Fire Eric Bruntlett

ROY OSWALT IS A PHILLIE: THE GAME CHAT

Because Roy Oswalt is a Phillie, and I swear to God, if I stare at my GMail account for another second or refresh my follower count on Twitter 8,000,000 times a second again, I will truly go insane. It’s the technological equivalent of watching paint dry.

Because Who Wouldn’t Want to See Me Embarrass Myself Publicly?

In the style of The Fightins’ Chris Jones, who jumped 82 followers (as of this posting) on Twitter by promising to wear a shirsey of hated Phillies reliever Danys Baez at next Friday’s game when the Mets are in town, I have made a similar proposition. I pledge to wear a shirsey of Natinals Messiah Stephen Strasburg. Except it won’t say Strasburg. It will say Strasboner. If I get to 900 followers (@uublog) by the end of today, Friday, July 30th, I will wear a Nats’ Strasboner jersey to a future Nats-Phillies game at CBP. (date TBD) I currently sit at 798, so you have a bit of work to do if you want to me look completely ridiculous in front of you. But I’m opening this up here, because I’m interested to see how far this can go.

This is what I might have to pay $37 plus shipping for and wear TO A PHILLIES GAME, let me remind you:

So get it done if you want to laugh at me at a future Phillies game.

A Hastily Written STFU About Cliff Lee Already Post

“I want to tell her that I love her but the point is probably moot.”

-Rick Springfield, the preeminent love scholar of our time

You need to know when to let go of something.  Many of us have had girlfriends we can’t forget, childhood toys we can’t let go of, favorite bongs long lost that we obsess over finding to the point that we’ve torn open our couch and really killed any comfort in it but damn it all I need to find that bong!

…but I digress.

Photo via @petzrawr.

Ed Wade got flat out hosed in the trade for Roy Oswalt.  Ruben Amaro Jr. took advantage of Wade’s Phillies love and loyalty and took Roy Oswalt for the low price of J.A. Happ (who will apparently be missed primarily by women for his lips) and a couple prospects.  Amaro even took $11 million worth of lunch money from Wade!  Oswalt gives the Phillies three awesome top of the rotation pitchers and leaves them in a great position to make the playoffs for the fourth straight year and go back to the World Series for the third straight year.

But that’s not good enough for you people! Noooooo, you all go “B-b-but Cliff Lee was so good to us!  Hewas badass and fun and awesome and he should be a Phillie still!”  No shit Sherlock, but Amaro stupidly traded him away.  Boohoo, it’s done.

Cliff Lee is gone people!  He’s not walking through that door and you know it!  Yet you keep TALKING about it!  The whining is incessant.  We’ve got two Roys now!  I wish that I could have Cliff Lee, you wish you could have Cliff Lee, but guess what, we don’t have Cliff Lee!  We need to shave, put on a nice suit, and show our three ace starting pitching combo just how much they mean to us.  I’ll admit I did whine a bit about it yesterday before the trade.  But hey, I’m over it, and you should be too.  We can’t control the shitty decisions of the past so we should accept the great stuff we do have.  Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt, and Cole Hamels?  I’ll take that any day.

DOMONIC BROWN MAN-CRUSH CHAT

A second impromptu live blog in a span of a week? Why the hell not, I say!

Phillies vs. Rockies Live Blog

Less impromptu than last Thursday’s! Doors open 35 minutes before gametime for extra discussion of Rube’s failure in letting Haren go to the Angels for the equivalence of a bag of balls.

Offense Comes Alive

WIN of the Month – 7/23: Athletes on Facebook WIN

We don’t have a whole lot of consistency over here at Fire Eric Bruntlett. It’s partly because of each of us being incredibly busy in other parts of our lives, but also in part due to us being really bad at this. In any case, this is one of several steps we will attempt to take to gain relative consistency. Once a week, we will try to post a random picture of screengrab we find around the interwebs (but likely fail) which is ironic, considering what the nature of feature is. Most of the time, it will be a fail we thought was funny. “Fail,” or “epic fail,” of course, referring to the Internet meme of something bad happening with hilarious circumstances. However, once a month, we will post a great win, like that used in this post.

I really love finding athletes on Twitter, for a few reasons: they’re more candid than usual, they’re generally impossible to understand, and sometimes you need a translator just to do so. However, as great as athletes Tweeting is, athletes on Facebook are even better. First of all, they’re are more words coaches can use when trying to talk about Facebook, as University of Arkansas football coach Bobby Petrino did yesterday morning. You can also find more random info right on the surface – favorite movies, random people they’re friends with whom you also happen to know, etc. That is, of course, if it’s actually the real player, which is where a lot of the fun comes in. That’s also where the very first WIN of the week comes in. I was checking out some random Philly athletes on Twitter as I often do specifically for times like these, but other than that, for no real reason whatsoever. Eventually, I landed on a few minor league Phillies, and shortly thereafter, the page of Tagg Bozied, the power-hitting first baseman for AA affiliate Reading Phillies. He recently became friends with pitcher Vance Worley, who himself recently got called up to the show, directly from AA. Reading centerfielder, Tyson Gillies, who came over as part of the Cliff Lee trade, decided to add his insight.

Read more…

Phillies @ Cardinals Live Blog

I figure the Phils could use a bit of luck today, and we have a decent track record with live-blogging wins here. So why not go for our first live blog of the year? Starts at 2:00. And yes, The700Level posted theirs literally as I was writing this.

Click Here

Cliff Lee: Texas Ranger

Ed.’s Note: Steve may be a week late with analysis of the Cliff Lee trade, but the Yanks were a prospect or two short!

Well, well, well… it looks like Cliff Lee isn’t a Yankee after all!  The Texas Rangers swooped in after talks broke down between the Mariners and Yankees and offered up top prospect Justin Smoak.  The Rangers offered such a good package that the Mariners even threw in some money to offset the cost for the bankrupt Rangers.  This is great news as no one outside of New York wanted to see Cliff Lee in blue pinstripes.  And who do you have to thank for this?  Why me, of course! Read more…

Corky Miller has the greatest Sal Fasano-esque mustache since, well… Sal Fasano

We here at Fire Eric Bruntlett usually prefer beards. They are, after all, the facial hair of choice of the one and only Eric Bruntlett. But we could never turn down a kick-ass fu manchu!

I was watching Friday night’s Phillies-Reds game. (On delay, I’ll admit. It was 3-0 before I even noticed that it was gametime.) I noticed something awfully familiar on the Reds: a terrible back-up catcher with one redeeming quality, an epic mustache. That catcher, Corky Miller, started Friday night after Ramon Hernandez was placed on the DL. Miller made me reminisce of our own terrible mustachioed back-up, Sal Fasano, who spent the first half of 2006 in Philly. Specifically, it got me wondering whether or not they were separated at birth or something. Decide for yourself:

Left: Sal Fasano's team photo from his short Phillies stint. Right: Corky Miller after a 2nd inning leadoff single during the Friday, July 9 Reds-Phillies game.

Sal Fasano photo via Phinally Philly.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, Corky is, in fact, his real first name.