It’s hard to talk Phillies during an Eagles’ Super Bowl week …

Look, if nothing else, we here at the Hittin’ Season podcast are nothing if not realists.

When the Phillies are bad, we’ll tell you they’re bad. When they’re good, we’ll sing their praises. When they make a great signing or trade, we’ll trumpet it from the mountaintops, and when they sign Max Kepler as their lone outfield addition, I’ll moan about it until the cows come home.

Obviously, it’s Super Bowl week. For the second time in three years, the Eagles are playing in the Super Bowl and, on top of everything else, it’s a rematch against their old head coach Andy Reid and the Chiefs, with perhaps the greatest quarterback of all time, Patrick Mahomes, attempting to do something no other team in NFL history has done – win three Super Bowls in a row.

We know there is nothing the Phils could do this week to take any meaningful attention away from the Birds’ quest for their second title in seven years, and yet, we podcast anyway.

Even if the Phillies were to sign the biggest free agent remaining, third baseman Alex Bregman, to a seven-year contract and trade away Alec Bohm, it wouldn’t be enough. Outside of signing a player like Juan Soto or Aaron Judge, the Phils ain’t making a dent this week.

But there is something to be said for counter-programming. After all, how much more can we possibly talk about this game on Sunday? How many podcasts can a human being absorb, how much talk radio can we listen to, how many talking-head TV shows can we watch about this football game before we retreat into our deprivation tanks and turn out the lights?

Hittin’ Season can be a palate-cleanser for you, because on the latest episode of the podcast we talked about a well-known computer model that says the Phillies have the 10th-best odds of winning the World Series in 2025. TENTH-BEST??? I knew we couldn’t trust our AI overlords.

Which players have the most to prove when spring training gets underway in a month? Bryson Stott? Alec Bohm? Ranger Suarez? And which players will bounce back after a down 2024 season? 

And what about Kyle Schwarber at the top of the lineup? Isn’t it time we move him down and let him actually hit some homers with dudes on base? Do we really need to continue living in a world where 7 out of every 10 of his dingers is with no one on base? Really? IN THIS ECONOMY?

Despite it being an Eagles Super Bowl week, there are still lots of fun things to discuss about your Phils and America’s Pasttime, so don’t let your friends call you “weird” for being devoted to Hittin’ Season during this football-obsessed time.

Come join us for a frollicking foray into Phillies fandom, and give yourself a break from the unrelenting content machine that is the Super Bowl, if only for an hour.

The post It’s hard to talk Phillies during an Eagles’ Super Bowl week … appeared first on Billy Penn at WHYY.