Unbearably Bad Baseball

Best World Series game ever? Are you freaking serious?

I have heard that term used at least five separate times already to describe Game 6 of the 2011 World Series from Thursday night, when the Cardinals snatched victory from the jaws of defeat repeatedly in winning the game and forcing a deciding Game 7 with a walkoff home run in the bottom of the 11th inning. And my first thought when I heard that description was "What are these people, four years old?"

Come on guys. Best World Series game ever? A game in which:

The home team gives up a run in the top of the first inning, in a game in which they have to win, or go home.

The road team then follows up by immediately giving up two runs in their defensive half of the first inning, in a game where they had already grabbed a lead that, if it held, would bring them their first world championship in franchise history?

A game with five errors, including multiple crucial missteps by the Rangers in the late innings to blow not one, not two, but three separate leads after the 7th inning?

Not one, not two, but three blown saves by the Rangers? All in one game?

28 hits allowed by the two teams in 11 innings? 19 runs?

Come on, guys. This might have been an exciting game, but please don't fall into the clueless monkey's trap of just calling whatever the most recent game is, the "best game of all time". My lord. I can think of at least five better World Series games than this, just in the past decade or so. Anybody remember John Smoltz vs. Jack Morris in 1991, still the best World Series of my lifetime? Anybody remember the infamous Dodgers - Oakland game featuring Kirk Gibson and "I don't believe what I just saw!" in 1988? I mean, it's not like I'm going back 80 years or something. The list just goes on and on and on of far better ball games than last night's straight-out massacre of the game of baseball itself.

Game 6 of the 2011 World Series was a freaking embarrassment is what it was. And, sadly, it's a microcosm for what this entire World Series has been. In addition to being the least-watched World Series in modern television history, these two teams have butchered what are generally considered the tenets of great post-season baseball over and over again, night after night, like two blind kids with sticks just bumping into each other and swinging blindly game after game. Believe me, as a lifelong baseball fan and especially as a Phillies fan, it has been absolutely painful to watch.

As bad as the Rangers have been about giving up 1st and 2nd inning runs to the Cardinals in this Series and then having to play the rest of the game from behind, you've had the Cardinals' starting pitchers not make it through the 4th inning three times already in six games. I mean, just think about how bad that is! And they've actually won three of these games anyways! It's like these teams are just putting children out there on the mound, lobbing 'em in, and letting the other team just whack away, batting-practice style. They might as well just set up a tee on home plate and play a good old-fashioned 1st grade little league game. As a longtime baseball fan who is used to pretty much always seeing good pitching in the Series, this matchup has truly been an abomination to behold.

You've had the Rangers now with 8 errors in 6 games, including two critical errors in Game 6 to go along with 3 errors from the Cardinals in the same game (the "best game of all time", ha!), with the Cardinals chipping in with five errors of their own over the 6 games so far in the Series. As a general statement, the fielding in this Series has been nothing short of atrocious, with even the big stars on both teams repeatedly costing their teams games by failing to execute the very basics of the game on defense, blowing leads and ruining big chances for either team to grab absolutely crucial wins.

The managing by Ron Washington and Tony LaRussa has been highly questionable to say the least -- enough to make even Phillies' idiot manager Charlie Manuel look smart -- with in particular LaRussa making gaffe after gaffe in an uncharacteristically sloppy show from a guy who is thought to be one of the better managers in the game today. The guy couldn't even figure out how to call for the right pitcher to come in in Game 5, for crying out loud! Is this even real? You would never have believed that bullpen story if you didn't see it with your own eyes. LaRussa has also muffed at least one if not two critical at-bats from Albert Pujols with ill-timed and poorly thought-out steals or hit-and-run calls in very key spots. And meanwhile, Ron Washington is so coked up that he isn't even starting his ace Derek Holland, he of the 16-5 regular season record and the absolute shutdown of the Cardinals in Game 4, on full fucking rest, in Game 7 tonight, in favor of Matt Harrison, who took 73 pitches to get not even through the 4th inning in a Game 4 blowout by the Cardinals, while LaRussa is at least smart enough to take advantage of the extra day off due to the Game 6 rainout and start his ace Chris Carpenter in the deciding game of the Series. Honestly, if you told me to purposefully go out there and manage like an asshole, I'm not sure I would have come up with some of these moves. If Matt Harrison gets shelled again tonight and the Cardinals win the Series, so help me god Ron Washington better get his ass fired, or that franchise will never win a World Series during the lifetime of anyone reading this post right now. They'll be calling it "The Curse of the Cokehead" by the time your great-grandchildren are into baseball, you heard it here first.

