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Pete Mackanin Waits for No One in Twitter Chat

In the third day of Phillies Twitter Hangouts, Pete Mackanin starts early and ends quickly.

By Eric Chesterton
Jim Brown-USA TODAY Sports

After two intense Twitter chats with Aaron Nola and Aaron Altherr, the Phillies turned the keys over to their skipper for the finale. Originally scheduled to begin at the prime late-afternoon hour of 3:30pm, the Phillies took to the Twitter-waves at 3:15 to inform the anxious masses that, due to a particularly dastardly hangover, Pete Mackanin would not be able to tolerate the backlight of a computer screen until 6pm.

Well, Mackanin must have popped some Aspirin and chugged some water because, when I opened up Twitter at 6:00pm sharp, that wily old fox was already chatting it up with whoever it is who submits the sorts of questions that get answered in Twitter chats.

Geez, Phillies! Don't you realize that some people schedule their lives around these events so they can cover them for the benefit of the internet. OK, fine, I'm the only person doing that, but still. Very rude indeed!

The question asked for realistic goals, Pete! I know the team rallied a little bit after you resurrected their soul-less corpses from the devastation of the Ryne Sandberg era, but this is a team that won 63 games last year with Cole Hamels and Ken Giles.

How about I make an internet promise? For every game the Phillies win over 80, I will call up a girl I had a crush on in high school and confess my decade-old love for them. For example, if the Phillies win 85 games, I will call five females with whom I was smitten approximately ten years ago and reveal my past feelings. I have spoken to none of these people since high school. Some are married. I will cold call them. So, go ahead, Pete. Let me see you go .500!

Yet again we have an issue of reading comprehension. The question asked for your favorite restaurant, not a list of all the restaurants you think are pretty good. I've never been to any of these, but I've heard Talulah's Garden is mighty good. These answers could have been worse.

Again, Pete, you were supposed to identify a single player you are excited to see in 2016. Any of these four would be acceptable--though incorrect--responses. All four is simply not the thing we're looking for. For the record, acceptable answers include and are limited to Odubel Herrera, Aaron Nola, and Peter Bourjos.

"I'm Pete Mackanin. I think we, the Philadelphia Phillies, are going to win 81 games this season. The reason we will do so is because we will have four players playing so well in center field that we can't find room for one of the likely top 50 prospects in the game. Yes, two of those four were Rule 5 draft picks within the last 13 months. Another was released by his former team. But, yeah, they're all going to be great."

And with that, the chat was concluded a ripe 12 minutes after it started and 6 minutes after it was supposed to start. They say that if you're not early, you're late and, by that standard, I was most certainly late.

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