First Mike Freeman, and now Jon Paul Morosi. It seems as though folksy country sweetheart Charlie Manuel is charming the pants off the national media.

Some highlights from Morosi’s Saturday piece on FOXSports.com, where he got some good thoughts from past & present colleagues, after the jump:

Ed Wade:

“I would have to guess that Charlie’s not thinking about his legacy right now,” Ed Wade, the Phillies general manager when Manuel was hired, said Friday in a telephone interview. “He’s probably thinking, ‘Who’s the next guy that will come through the door to talk baseball with me?’

“He’s not worried about whether they’re going to build another Rocky statue for him in Philadelphia. He’s just looking for the chance to talk baseball and be part of the game.”

Ruben Amaro, Jr.:

Ruben Amaro Jr., a reserve on the ’94 and ’95 Cleveland teams, remarked Friday that he always got the same number of swings in batting practice as Manny Ramirez and Jim Thome.

“He believed in treating everybody fairly,” Amaro said.

Jimmy “Fuck Yeah” Rollins:

“Charlie’s got something every single day,” Rollins said. “I understand the stories. I don’t always get his little sayings and things. Some things, it’s like, ‘That is country.’

“Somebody takes a 2-0 fastball, and he’d look at me like, ‘J-Roll, you see that little McDonald’s sign up there (in the third deck)? I’d hit the ‘o’ in that sign when I was playing.’ Stuff like that, all the time. I’m like, ‘Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.’”

Even Uncle Cholly himself contributed to the soundbite love-fest, regaling the room with a 7-minute anecdote about his time as a rookie skipper for the Class A Wisconsin Rapids in 1983:

“I could fish at night. I could walk right outside the locker room. There’s a river about a block away. I’d have a Greenbelt Beer, a Star Beer, Old Style. Old Style was big. I used say Old Style was my lucky beer. You know, we’d get on a roll or something, I’d be drinking Old Style. It was all good.”

And:

“I used to mow the field. I put the lines down and the pitching rubber and home plate. I had this pitcher, one night early in the season, come in swearing, and he said, ‘I’m telling you, home plate’s crooked.’ I got real upset with him. I go, ‘What the hell you talking about? I put the damn plate in.’ I go out the next day, and we start measuring it off with a string. And it was off. It was off about 18 inches [ed. note: 18,000,000,000 nano-inches].”

Manuel’s Love Of The Game Rubbing Off On Phillies | Jon Paul Morosi, FOXSports.com

Bonus Links:

• Red Sox Nation seems to be aligning with our guys, as Phillies fever spreads through New England, according to CMSB 96.3 FM. Additional proof of this phenomenon comes from the glowing praise certain Phillies blogs received last week from the Red Sox blog Center Field.
• Commenter Matt from Defend Broad Street drew several readers’ attention to a tidy little piece written by a Detroit sports fan. Philadelphia is a city of chumps, not champs. Again: written by a Detroit sports fan. Satire? Sure. The only question is if the satire is intentional or not. Go Twins.
• This just in: Ryan Howard is adorable.
• Want to see a dolled-up old broad getting hosed with champagne?

Dick-Move, Dude.