Sniff, sniff.

I smell a rat.

It’s the Los Angeles Dodgers, who just HAD to go and insert themselves into the Bryce Harper sweepstakes.

I’m preparing a list of excuses that we can fall back on if we miss out on Bryce, and you can feel free to use them as well. My primer features 12 “narratives” we can push, most of which are total BS:

1. “We never wanted him anyway”

We wanted Manny Machado or someone else. This is the fake tough guy approach.

“Kettle Kid” has the right idea:

2. “He’s not a Philly guy”

‘Go to California and hang out with all the other wussies out there,’ players like… <checks notes> Phillies’ World Series MVP Cole Hamels.

I’d expect to hear a lot of this. People will say ‘he never wanted to be here’ because he’s a west coast dude who would prefer to be closer to home in Las Vegas. People will call him a diva and say he didn’t have the fabric of a blue collar Philly player, like T.J. McConnell, who is from Pittsburgh.

‘We only want players who really want to be here,‘ is something I copied directly from a Twitter response to 94 WIP this morning.

3. “He doesn’t hustle”

Blatantly false, but that won’t keep people from making shit up on social media and posting it anyway.

4. “Too much money”

‘10 years at $300 million+ was too expensive anyway. The Phillies did the right thing by holding firm.‘

Believe it or not, I actually say a guy on Twitter say the Phillies should “pull their offer” because Harper decided to listen to the Dodgers. That’s a horrible idea. They should not do that.

5. “We’d rather have Mike Trout”

Mike Trout is under contract with the Angels, but people will try to say that we should have traded for him, OR that the smart thing to do was wait and pursue the Millville native in free agency.

6. “Let’s keep steadily building this thing up”

‘We got Jean Segura, Andrew McCutchen, Pat Robertson, and J.T. Realmuto. Rhys Hoskins is moving back to first base. We’re gonna challenge for the playoffs with or without Bryce Harper.’

7. “At least we didn’t cave to Scott Boras’ demands”

Yeah, that’ll teach him a lesson.

8. “Harper’s defensive numbers are down”

Actually, this one is legit. Bob keeps throwing out the fact that he had a poor showing last year, actually his worst defensive outfield numbers as a National.

Wait-

Bob has a good primer tweet for us to use:

9. “He didn’t want to disrespect the Nationals”

‘He was never going to a division rival in the first place!‘ is what they’ll say. I don’t know if there’s a shred of truth to that.

10. “He couldn’t handle the pressure of playing here”

‘He took the easy way out! Harper couldn’t handle Philly expectations.’

(this is one of the excuses we used for Machado, who went to sunny San Diego)

11. “Nobody cares”

A particular favorite of Crossing Broad readers, we could simply feign disinterest and pretend like this whole saga was becoming tiresome.

12. Gabe Kapler

You’re gonna hear people blame the manager, saying Harper didn’t want to play for him.

Either way, I think the best part of the Harper saga coming to an end, whenever that may be, is that we don’t have to hear anything more from this guy:

Enjoy your Monday.