The Phillies plan on gambling on their intra-squad scrimmage Wednesday according to Dave Dombrowski. Pete Rose is somewhere smiling in a mortuary fridge:

I love this! Keep that competitive fire in your belly. All we hear from players on teams that get a first round bye are how much the new format messes with them because of time off. Maybe they should’ve had a bunch of degenerates on their team that can’t play an intra-squad scrimmage without having some skin in the game. They’re pumping in crowd noise, they’ll be umpires and walk-up music. I love that they have captains and picked rosters out of a hat!

There will also be a ton of shit talking according to Jeff Hoffmann and Kyle Schwarber via Alex Coffey at the Inky:

There are two captains per team: Turner and Bryce Harper, and Kyle Schwarber and J.T. Realmuto. There will be a prize — yet to be determined — for whichever team wins.

What has been determined is the presence of trash talking. Lots of trash talking.

“Of course,” said reliever Jeff Hoffman. “I’m maybe the leader of [the trash talk]. It’s not often where you get to lace ‘em up against your own guys. And when you have a clubhouse that’s as competitive as ours — as chatty as ours … I can’t wait to actually get them out, so I can talk trash on the field. We all like to talk [expletive] to each other.”

“There’s going to be a bunch of [expletive] talking,” said Schwarber. “We’ve been screaming at each other. My team has got to face Ranger [Suárez] and I was like, ‘I thought I was done facing Ranger in my career.’ I guess not.

“I think I’m 0-for-3 with three broken bats. So I’m not looking forward to that.”

Unfortunately, fans won’t be welcome. For some reason the Phillies decided against it. Probably the same guy who pulled the plug on Dollar Dog Night. What proprietary information are they keeping under wraps for the NLDS? The least they could do is give us the rosters so we can come up with a line and bet on the game using NJ sports betting apps.

No word on the what the wager is, but I’m hearing it’s HEFTY and if the Phils are involved we already know it’s gonna be big.


It’s $5,000 a head just to get into their fantasy football league: