In a deal that really shouldn’t have surprised anyone, lest a team were willing to deliver an entire bus full of MLB-ready pitching prospects to City of Brotherly Love, the Philadelphia Phillies have agreed to a new deal with lefty Cole Hamels that will make him the second-richest pitcher in Major League Baseball, behind C.C. Sabathia. At a press conference today, Hamels will probably show up in a tuxedo made of money to announce his new 6-year, $144 million deal to remain with Philly.

And there’s not really much else to say about this deal, other than it’s great, because if it weren’t the Phillies, another team would have probably paid Hamels even more. Phils fans deserved some good news, too, as they’re languishing in last place in the NL East while watching the Miami Marlins, who they trail by a game and a half, clean house in a most, well, Marlins kind of way. Seriously, they just gave Hanley Ramirez away. I know he sucks, but there had to have been a more desperate team.

Regardless, while a late season push by the Phillies seems far-fetched, we know stranger things have happened, so maybe this will provide a little boost for the team that now has a small fortune wrapped up in 1/6 of the team’s payroll. But I won’t let a thing like money get in the way of making our friends at Zoo With Roy go photoshop and GIF crazy.

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My friends ask me all the time, “Burnsy, why are you always making all of those crazy photoshops and are you ever going to pay us the money you owe?” and my answers are “Because one day I hope that an athlete might notice something I did and truly appreciate it” and “HEY! LOOK OVER THERE!”

Well, that day is finally here, friends. Our beloved peers at Zoo With Roy recently had the incredibly adorable Awesome Emma interview Philadelphia Phillies ace Cole Hamels – a guy I truly enjoy watching pitch despite not being a Phillies fan – at an event for his Hamels Foundation. The entire video is worth a watch, because Emma is impossibly delightful and has a very bright future, but for those of you saddled with ADD, the payoff comes around the 3:15 mark.

A few weeks ago, Zoo With Roy sent out the battle cry for photoshops of a specific picture of Hamels, and I answered with a few. One was the above image of Hamels on Splash Mountain, and it turns out that he was quite fond of it.

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Creepy floating heads edition.

When I’m wrong, I’m the first to admit that I was wrong. And boy did the NBA’s defending champs make me look like a fool. Last week, I predicted that no team would be swept from the NBA Playoffs last week, and to make matters worse, I boasted that it was a sucker’s prediction because only one team had the possibility of sweeping its opponent through Saturday, and that was the Oklahoma City Thunder. But I thought for sure that Dirk Nowitzki and Co. would show some scrap and claw back for one win. Wrong.

Oh well, I never said that the prediction machine was a perfect beast, but it’s close to perfect, because I was right about everything else, including the winner of the Kentucky Derby*. And that builds enough confidence for me to move forward with another round of brilliant sports predictions.

*I did not pick the winner of the Kentucky Derby in last week’s post, but I was totally like, “Oh yeah, bros, I pick I’ll Have Another.”

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I don’t know how close Phillies fans are to becoming as annoying as Red Sox fans, though some of you might say that they’re already there. And I don’t mean rating them in terms of sheer filth relative to the rest of humanity (consider that market cornered). I mean in terms of being band-wagon-a-rific, much like the Sawks were in the better part of the century. But then, after seeing this genuine effort from Cole Hamels in a Camaro dealership, I’d have to wonder if that bandwagon actually sacrificed a bit of legroom for more horsepower under the hood. Cole Hamels would ad. via.

My man Enrico over at The 700 Level (via Mr. Irrelevant ) weeds through interviews of baseball players so that we don’t have to.  The gem in this interview of Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels is the plan of his wife, Heidi, to adopt an HIV-positive child from Africa. Heidi? You gossum splainin to do:

“We’re in the process of adopting an AIDS orphan from Ethiopia,” she said. “Maybe two. I’m so pumped. I’d adopt six if I could. When I was five years old — I grew up in a very rural town in Missouri, and I had never even seen a black person — they asked us to draw a picture of ourselves in the future, and I drew myself holding hands with a line of tiny black stick figures. I’ve always wanted this.”

Why do they have to refer to him as The AIDS orphan? It’s bad enough that the kid’s gonna grow up with two white parents. You can do anything you want in life, my little AIDS man, but remember the clock is ticking. Think of your T-cell count as your own personal crystal ball in Times Square.

Hey, did we just do a whole baseball post without mentioning the Yankees? I think we did. Good job, us.

If Ryan Howard and the tortured souls of Philadelphia aren't enough to make you like the Phillies, then how about this: Cole Hamels, the young starter with enormous potential on whom the Phillies are counting to be the second coming of Cy Young, just got married… to the blonde in that thar picture.

Hamels, 23, and Survivor contestant-turned-Drexel student Heidi Strobel, 28, got married New Year's Eve in Springfield, Mo., near her hometown. Among guests were her Survivor cohort Jenna Morasca.

Well, it was certainly nice of Heidi to invite Jenna to the wedding, considering, you know, they posed naked in Playboy together. That's the kind of lifelong bond you just can't break. Carefully insinuated lipstick lesbianism runs deeper than blood, my friends.

Anyway, nice pull for Hamels. He probably wanked it to Strobel before he ever met her, which is pretty much all I want out of my future ex-wife. Even if he's cashing in his chips a little bit early, he's still walking away a winner. I wonder how many times Rick Ankiel walked away from hot girlfriends because he thought he'd get someone better when he became a huge star.