"When you win," Geoff Jenkins said, in the middle of the party, "it's forever, man."
Forever is a word to which no few of this year's Philadelphia Phillies, and about as many of Phillies Phederation, attach individuated meaning no matter how ravenously they partied when they finally finished what they were pretty sure they started two days earlier, bumping the formerly feisty and suddenly modest Tampa Bay Rays to one side.
"Forever" was once the word applied to the marriage between "championship" and "Phillies baseball." It was also the word delivered as the answer to that once transcendent question, "How long before Philadelphia or the Phillies shake off 1964?"
"Forever" was just about what it seemed to have been between the birth of the franchise and its first World Series conquest, when perhaps the best third basemen ever to play the game — Mike Schmidt and his near-equal, George Brett — led their teams against each other, Schmidt came out just enough ahead of his contemporary to nail the Series MVP, and the Phillies inspired James Michener to wax doggerel.
Through the long dark years they stumbled
scarred with deep humiliations
but our cheering never crumbled
and we kept our expectations.
Yes, we loved them for their sillies---
who? The Phillies.
"Forever" should be just about long enough between that exercise and the next time Michener decides he has a poem in him.
"Forever" was just about the span some thought would be required for the Phillies and the Rays to finish Game 5, which in turn has inspired such nonsense as Buster Olney's suggestion that it's time for the World Series to be moved to neutral grounds. Poppycock. What it's time for is to restore the Series to its primacy and (hah! you thought I could go a full year without even hinting at it?) shorten up the postseason thus: best-of-three division series between the division winners who didn't have the best record in the league; the winner plays the division champ with the season's best record in a best-of-five League Championship Series; then, on to the seven-game Series. No more wild cards. Watch the television ratings grow again.
"Forever" may also have been the answer to the question, "When the hell are these teams going to quit turning baserunners into castaways?" Perhaps not quite to the level the Red Sox achieved in falling to the Rays, in the only postseason set to get past a fifth game this time around, but the Phillies and the Rays were mostly so inept at hitting with men on base at all, never mind in scoring position, that they made sometimes shaky pitching look almost Gibsonian. Just how did the Phillies manage a Game Four blowout?
But I digress. And that isn't fair to the Phillies. Not that much in their history has been fair to them. They don't have the long log of extraterrestrial, transcendental 11th-hour disaster that long enough dogged the Boston Red Sox, and they haven't exactly been as colorful in protracted life in the basements as the Chicago Cubs. And I don't know if anyone's discovered anything close to a particular curse that followed the Phillies for generations after generations, although for every cynical Phillies fan with a penchant for long, colourful, and imaginative insult there's been a cynical Philadelphia sportswriter with a comparable penchant for longer, more colorful, and more imaginative slander.
But I'm willing to bet that not even the longest dispirited Red Sox fan would have imagined a spare part who hadn't had a base hit in game competition in over a month would set a possible record for longest-delayed pinch hitting assignment in World Series history — and then shoot a double into the gap in right center to start Part Two of Game 5 and, it turned out, the Phillies' final march to the Promised Land.
And I'm willing to bet that not even the longest disgusted Cub fan would have imagined a relief pitcher, whose former infamy was sealed when he served one of the most monstrous home runs in postseason history, protracting a League Championship Series his own club had just about in the bank, putting an end to a World Series by throwing Eric Hinske a slider that vaporized Hinske's bat for strike three faster than Mitch Williams's meaty fastball flew into the upper deck in the bottom of the ninth a decade and a half earlier.
In between Jenkins' laser and Brad Lidge's Series-ending slide, all the Phillies had to do was shrug off Rocco Baldelli's game-tying bomb in the top of the seventh. (That it was the first gopher out of Ryan Madson's hole in six months was a mere technicality.) Chase Utley made sure they'd have a reasonable chance at that, when he backhanded Akinori Iwamura's chop up the pipe, faked to first, then bagged Jason Bartlett at the plate, Pat Burrell — who couldn't buy a hit from a Mafioso all Series long — drew up the insurance policy when he opened the Philadelphia eighth with a double off the left center field fence, and Pedro Feliz, with the Rays infield in enough to resemble a defensive line dangerously close to an offside penalty flag, shot one right through that line to send home Burrell.
"You can't feel yourself," Lidge said later, asked what prompted his unexpected stroll around the mound with another tying run aboard and the Rays down to their possible final strike of the season. "I honestly couldn't feel myself. It felt like the first time I ever pitched in a big league game. Your legs are heavy, and you have to take a big, deep breath just to be able to pitch."
The last time Lidge felt that way, in a comparable scenario, Albert Pujols made it feel almost like the last time he might pitch in a big league game. Had it not been for the bracings for the Minute Maid Park retractable roof, they'd still be wondering into which Houston sewer Pujols' surrealistic bomb would have plunged after hitting the streets behind the park bouncing.
And anyone who tells you there weren't even a few Phillies fans aware of that history aligned to the history their antiheroes wrote the last time the Phillies showed up in a World Series is lying.
Except that, yes, if the Red Sox could break their curses, actual or alleged, anything other than disaster was possible for even the disaster prone. And this time the Phillies had a little pre-insurance going in. As if you should really expect otherwise, considering, but these Phillies, this year's model, never once blew one when leading after eight. (Their record after the eighth: 93-0.) And this closer, this year's model, had forty-seven save opportunities and didn't blow a single one of them.
Even those of Phillie Phederation who couldn't forget 1993 finally shook that memory off the moment Lidge released the slider that buckled Hinske into that feeble, Series-ending swishout. And the next thing anyone in Citizens Bank Park knew, Lidge's slider had made dust of Hinske's bat, Lidge was hitting his knees half in celebration and half in monkey-off-the-back relief, and catcher Carlos Ruiz hustled up the pipe to embrace him down there.
Then came Ryan Howard atop them in a swan dive that might get him a second career as an Olympian should he ever lose whatever it is that helps him atone for his virtuoso strikeouts by way of his conversation-piece home runs, such as the pair he launched in Game 4. (Only who the hell needed him when the Phillies had Jumpin' Joe Blanton hitting the fourth pitch he saw from Edwin Jackson into the left field seats in the bottom of the fifth?) And the champagne pile-on was on.
Game ball? They gave Jamie Moyer, their grand old man, who once ditched school to make it to the 1980 World Series victory parade, and who pitched magnificently in Game 3 with a repertoire that couldn't have outrun an arthritic millipede, got the Series pitching rubber. Cole Hamels, who probably set a Series record for the longest no-decision, day(s), in the history of the classic, had to settle for Series MVP honors and becoming the first to bag consecutive MVPs in the same postseason.
Once upon a time, Phillies baseball meant something so futile that a particularly creative fan, taking a can of paint to a billboard sign in ancient Baker Bowl on which the team endorsed a newly popular deodorant soap, made it read thus: "The Phillies Use Lifebuoy! ... and they still stink!"
That was then. This was in the immediate moment after Hinske turned back to a dugout full of dispirited Rays, who had no reason at all to feel shamed for losing a World Series nobody including their own fans would have pictured them reaching when spring training opened, and after the Phillies began pouring onto the field to whoop it up: a particularly creative and sensitive Phillies fan whipping up a placard as fast as his hands could reach the skies with it:
GOOD NIGHT, JOE CARTER.
Bang the drum and toot the oboes,
dance until the earth has shaken.
Cheer, for our beloved hoboes
have at last brought home the bacon.
Garland them with timeless lilies!
Although they are a bunch of dillies
who still give honest men the willies
we still love them for their sillies----
hail! The Phillies.
Leave a Comment