Klentak’s housecleaning can wait, but will get done

Connie Mack managed in Philadelphia for 50 seasons. As for everyone else to have tried it, there has been a touch less job security.

The latest contestant is Pete Mackanin, a refreshing fountain of patience through a rebuilding project growing old and tired. Because he deserved it, and because they had no one else in house who could have done any better, the Phillies recently picked up his option for 2018. It was responsible business. It was not a sacred commitment.

So whether it is after Game 162 this season or sometime during the next, Mackanin will do the Wawa bag shuffle once made famous in a news photo of the justfired Charlie Manuel. And whether or not the next manager does any better — Dusty Wathan, anybody? — it will not erase what has been a recent collision of horrifying Phillies optics.

Not that Mackanin has had an All-Star team to manage, but a week that included two baserunning blunders of banana-peel quality from Odubel Herrera and Pat Neshek’s polite decline to throw another inning after his pitch count reached the unmanageable number of five will be all Matt Klentak needs for reference whenever he makes his first career managerial change. Just as Ryne Sandberg’s failed managerial career is best crystallized by the off-the-hook bullpen phone, Mackanin’s will be smeared by the events of the past weekplus.

Whenever Mackanin is rolled, he should be accompanied by a posse. The Klentak-approved coaching staff has been unable to improve young players or quiet Mackanin’s wails for more professional approaches to rudimentary baseball challenges. The only thing more useless than Bob McClure around Citizens Bank Park is that hunk-of-junk advertising board blocking the skyline view from the parking lot. Matt Stairs has been no better than Steve Henderson. And Juan Samuel’s stop signs don’t demand universal respect.

At this point in a failed season, there is no value in a coaching-office sandblast. So Klentak can wait. Besides, he has enough reason already to make it one more Philadelphia manager unable to outlast C-Mack.

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••• One way or another, Josh Harris will stuff the Wells Fargo Center with talented athletes with disturbing injury histories.

Harris, who owns the Sixers and the New Jersey Devils, already approved the hiring of injured high NBA draft choices Nerlens Noel and Joel Embiid, neither of whom has ever seemed able to go two injury reports without a cameo. So of course Harris’ hockey club used the No. 1 pick in the draft Friday to select Nico Hischier, for that immediately trapped the Flyers into settling for the other guy in a draft said to be twodeep. And that would have been Nolan Patrick, he with a troubling history of injuries, both of the lowerand upper-body variety.

From shoulder to groin, Patrick has been a virtual one-man sports-medicine honors course throughout his otherwise wonderful amateur career. And he is 18 years old. What? Is he going to be any less brittle at 21, 23, 25 or 28? Ah, maybe. But the Flyers have been tormented by injuries to great players for too long. Bernie Parent. Tim Kerr. Keith Primeau. Eric Lindros. Chris Pronger. And there were more, including Ron Hextall his own self. So to so willingly accept such a risk again is alarming. Even if it was all Josh Harris’ fault.

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••• There are sports where there can be reason to wait for a TV timeout, or for the referee to make a favorable call, or for the momentum to shift. Boxing doesn’t happen to be on that list.

The other night in Vegas, versatile and gifted light-heavyweight Sergey Kovalev spent most of eight rounds being hit low by Andre Ward, who apparently doesn’t know the difference between a belt and a shoelace. More than once, Kovalev buckled over, as if to ask referee Tony Weeks for sympathy. Odd, but not much of that is ever spread around that city.

By the time Ward hit Kovalev with multiple Golatas in the eighth, Kovalev essentially chose not to fight back, but seemed instead to wait for the next bell. Yet that ring was not scheduled for another 31 seconds … or, in that line of work, a lifetime. Once Weeks saw that Kovalev had ceased to respond with punches, he had no choice but to stop the fight, allowing Ward to keep his championships.

A day later, Kovalev’s promoter, Kathy Duva, filed a protest with the Nevada Athletic Commission. It was a punch. But it was a punch 24 hours too late.

In a sport he has never tried at the professional level, MMA hero Conor McGregor will confront, of all people, Floyd Mayweather.

Come on … is somebody goofing on all of us or what?

Even if Mayweather has been semi-retired, his expertise in a boxing ring is historic and in many ways unmatched. And for a virtual amateur to try his luck against him in a professional setting is as senseless as a high school basketball player attempting to match up against Kevin Durant.

Though a fierce puncher, McGregor has never had to punch while wearing boxing gloves. Spoiler alert: Ten ounces of padding and leather compromise a puncher’s edge.

McGregor has a following and the fight will sell. But there is no evidence he can survive a four-rounder in a small-town banquet hall let alone a main event against one of the most magical and effective performers in the history of boxing. ••• Markelle Fultz says he wants to be better than Michael Jordan, who he insists is the best player of all time. Shame the newest 76er didn’t see the last NBA championship series. He would have enjoyed it.

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DERIK HAMILTON — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Phillies manager Pete Mackanin just stumbled through one of the worst weeks of his managerial tenure. His team’s horrific baserunning and other mistakes not only reflected poorly on Mackanin, but his coaches, too.