Memo to Philly fans: Remain calm

June 22, 3:13 AMPhiladelphia Eagles ExaminerGordie Jones

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The Phillies lost another baseball game Sunday – that’s six defeats in a row now, to conclude a lovely 1-8 homestand – and it’s safe to say that a sizable portion of the Delaware Valley will go into panic mode, as is normally the case whenever the Fightins struggle.

It’s the same with the Eagles, of course. No sooner do they lose two straight than everybody goes to DefCon 5, also known as the trade the quarterback/fire the coach default setting. Happens every year, it seems.

That the Flyers don’t elicit such hysteria when they hit the skids can be attributed to the fact that their following, while fervent, is not overly large. As for the Sixers, nobody really cares much about them.

So here we are again, this time with the Phils: Trade everybody. Fire everybody. (Wait. Charlie Manuel, a resident genius since last October -- but something less than that before then – gets a free pass for the time being. And did you see the way he tried to fire up the troops by getting kicked out of Sunday’s loss to Baltimore? At least he cares, right?)

But definitely trade everybody. Or at least Jimmy Rollins. Guy’s barely hitting his weight.

Stop. Just stop. The Phils will be fine, once they get everybody healthy. They might not win the World Series again, but they should be able to win a less-than-overwhelming division. The Mets have apparently pushed up the timetable for their annual collapse from September to June. The Marlins have the bullpen from hell. The Braves are a shell of their former selves. And the Nats are, well, the Nats. (Though it sure is interesting to hear Bob Carpenter and Rob Dibble describe Washington games on TV. Apparently they see something the rest of us do not.)

We’ve been down this path before, and things tend to work out in the long run. Just look at the Eagles last season. They were toast after that tie with Cincinnati in November, and certainly after they lost to Washington the next-to-last week of the season. But then the dominoes tumbled on that final Sunday, and they battered the Cowboys to reach the postseason. It took until the NFC Championship game until the paying customers were able to revert to trade the QB/fire the coach form.

Or look at 2006. All appeared lost when Donovan McNabb blew out a knee. But then Jeff Garcia rallied them, and they made the playoffs.

Look, even, at 2004, the year they went to the Super Bowl. Some guy named Terrell Owens got hurt, and then everybody went bananas when Andy Reid benched his starters the last two weeks of the regular season, with homefield throughout the postseason already secured. Surely, the thinking went, he had scuttled his team’s momentum. Surely that would hurt them in the playoffs – to say nothing of the injury to T.O.

Only it didn’t. They breezed to Jacksonville. (Now, if you want to get into clock management at the end of the Super Bowl, that’s another matter ...)

The point here is that panic doesn’t always pay. The sky isn’t always falling. In fact, there is some evidence to indicate that it won’t fall at all.