There are very few must-watch press conferences in sports, but Charlie Manuel’s presser today was fantastic.

We’ve all gone through the grieving process: shock, sadness, dark humor, anger, thought-we-were-over-it-but-we-weren’t… Now it’s back to sadness. Watching the passion spill out of Charlie the way it does, makes it really tough to come to grips with the fact that this season was, let’s face it, a failure.

Charlie was pressed a number of things, most notably the hitting. He defended himself, almost angrily:

“You guys, I want to tell you something, I take a lot of pride in hitters. And I get upset sometimes when we don’t hit as good as I want us to hit, or think we should hit. And I want to tell you something, I don’t care whether you like it or not. I know how good a hitting coach I am. And whether you want to believe that or whatever… you know, really. That’s kind of how I look at it. We will get better.” 

 

The video above is a condensed version of his 25-minute presser. Enjoy.

Video via MLB feed, quality is a bit lower to allow for longer video