We don’t know how you did it either, Brett. Myers went 3-for-3 and drove in three runs in the Phillies’ 8-5 win over the Dodgers. Phils lead 2 games to 0 heading out to LA. How about that local baseball nine!
More thoughts coming throughout the weekend. For now, we celebrate.
Pat Burrell sometimes comes to the plate while Dirty Laundry” plays; after he homered last night to give the Phillies a 3-2 lead, the PA played “You Dropped a Bomb on Me.” Apparently, music about Pat Burrell can only be from 1982.
The best part of Burrell’s homer, though, was watching the fans dive into the flower bed above the left field wall to retrieve the ball, as frightened fans looked on. That one kid’s pretty well hidden! I bet he could have hung out there for the day and popped up in time to watch Game 2.
The last time the Phillies were in the NLCS, I was in sixth grade. My walls were covered with Inquirer posters and Daily News headlines of the Phils’ surprise run to the top of the NL East. The Phillies clinched the division on Sept. 28, banging out 18 hits in a 10-7 win over the Pirates. Mariano Duncan topped off a six-run seventh with a grand slam. “Slam Duncan,” the DN crowed.
The 76ers were 38-6 the day I was born; a few months later, they’d sweep the Lakers in the NBA Finals. The Phillies would win the pennant that autumn. I was too young for the Flyers’ run to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1987, so the Phillies’ playoff experience that year was the first time I really saw the city galvanized behind a team. (In my lifetime, the 2001 Sixers are the high-water mark for such hysteria.)
All my friends are nervous today. A friend send me an email saying he couldn’t eat. Another complained about how long the day felt. Another warned me about jinxing the Phillies. Fortunately, I won’t be pitching, only watching, so I’m not so worried about that last one.
It’s just like a sports fan to be that nervous before Game 1 of a Best of 7 series. It’s just like a Philadelphia fan to be worried that something bad is going to happen. Not me, though. Not this time. I’ve been supremely confident all season, and I see no reason to change my mind. The Phillies are going to win this series. It might be easy.
Like all sports predictions, take it with a grain of salt. My opinion isn’t based on much anything besides a cursory glance at the stats and my own conjecture. This is better, at least, than columns predicting doom for the Phils because Joe Torre used to manage the Yankees, but it’s still just a guess. Hell, I won’t even give any evidence, because my reasoning is simple. Same thing as last series, but replace the team: The Dodgers suck. The Phillies are good, yes, but more importantly: they are better than the team they’re facing. And that’s only as good as they need to be.
Obviously, I don’t know if the Phillies are going to win, and I have no idea why my guess should be accurate. But one of my nervous friends today sent out an email to a few of us, asking us how the Phillies would lose in the end, be it the NLCS or the World Series.
I do not know when the Phillies will lose. They could even win it all. But I have come up with the most Philadelphia way for them to lose, on a home run at a crucial moment overturned by instant replay. Howard or Burrell or Utley will hit one high and deep and down the line, and it will be a homer, until it is overturned by a rule almost randomly put in late in the season. No ending could be more fitting.
But, hey, they haven’t lost just yet, and I know they’re going to win tonight, so let’s have fun while it lasts, eh? Phils in 5.
• The Phillies’ 3-1 NLDS win over the Brewers was only the franchise’s fifth postseason series win. In reverse chronological order:
2008 NLDS vs. Brewers, 3-1
1993 NLCS vs. Braves, 4-2
1983 NLCS vs. Dodgers, 3-1
1980 World Series vs. Royals, 4-2
1980 NLCS vs. Astros, 3-2
If history is a guide things do not bode well for the local baseball nine, as the team has only won multiple series in a postseason once. Then again, history probably doesn’t have much of a factor. It’s not like Chase Utley is going to strike out because Grover Cleveland Alexander didn’t pitch well enough in the 1915 World Series. [via]
• Pat Burrell and Jimmy Rollins met as kids! I’m sorry: Not just kids, but little degenerate gamblers, writes Yahoo! Sports’ Jeff Passan:
Long before either played for Philadelphia, they met at the 1994 Area Code Games, a California showcase for young baseball talent. Rollins was a junior from Oakland, Burrell a senior from San Jose. To extend some Bay Area love, Rollins invited Burrell into his room. Well, that and so he could make some money.
