After Game 1, the bandwagon couldn’t get out of the Yankee clubhouse quick enough. By the time Game 4 ended with Brad Lidge hunched over in the dugout after blowing another potential Phillies’ win, there were broken ankles all over the country thanks to people jumping off the Phillies bandwagon.
do the phillies have some kind of moment like this in them?
Now, armed with one measly win, the bandwagon is filling back up with “Don’t count the Phillies out!” proclaimers, many of whom will watch their first baseball game of the season. They don’t mind the fact that only six teams — and only four since the 1920s — have come back in the World Series from 3-1 deficits. No, they would just rather be out there on the limb so they can say, “See, told you!” even though you won’t be able to find them for a week if the Yankees win tonight.
You’ve still got some convincing to do ’round these parts the Phillies can come back. Winning back-to-back games in Yankee Stadium — old or new — is hard enough, but doing it in the playoffs has to be just south of impossible. The Braves did it in 1996, but then lost the next four. The A’s won two, then lost the next three, highlighted by The Jeter Flip Play.
It’s tough to feel confident if you’re on either side of tonight, I’d imagine. Well, it shouldn’t be that tough if you’re a Yankees fan. You can at least fall back on having wiggle room to go through a blowout tonight. Either way, trash talk still is fun. And educational! Did you know Jesse Jackson says things like “If they are great, don’t hate”? Look at that, we’re learning!
This is why people hate fantasy baseball and fantasy football people. Because in the middle of what potentially could be one of the greatest series ever, this guy is content to sit back and play with his own little toys. Weirdo! Stop ruining it for the rest of us! Just enjoy your own creation and don’t plaster it all over the place.
this is nothing new, america. this is the streakiness that is ryan howard. deal.
Hey, what about the sixth theory, the one that’s actually true? You know, the one that says, “He’s been doing this his whole career and anyone who’s watched him for a month knows this is how he goes sometimes?” He’s the most frustrating player in baseball. Week-to-week, he can go from looking like a Little Leaguer (Game 3 against Pettitte) to looking like the best player in baseball (the NLDS and NLCS). With Howard, you take the good with the bad and just hope the good happens more than the bad. Which it does. This is just the law of Ryan Howard averages catching up to him.
How can you not listen to Bob Gibsonwhen he’s talking about pitching? The man should be considered EF Hutton when it comes to throwing a baseball. But Gibson was a once-in-a-generation pitcher whose rubber arm rarely showed so much as a scratch despite the work he put in. In my best Howard Stern voice: The fact of the matter is, pitchers’ careers last twice as long as they did in 1970. That’s part medical advancements, part cleaner living, part workout routines and more than anything, part proven rest. This wasn’t just some crank sitting down picking four days out of a hat and saying, “I think that’s how long pitchers should rest for.” It was owners who spent millions of dollars researching this so that they didn’t lose 10 times as much on a pitcher who throws 310 innings in a year then blows out their arm in spring training next year. Same with pitch counts. No one pulled 100 out from under their car seat cushion. It’s proven that 100 pitches is the benchmark for how long the average — or even above-average — arm can hold out before damage starts to get done. There are once-in-a-generation arms like Gibson, Steve Carlton, Greg Maddux and CC Sabathia who don’t seem to be bothered by pitch counts or rest days. Great for them! They’re medical miracles. But for the other 99.999999999 of the population, the blueprint for handling a $10-million arm is pretty straightforward. If you deviate from it, you’re playing with fire and deserve whatever you get. Careers have been ruined by exceeding pitch counts, managers have been fired for pushing them. Mark Prior and Kerry Wood should already have led the Cubs to five World Series. Instead, Dusty Baker pushed them in 2003 under the crotchety premise “pitch counts are for sissies” or something along those lines and they were never the same.
How come they didn’t ask Gibson about why Chase Utley hasn’t been knocked downyet? Now that would be some interesting. So why hasn’t he? Maybe it’s karma, because Utley has been hit by pitches somewhere around 6 trillion times in the past five years or so — even knocking him out of action for 6 weeks two years ago — and the Phillies haven’t retaliated once. NOT ONCE!!! So maybe the Yankees just look at the Phils and say, “Aww, there so cute! We can’t do that!” which must have been Charlie Manuel’s plan the whole time. How devious! Manuel that master strategist had them swingin’ all the way! Maybe it’s all some big Yankee plan to let him win the MVP in a losing cause so that they can say, “You see! We don’t have one big star, we’re a team!” to offset all the talk about them buying a championship.
Even I’m getting a little tired of all the Utley talk though. The guy is having a great series. Get over it. Although he does have nice hair and he does run fast.
I’ve always been a Johnny Damon admirer– that’s a step below fan, if you’re checking — so I didn’t think for one second the pre-World Series playoff slump would continue. If you were around for our live blog during Game 1, I continually harped on Damon needing to produce if the Yankees were going to win. I saw him as a wild card for the series — if he produced, the Yankees would be really, really tough to beat. Well, he’s produced and the Yankees have a great shot at closing it out tonight. Not a coincidence.
