Important Question: If Rhys Hoskins Is Indeed An Alien, Should We Still Be Allowed To Root For Him?
Couple of quick things here before we get going. 1) I could watch Rhys mash dingers off Vance Worley all day, every day for the rest of my life. There something so satisfying about seeing his goober face walk back up to the mound every time knowing that he has absolutely no chance against this kid. And 2) I really, really, reallllllllly need Unbe-Rhys-able to die immediately. The Phillies have a great thing going with Hoskins right now. Something that’s never happened before in the history of the game. The moment the Phillies start handing out Unbe-Rhys-able shirts at the games, it’s all over. That’s how these things work. Just promise me you idiots won’t ruin a good thing.
Now back to to the question at hand here. Where do we stand on cheering for aliens? I love Rhys Hoskins just as much as everybody else. The amount of young talent in Philadelphia has restored my will to live. Hoskins, Nola, Crawford, Wentz, Barnett, Hicks, Embiid, Simmons, Fultz, Saric, Provorov, Patrick, Gostisbehere, Konecny. For the first time in a long time, all 4 teams in this city have something to look forward to. But I’ve seen the movie Independence Day. I’ve seen the movie Mars Attacks! (which is a criminally underrated movie and should be highly regarded as one of the greatest films of the 1990’s). I know that aliens are not friendly. And unfortunately, we don’t live in the movies. We don’t have Will Smith or Lukas Haas to come and save the day. If we get invaded by aliens, we’re screwed. I don’t even think we’d put up a fight. We’d just have a president who would celebrate being the only president in the history of the United States to have an alien invasion.
The selfish part of me obviously wants to keep cheering for Rhys. He’s managed to turn the worst team in baseball into appointment television. But this is how it all starts. Rhys gets the entire city of Philadelphia on his side. Dinger after dinger, yabo after yabo. The city falls in love with him one 400 ft bomb at a time. And then once everybody has settled in and welcomed Rhys as our new overlord, he reveals his true self and Philly is the first city to fall to the aliens. It’s prime location for the alien invasion to start considering Philly is almost equidistant from New York City and Washington DC. I’m sorry but when it comes to my love for Philadelphia sports success and the fate of humanity… well… you know what? Actually I’m probably still going Philly sports success. So yeah, if Rhys is or isn’t an alien I guess doesn’t make much of a difference to me. Would I have loved to be alive to see the Flyers win a Cup or the Eagles win a Super Bowl? Obviously. But if Rhys Hoskins and his alien cronies kill us all, at least we will have died with hope.