That headline isn’t rhetorical. They should literally just stop the presses on the Daily News.

I can’t believe I’m going to sit here and defend Ryan Howard, who is a complete shell of his former self and will serve as only an obstacle to future Phils success. But, calling for him to retire and forgo $10 million at the end of the season just to save face in a matter of semantics is a ludicrous notion for even the mostest drunkiest sports talk radio caller, let alone a columnist. And yet, professional troll Stu Bykofosky, a genuine vestige of old media, offers up this ? pile of ? printed on this ?:

You’ve gone from the Big Piece to the Big Load.

Since blowing up your Achilles’ tendon in 2011, you haven’t been the same. The comeback year you and we expected never came.

Don’t do this to us, Ryan. Don’t make us hate you. Don’t make the Phillies cut you.

Retire at season’s end. Please.

You’re getting $25 million for this year, and have collected much more than $100 million from the Phillies over your 13 years of service. You don’t need the money.

If you don’t retire, the Phillies will have to pay you $10 million to make you go away next season. If forced to, they will. What happens then?

Do you become a shuffleboard disk banging from team to team, like Steve Carlton, staining your stellar reputation? You want to play in another league, like Allen Iverson when he went to Europe? He needed the money because he was an immature jerk.

That’s not you. You’ve been clean on and off the field. The only thing hanging over you is an unsupported allegation by Al Jazeera that you were on the juice, and you are suing them for defamation.

Please, Ryan, tell the Phillies you will retire at the end of this season. Maybe they’ll give you the $10 million anyway to avoid the anguish about cutting you from the only professional team you’ve played for.

Better yet – maybe they’ll send it as a donation to your charity, the Ryan Howard Big Piece Foundation. Wouldn’t that be cool?

I don’t even need to belabor the point that this reads like it was written by a high school freshman. But just so we’re all on the same page, here’s one of the DN’s lead columnists, who, if you know anything about Stu, has a genuine disdain for wealth, calling for someone he doesn’t know to leave $10 million on the table simply so he can avoid the embarrassment of having to be “cut,” which is a wholly misleading way to describe the pretty standard, pre-agreed upon (THANKS, RUBEN!) $10 million buyout in Howard’s contract.

Sometimes this town sucks.