We won’t fully know if the Cliff Lee deal was better than the potential Roy Halladay dealuntil we see how all the prospects involved in both deals pan out. But let’s just say that right now, the Lee deal is about a 1-20 favorite to come out on top, the equivalent of Usain Bolt racing against Carl Lewis tomorrow. There’s always a chance Lewis can muster some of the old mojo, but the chances of that happening are as close to zero as possible. Right now, since Halladay didn’t even pitch in the playoffs, we don’t have a frame of reference. But to even consider he would have been as good as Lee is insane. And to think the team of Jacon Donald-Carlos Carrasco-Jason Knapp-Lou Marson would even approach the major league production of Halladay-deal inclusions Kyle Drabeck-Michael Taylor-Dominic Brown is sheer folly. The Lee acquisition is a good argument to make Ruben Amarao Jr. the executive of the year.
Some people just can’t help it — they hate the Yankees. Hate ‘em. They’re the most polarizing team in sports, up there with the Cowboys, Notre Dame football and Duke basketball. No one knows why. Or do they? A professor from ESU decided to try and find out by writing a book about it.
You know who doesn’t hate the Yankees? The governor of New York, David Patterson. Maybe after they ratted him out to the media about asking for free tickets, that will change. Isn’t he worth millions? What, they don’t have the Internet in Albany so he can’t get to Stub Hub?
the real world champions
There are a few truths we know for sure after the Yankees won their 27th World Series last night:
Like Kevin Bacon said in A Few Good Men, these are the facts, and they are indisputable.
cha-ching!
Proof that the Yankees were the best team is a guy who only played in half the series — and wasn’t a pitcher — took home the World Series MVP. Hideki Matsui just rolled the Phillies. They had no answer. At the start of the series, I thought the Yankees getting Matsui as the DH was a huge advantage. Seeing as he went 13-for-45 in the postseason and hit .615 for the series while Phillies extra men Ben Francisco (0-for the postseason) and Matt Stairs (one hit), it looks like that came true. The Yankees were far better equipped for the series because of Matsui as the DH, even if their offense took a hit when he couldn’t play in Philly.
Now the question is — what will the Yankees do with him? If anyone was cheesed off about Matsui winning the MVP, it had to be Yankee GM Brian Cashman. Any thoughts of getting the now-free agent on the cheap were dashed the second he got that MVP trophy. He went from a two-year, $19 million contract, to a bidding war at four years and $45 million. All because Pedro Martinez refused to change his approach against him. The Yankees would have been more than content to send him off into the sunset and let some team (Mariners?) overpay him, but that’s going to be a lot harder for them to do now. Four years and $45 million seems pretty steep for a 35-year-old outfielder who can’t play the outfield anymore. Then again, if Boomer Wells thinks it’s feasible, then it must be true!
We’ve already debunked the myth that the Yankees buy their greatness. If you use that as a premise for an argument against them, you’re just being lazy. Same as a Yankee fan who says your team isn’t as good as theirs because the Yankees have won 27 championships. Lazy. The advantage the Yankees have isn’t that they can buy anyone they want — it’s that they don’t have to tie their entire future to the guys they buy. If the Royals decided one offseason they wanted to go all out and sign the biggest free agent — say, Carl Pavano circa 2005 — then it would be imperative that he’d be successful. If not, their club would be set back 10 years. If Pavano flops for the Yankees, they just reload the next year. And that’s what happened. If the Pavano signing set the Yankees back, it meant they only made it to the playoffs instead of the World Series.
ba ha! someone's going to give me a multi-year deal! ba ha!
Here’s the good news for Phillies fans: This isn’t over. Every very important guy on the two-time defending National League champions is locked up for at least next year. Only Pedro Feliz is a free agent (and Chad “Dead Arm” Durbin) and Feliz should kiss Ruben Amaro Jr.’s feet if he gave him a one-year, $4 million contract offer after the way Feliz served up a turd sandwich of a postseason.
Now the bad news — they could have won this thing, and two of the biggest culprits were the two guys who have done their best to torpedo this season from the start, Brad Lidge and Cole Hamels. Last year, if Hamels was staked to a 3-0 lead, the Yankees might as well have packed it up and headed back up the Jersey Turnpike. If Lidge was one strike from a 1-2-3 inning, the fans would have had one step into the aisles to beat the traffic? Now? The Yankees weren’t scared of Hamels and fans saved half their beer for when Lidge blew the game.
Oh, and Brett Myers. He’s a free agent too.
Two things you should know about Friday in New York City. If you’re planning on going to the parade, it starts at 11 a.m. If you were just planning on going in for the day, cancel those plans. Sell your show tickets on Stub Hub, call in sick to work. Between traffic, drunk people, crowded trains and general inconvenience, it will be the most annoying day imaginable if you’re not going in for the parade.
Just what Philly fans need – New Yorkers telling them to calm down. Don’t poke the dragon, New York. That’s all I’m sayin’.
It’s never too soon to start thinking about next year’s fantasy baseball season. One tip — don’t overvalue guys who had good postseasons. Matsui and his next team would be really, really happy with a .275, 25 HR and 90 RBI year. Those are the stats of someone who should be drafted in the 11th round, but The Guy Who Doesn’t Pay Attention That Much in your league will remember this World Series and reach for him in the fifth round. Mistake.