The Nick Castellanos joke has officially died so hard it fueled a Nick Castellanos hot streak

Imagine how Nick Castellanos of the Philadelphia Phillies feels to be the harbinger of death. He wakes up, checks his phone and shudders: Beloved star of stage and screen Betty White has passed on. He knows what he must do. Time to go deep.

Smash cut to Castellanos in the box, taking his mightiest hack, connecting, and sobbing. "I do not want to be doing this!" he wails. "I'd vastly prefer to be homering on Arbor Day or Lollapalooza! Is it too late for me to be the Homering Tree Preservation Guy?" He chokes back tears rounding third. In a way, he, too, has been sentenced to danse macabre.

Seriously, though, does nobody else find this tiresome? As we embark on Year 20 of reciting Family Guy jokes and passing them off as our own, I guess it's hard to remain flabbergasted with the lack of self-awareness from the general public. Social media and its easy echoes has only made this tiresome process worse. But here's the thing with parroting the extremely easy, "Oh, wow, bad thing happened, here goes Castellanos!!" joke: Bad things happen every single day. There's nothing ironic about his blasts. You can tie a noteworthy historical event to any home run that has ever happened.

Not to mention the very first time this joke began to spread was, of course, when Castellanos went yard following the on-air apology from Reds broadcaster Thom Brennaman, who hot-mic'd himself into an anti-gay slur. What a hilarious foundation for a worldwide goof!

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Philadelphia Phillies star Nick Castellanos did not hit a home run after the Pope died. Sorry you lost your bet! I thought it was a lock.

Spoiler alert? I can already feel the reaction to this column in my bones, calling me a "toddler" and a "baby" and a "baby toddler with no bones".

"Can't take a joke??? Classic. 2025 in a nutshell."

No, no. The problem isn't that I can't take a joke. The issue is that I've taken the same joke 35,000 times. I would love to take another joke. I would love for absolutely anyone on earth to attempt to pass on a new joke to me.

Instead, I'm inundated with betting app screenshots of a lock graphic and a grayed-out interface every time something gut-busting like the death of a Pope or the start of a war happens.

If this is the way that Americans cope with tragedy these days, then I guess I'll have to begrudgingly accept it. But a shared culture doesn't have to be a monoculture. And Castellanos doesn't have to be tied to the world crumbling just because he happens to be metronomically consistent and pretty good at his job. Based on the way he responds to most interview questions, I'd bet he hates each and every one of you who hammer his homer parlays when beloved public figures pass away. So keep it up. If you beat this joke to death hard enough, maybe he'll drill a walk-off to memorialize it.