MLB | No more excuses, it's time for Phillies to start making some changes

Manager Pete Mackanin. Should he remain in charge or be let go? The Phillies had the worst record in baseball under his direction entering Thursday's game with Colorado.

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Diehard Philly baseball fans and pro-Pete Mackanin media members can rationalize and juxtapose and supposition stuff all they want. The reality is, the Phillies don’t just suck. They’re dead. When it gets to that point, changes need to be made. Pronto.

By Jack Kerwin  |  [email protected]

It’s a death knell.

The ultimate indictment.

Classic “writing on the wall” stuff.

When a team has reached the point of being lifeless. Just downright unwatchable, unfollowable, un-anything-able, it is done. DONE.

Cooked. Fried. Kaput.

Diehard Philly baseball fans and pro-Pete Mackanin media members can rationalize and juxtapose and supposition stuff all they want. The reality is, the Phillies don’t just suck. They’re dead.

When it gets to that point, changes need to be made. Pronto.

None of this wait-and-see, baseball-is-different-than-other-sports crap. Get a grip. Major league baseball is a business. Not just a business about winning, but entertaining … and, right now, not even the masochistic sorts out there can enjoy this daily submerge into the abyss.

With not a flicker of excitement, or even a little tease that things can turn around.

Entering Thursday’s series finale with visiting Colorado, Petey Mack’s troops had come up on the short end of the stick 20 times in the previous 24 games. That’s a standard of ineptitude that seems, well, almost impossible to achieve.

By accident, a baseball team wins one of every three or four games. Bumping that “up” to every six? Wow, that’s saying something … and it ain’t good.

For starters, at this point, anyone with a pen, pad, tape recorder, microphone or camera who comes rushing to the defense of the manager any time the possibility of him being canned comes up needs to knock it off.

Man up, get some balls and start calling the guy on the idiotic decisions he makes short-term and long-term on a routine basis instead of excusing him for not having the resources and that, really, ya know, his hands are tied.

We get it. He’s a good guy and you like him. Yo, leave that bromance silliness in the far recesses of your brain and focus on the task at hand: Judge him for what he is doing, not what you think he’d be doing under different circumstances.

Really, we’re up in arms that Odubel Herrera goes with the pretentious bat flip after a home run, but “Skip” is never held accountable for incorrectly yanking, or not yanking, a starting pitcher at certain, game-deciding junctures?

Not for nothing, but the crap-ass approach and general overall laziness the team seems to play with … well, let’s harken back to an all-time line from a great sports movie: Attitude reflect leadership.

Thank you, Julius Campbell of “Remember the Titans” lore.

Now, if only “hardass” Philly fans and media would get on board.

Thing is, until those two groups start living up to some modicum of their wildly overblown no-nonsense, tough-love reps, don’t expect anything to change.

Christ, they don’t even recognize the real problem. Starting pitching? Hell, who cares if they’re down 7-0 after four innings just about every night … when the most pressing issue is that they can’t even get on the goddam scoreboard until after the seventh-inning stretch.

That’s not just “losing” baseball. That is “boring” baseball, and with it the Phillies are kaput right now.

Unless Mackanin goes or prospects are brought up. Something. Anything. Just to pump a little life into the mix.

Eff the “gotta think about the future” BS. Most of the time it never gets here anyway.

Live for now … for once, Phillies.

What’s that, there is hope? You say they’re deadlocked at 1-all with the Rockies heading into the 10th inning at Citizens Bank Park right now.

Really?!!

Wow, just pinch me from all that excitement.

Zzzzzzzzzz …