Rollins and a couple friends taught Burrell and a buddy the rules. Sevens and 11s and side bets and the like. Burrell understood and threw down his cash.
“Three rolls later, they’re both sitting on the bed watching us,” Rollins said. “And that’s how I met Pat.”
Just wait, now the Dodgers are going to get the pair banished from the major leagues for gambling right before the NLCS starts Thursday. [via]
• The Phillies’ four starting pitchers in the postseason — Cole Hamels, Brett Myers, Jamie Moyer and Joe Blanton — all have 10 letters in their names. Spooky. [via]
• Bonus not-really a factoid!WTF??? Seriously, somebody read that and let me know if you’re as confused as I am.
You do that celebratory spit, Pat Burrell! Pat the Bat hit a three-run homer, and Jayson Werth hit a solo shot right after him. Jimmy Rollins homered to lead off the game, and it’s 5-0, Phillies, after five innings. LET’S GO PHILS!
Yeah, I know how you feel, Carlos. The Phillies can’t score but one run against Dave Bush (career ERA: 4.45) and are losing in Milwaukee? It’s 3-1, Brewers, so the Fightin’ Phils are still in striking distance. Let’s hope for some late-inning magic.
The Phillies don’t have much of a playoff history: 5 pennants, 8 1/2 division titles and just the one World Series win. The Phillies have only played 62 playoff games, 61 fewer than Derek Jeter has played in himself.
It’s no surprise, then, that a loss ranks as one of the greatest moments in Philadelphia sports history. (It’s Great Moment #2 in The Great Philadelphia Fan Book.) In the second inning of Game 3 of the 1977 NLCS, Phillies fans cheered louder and louder as Dodgers starting pitcher Burt Hooton issued three consecutive bases loaded walks (helped, like last night, by a few borderline calls).
It’s a moment Philadelphia fans are proud of. Most of the people who refer to the local teams in the first person plural know they’re not part of the team, they know their weird superstitions and reverse jinxes have no effect on the game. We know these are just 5 or 9 or 11 strangers who happen to play here. But that night on 1977, the fans were part of the game. “We got to him,” people say, “and he unraveled.”
Another fitting point? The Phillies ended up losing the game when the Dodgers scored 3 runs in the ninth inning. (To make matters worse, the Phillies actually should have won the game on a wild groundout that bounced off Mike Schmidt’s knee and into Larry Bowa’s hands — but the ump ruled Davey Lopes beat Bowa’s throw to first.) It’s called Black Friday and it stands along with the 1964 collapse and the 1993 World Series loss as the most painful moments in Phillies history.
The parallels to last night are too easy. Here was C.C. Sabathia, ERA under 2 since joining the Brewers, facing Brett Myers, just like Larry Christenson did 31 years earlier. The Phillies had already gotten a run in. And here was Myers, working a walk after falling behind 0-2, just like Christenson. Here was the crowd, cheering louder and louder with each ball Sabathia threw. Any Phillies fan who knows their history was thinking about Burt Hooton by the time Sabathia walked Jimmy Rollins, loading the bases and sending the fans into a frenzy.
In 1977, Hooton walked four straight batters before being pulled; this time, the Phillies would get something even more magical. Shane Victorino caught a hanging breaking ball and lined it into the left field seats. Suddenly, the Phillies had scored 5 runs in just two innings against Sabathia, a pitcher who hadn’t given up that many in a game since being traded to Milwaukee mid-season.
The stadium was filled with dread the rest of the game. Being a Philadelphia sports fan means knowing that, soon enough, something bad is going to happen. An easy win, a magical moment, a historic grand slam can all go away so quickly. It looked headed that way last night: The Phillies couldn’t get any insurance runs; Milwaukee creeped closer with a run in the 7th. The tying run came to the plate in the 8th. Brad Lidge came into the game in the 9th a night after nearly blowing Cole Hamels’ eight-inning gem.
