After last week's dust-up with Marcus Hayes, I decided to follow our own jonk's lead and address Don McKee's Incites piece from Sunday's Inquirer, wherein Messr. McKee drops this megaton atrocity on the Delaware Valley:
Why is my favorite Eagle always cut, released, allowed to leave, or just plain dumped?It's uncanny. Duce Staley, Jeremiah Trotter I, Brian Mitchell, Troy Vincent, Hugh Douglas, Terrell Owens, Jeff Garcia, and Jeremiah Trotter II. All personal faves. All gone.
The Phillies, on the other hand, have it right. As soon as I work up a healthy disdain for a certain guy, he's gone. Curt Schilling, Scott Rolen, David Bell, Mike Lieberthal, Bobby Abreu. All easy to dislike. All gone. (And can Pat Burrell be far behind?)
In the interests of "phighting the good phight," I decided that this aggression would not stand, man. I fired the following email off to our old friend Don:
Mr. McKeeFrankly I'm baffled upon reading your Incites column from Sunday's Inquirer, wherein you lament the departure of your "favorite" Eagles, and subsequently heap praise upon the Phillies for running the players for whom you have "healthy disdain" out of town.
Your "favorite" Eagles are a rogue's gallery of the past-their-prime, overpaid, and the malcontent. Many of them are good and likeable people who just happen to have been pushed out to sea by an organization with a strong focus on winning football games first and public relations a distant second.
And your least favorite Phillies just happen to leave town, go elsewhere, and win a few World Championships. "Healthy disdain" for productive and talented players in or near the peaks of their careers? Yeah, Bell was a grub, and Lieby's best days were way, way behind him, but the other guys, jeeeeez...
The relative success of each franchise over the past seven or eight years should probably say quite a lot about each team's roster management philosophy: Division championships and multiple playoff victories versus near-misses ad nauseum, breakdowns, blow-ups, bad moves, poor decisions, and unaccountability.
Of course, you're entitled to like whomever you want; heck, I might prefer Froot Loops to filet mignon, but that doesn't mean my opinion is normative or universal, and it certainly doesn't mean that you'd want me running a restaurant.
Maybe you could get your elbow into Pat Gillick and Andy Reid, tell them which players you like, and then have them construct their rosters with that in mind -- by trading or dumping the "Don McKee's Favorites" All-Stars en masse.
Peter
TheGoodPhight.com
