Jul 22nd 2008 1:51PM by Tom Fornelli (author feed)

On Deck is FanHouse’s look at the day’s most intriguing baseball matchups

Dear Joe Blanton,

Hello there and welcome to your new home, the city of Philadelphia. It’s a wonderful place to live, and I can’t tell you how excited we are to have you as the newest member of the Philadelphia Phillies. I hope you enjoyed your flight to New York with your new teammates and got to know them pretty well, they’ll be looking to you for support tonight.

Now, I don’t want to put any added pressure on you, as I’m sure pitching on a new team is stressful enough, but tonight’s game is rather important. You see, Joe, tonight we’re playing our division rivals the New York Mets. They don’t like us much. Something about us making up seven games in the standings last September and winning the division.

Seems the Mets are out for revenge this year, because in the last few weeks they’ve gobbled up all the space that was seperating us from them in the division, and now we’re tied for first place with them. If we lose tonight, we’ll be in second place.

We don’t want this to happen, obviously, or else we wouldn’t have traded for you! So go out there tonight and win us a ball game, would you? If you don’t, I wouldn’t bother coming back to Philadelphia with the team. The fans here are quite passionate, and they will kill you. Seriously.

No pressure!

Have a good night,
Pat Gillick
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