string together a coherent, unique thought of your own?
Well if that’s the case, than how do you not already have your own show on WIP or the Fanatic?!
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Oh my god we are SO very much back.
It’s been FOUR long years since the last All-Philadelphia Royal Rumble. We survived a pandemic, a Donald Trump presidency (though, ya know, that might change later this year), dozens upon dozens of 76ers second round exits, and two horrifically shitty championship ventures that we’re STILL trying to get over.
The last time we did this was 2020. Nobody had any idea what COVID-19 was yet, Ben Simmons still had a working spine, and we were all looking forward to the innovative ideas Joe Girardi would be bringing to the Phillies.
It’s been four years of garbage since. We’re wallowing through a horrendous Eagles collapse, the Phillies blew the NLCS against a pitiful Diamondbacks teams, the 76ers are still a piece away, and the Flyers are the Flyers. Nobody cares about the Flyers.
So it’s time. It’s time to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, look to the future, and absolutely bust Howard Eskin open with a steel chair.
Ladies and gentlemen, the All-Philadelphia Royal Rumble is BACK.
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Enough is enough. At this point I think we’d all rather watch replays of “Little Big League” and “Major League” on the MLB network than get our hopes up for the off chance the player’s union and the owners decide to stop lobbing passive aggressive tweets at each other to, you know, actually play baseball.
70 games. 60 games. 50 games. 90 games and we play into December in front of rats with open bottles of Schnapps at Citizens Bank Park….who gives a shit. It doesn’t matter at this point.
Big news everyone! Billionaire baseball owners don’t want to pay their athletes previously agreed upon prorated salaries and want to cut salaries even further for the absolute privilege of playing an abbreviated season amidst a global pandemic!
And guess what?! Boy oh boy, I bet you can’t guess….but the players don’t want to take a pay cut and be paid based on revenues earned in the truncated season. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?!
It’s billionaires arguing with millionaires about how many millions they’ll all be paid, while the rest of us have been sitting in our filthy hovels for the last three months wondering when we’ll ever be allowed into Target again without face masks.
Fuck baseball. Fuck the owners for being greedy pigs. Fuck everyone involved squabbling for money.
It’s time to grow up and face some hard truths. We’re living in a moment in time where we need to be direct and up front with our friends, our family and our lovers. We can’t be nice for the sake of being nice, so it’s time to accept what’s right and wrong.
It’s time to grow up and accept the fact that Rookie of the Year is a piece of garbage. It’s nothing when compared with the cinematic masterpiece that is Little Big League.
He’s still green. He’s still morbidly obese (less so now). He still hails from the Galapagos Islands and never saw a bald head he didn’t want to shine. But a funk now emanates from his green fur – more so than the normal mildew odors baking in the August humidity – an aura of negativity that creeps into your brain like cheap, money hungry tendrils overwhelming the synapses of your mind that control the last vestiges of pure positivity and happiness you can experience.
The once incorruptible has become sullied. By who? Well it depends on who you ask, but the big green guy isn’t the same anymore, in appearance or attitude.
The changes to the Phanatic are fine. The reasoning behind them SUCK.
The Washington Nationals, of all teams, are going to the World Series.
Bryce Harper is going to play under his sixth manager in nine seasons next year.
Do you think it bugs him? Of course it bugs him, how could it not? His entire stretch with the Nationals was plagued by the teams inability to escape the first round of the playoffs, no matter how talented the rosters were. He leaves, and suddenly the perennial choke artists are going to the biggest stage of baseball.
Sure, they’ll lose to the Astros or the Yankees, but still…what does Harper think?
My god, what a 24-hours it’s been. Fame, fortune, women, power, and the cocaine. MY GOD THE COCAINE. I’ve been yakked out of my gourd with fine Bolivian nose candy since Thursday morning as I’ve REVELED in the fame that creating a new MLB statistic brings you.
Last night’s Braves/Phillies matchup featured two starting pitchers so inept they combined for a rare DOUBLE VELASQUEZ, something you’ll be telling your grandkids about one day.
The “Velasquez,” ladies and gentlemen, is sweeping the nation.
I’m not a stat guy. Never have, never will be. I go by my GUT and by my highly trained EYE to make decisions on the players I watch. Oh, your starting pitching has a high VoRP, but a below average WARP, so he’s not very effective? I could have told you that by just hearing the smack of one of his pitches as it hits a weathered, oiled catcher’s mitt on a bright summer’s day. That’s baseball, sonny, not nerds with their slide rules and protractors measuring launch velocity and bat angles.
But one stat I can get behind? One that all of baseball should recognize as a sign of extraordinary FUTILITY for starting pitching is the “Velasquez,” a statistic of my own creation.
The summer is upon us. The weather is getting warmer, the days are getting longer, the 76ers had their annual second round playoffs exit (sob), and a shattered city hopelessly turns its attention to the Phillies to try to get through the long, humid months before the start of football.
3-1 counts! Mound visits! Pitching changes! Ben Davis prattling on like he thinks if he stops talking he’ll die! FEEL THE EXCITEMENT!
One thing that did catch my eye is the Phillies announcement of its annual “Phillies 2019 Phantastic Auction” which allows fans to bid on once-in-a-lifetime experiences with the team, with all funds going to Phillies Charities Inc., the franchises charitable organization.
I thought it would be a nice diversion from our crippling depression to take a look at some of the more interesting items you can bid on.
I’ll go through a few of these and give you an idea of how much you should bid on each one after the jump.
The Coggin Toboggan 