Roy Halladay allowed a lowly photographer to gaze upon his exquisite human form long enough to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated’s annual MLB preview issue, which hit newsstands earlier this week. Since then, a series of unfortunate developments are threatening to derail the Phillies’ quest for a third straight National League pennant. Is this the ballyhooed cover jinx at work? You be the judge:

Jayson Werth shaved his beard.

The beard captured the hearts of not only the Phillies’ faithful, but fans across the country, and probably the world over. The Internet, which had not seen a new meme in years, could scarcely move quickly enough to poorly Photoshop Werth’s glorious new locks onto pictures of Jesus, Santa Claus, Zeus, and Jeff Bridges (who are really all the same person, if you think about it).  So why would Werth return to the chin strap, which pretty much looks like a vagina? Clearly, he is under the influence of some sort of Manchurian Candidate type deal. If he starts hacking at pitches like Jeff Francoeur, abandon all hope for anything that is good and decent in this world, for we have entered dark times.

Joe Blanton is out 3-6 weeks with a strained oblique.

Blanton has never spent time on the disabled list before now, even though he tried to once as a rookie because he thought DL stood for “Doughnut Land.” What caused this brave Adonis, this Cadillac of men, to suffer an injury which, in and of itself, sounds shrouded in mystery? The only logical explanation: A gypsy curse.

Joe Blanton, in happier times.

Roy Halladay gave up four runs in the first inning yesterday.

Such a horrifying spectacle could never have taken place without the influence of dark magic. Roy Halladay – or, as he is known in the robot circles from whence he came, RObotic Yttrium Heuristic Algorithmic Linear LArge Dominance Apparatus…Yo – is an impeccably calibrated pitching machine from the galaxy Nebulon-5. The odds of a crappy Blue Jays team scoring four runs off of him in a thousand innings, let alone one, are a mathematically improbable infinity to negative one, or roughly equal to the Mets’ chances to win a World Series at any point in the next three centuries. Only a ball-shrivellingly advanced supercomputer virus introduced into his programming could bring such harm to the man who found Waldo, Carmen San Diego, and Osama bin Laden, then struck them out to retire the side.

Placido Polanco’s head has grown to comical proportions.

Oh, wait. It was always like that. Never mind. Scratch that one.

Raul Ibanez couldn’t hit a woman with Captain Falcon’s pimp hand.

His spring line is .128/.281/.234 in 47 at-bats. If you add all those numbers together, multiply by 29 (his jersey number), take that product to the power of 37 (his age), divide by 1,348 (the number of u’s in a proper “RAUUUUUUULLLL” chant), subtract the square root of pi, eat some chicken strips, and solve for x, you get 23, which was at the center of the Jim Carrey movie that was so horrible, it caused numerous suicides. How many, you ask? 1,506 – the number of hits Ibanez has accumulated in his career. Coincidence? I think not.

Thanks, Sports Illustrated. Thanks a lot.