Yawn. 1-2-3, 12 pitches, Phillies take a commanding 2-0 lead in the division series. The moment everyone was dreading never came. The cheers from Citizens Bank Park after Shane Victorino caught the final out of the NLDS were not just joyful boasts. They were sighs of relief.
Philadelphia fans are known for being boorish hecklers who boo Baby Jesus, throw snowballs at the president and eat the severed tendons of opposing injured players. All of that may be true. Truth is, though, it’s hard to be a Philadelphia sports fan. It’s one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Michael Irvin were dead. People were so nervous yesterday they couldn’t even come up with any good taunts:
[The] Philadelphia faithful watched Milwaukee ace Sabathia warm up in the bullpen prior to the game. A typical Philadelphia greeting, which meant showering him with epithets, was expected by many.But the crowd was strangely quiet. The few who were heard called Sabathia was fat or simply told him that he “going down.” No one had any real zingers for the 290-pound lefty.
Jarrod Krycewicz, 28, of Allentown, Pa., was one of the few who yelled at Sabathia during his warm-ups. “Hey, fat boy!” he screamed out. “Sabathia, fat boy!”
But it quickly stopped as one of the security guards told him to leave. And if he came back, he was told, he would be ejected. “I paid too much money for this seat to get kicked out,” Krycewicz said. “I’d rather just watch from my seat and root hard for the Phillies.”
It’s a little silly to say that the fans rooting hard caused Sabathia to walk Brett Myers, walk Jimmy Rollins, and leave that ball up against Shane Victorino (though the crowd’s cheering every ball as if Sabathia couldn’t throw a strike had to help when the ump called close pitches). But Victorino’s slam was so perfect, so amazing, so unlike anything the Phillies have seen in their previous 125 seasons you couldn’t help but think the crowd was part of it. You couldn’t help but think that screaming at your TV actually worked, that your lucky shirt actually was lucky, that even though it was just 11 innings into the series this could be the year when something everything breaks right and a local team finally wins a championship.
Of course, you also remembered the 2001 Sixers after Game 1 of the NBA Finals, or the Flyers squad that won in five overtimes the year before. You remember the 1977 Phillies. And that year’s Sixers, who won the first two games of the NBA Finals in Portland before dropping the next four. And you know the Phillies are more than capable of dropping consecutive games in Milwaukee.
Yes, this is life for a Philadelphia sports fan. It’s kind of depressing. But as last night showed, every once in a while it’s an awful lot of fun.
Man, that was easy yesterday. The Phillies didn’t even really get any hits (they had 4) and they still won. Hm? Oh, no, I’ve blanked the top of the ninth inning out of my mind, so I’m just assuming that went smoothly, too.
The real hero of yesterday’s game was Ryan Howard, who walked three times and delighted fans with his poem about a Subway sandwich. I just visited the Mmm… Hall of Fame last month; it’s a pretty nice place. I don’t know if the Big Philly Cheesesteak really qualifies for it, though.
Gee, nice, fast game and all, guys, but did Brad Lidge really have to make everything so close there at the end? He definitely killed off a few of our more loyal fans in that ninth inning. Gah.
And thanks for rubbing it in that postgame graphic there, TBS.
Thoughts and recap to follow; I need to calm down a bit. Maybe a lot.
Cole Hamels retired the first 17 batters he faced before giving up a single to Corey Hart, wearing sunglasses. He has 6 strikeouts and no walks through 5.
• The Phillies’ 3-1 NLDS win over the Brewers was only the franchise’s fifth postseason series win. In reverse chronological order:
The Phillies don’t have much of a playoff history: 5 pennants, 8 1/2 division titles and just the one World Series win. The Phillies have only played 62 playoff games, 61 fewer than Derek Jeter has played in himself.