So the pitching has been utterly abysmal in this World Series, and the fielding has been almost just as bad. The managers are out there embarrassing themselves and the game of baseball night in and night out. Basically, everything but the offenses have been utterly and completely putrid between both of these teams, now over six games and counting. The baseball audience has been itching for some actual good baseball so badly that in a game with featuring five errors and three blown saves, not just idiot fans but shitheads on ESPN and in baseball are actually trying to claim it's the best World Series game of all time? Oh. My. God. Again, as a fan of easily the best team in the sport during 2011, and one with the greatest pitching anyone has seen in generations, the best I can hope for at this point is that the Cardinals -- who have got to be massive favorites to win the Series tonight -- and the Rangers at least stop insulting the game long enough to play nine relatively clean innings of ball, and that we can declare a winner that, although obviously not really able to say they played "well" in the Series, can at least be able to know that they played better than their opponents by the time all is said and done. But please don't be one of those fools calling Game 6 the best game of all time. "The game where neither team wanted to win badly enough to string together a couple of clean innings of baseball" is about as far as you can reasonably go.

The Cardinals earned every inch of their appearance here in the 2011 World Series, and I'm not even beginning to take anything away from them and you've never heard me say that they don't belong here where they are right now. But my god, the Phillies would have swept this series so badly against the hapless Rangers, they probably would have called it on the "mercy rule" after three games. I hope the Phillies players are out there watching this series and suffering like I am, night after night. Because the play of these two teams just plain sucks.

Nice Try

Big Papi. Dustin Pedroia. Terry Francona. Theo Epstein. And now John Lester. The list just goes on and on of current and former Red Sox players and management being publicly quoted in the press as complaining that nobody mentioned the unbelievable stories of the team's players getting drunk and mentally and physically out of shape, back a couple of months ago when the team "had the best record in baseball."

Nice try.

The Phillies had the best record in baseball for just about the entire baseball season this year. The Phillies were MLB's first team to 30 wins, the first to 40 wins, to 50 wins, and then again to 70 wins, 80 wins, 90 wins, and the only team to win 100 games in the 2011 regular season.

Now don't get me wrong, none of this means diock anymore with the Cardinals set to represent the NL in the World Series once again. But I just can't sit quietly by while people associated with the Red Sox claim that their team was better than it was earlier in the season, in an unbelievably pathetic attempt to somehow claim that there is no story behind the total breakdown in control over the team that undoubtedly led directly to its downfall at the end of the season this year.

Phillies = best team in baseball, almost all season, including at this very moment.
Cardinals = NL pennant winner, without a doubt the franchise that historically makes the most out of its opportunities in the postseason, this year among the best examples of all.
Rangers = best team in the AL this year.
Red Sox = best record in baseball 20 games in to the season, and best record in the AL until around 120 games. Second best record in the AL through Game 161. Third best record in the AL come season's end. Ugh.

Despair -- Part I

OK. After a few days of serious inner mourning, I think I am ready to go public.

As a Philadelphia sports fan right now, I am in a deep despair.

And I know I'm not even close to alone in this feeling. Like most of Philadelphia's sports fans, I am still kind of in shock about the Phillies embarrassing elimination at the hands of an inferior St. Louis Cardinals team. And with the way it all happened, in a lot of ways there's not much to say, really. I mean, we lost a Game 5 at home by the score of 1-0, so that's just not the kind of game that someone who understands the game can really attack all that much, at least not from most perspectives. But then, if you take a little bit of a step back, the Phils signed Roy Halladay a couple of years ago and paid him roughly 20 million dollars a year, and then this past season they signed Cliff Lee and paid him another 20 mil a year or so, and the whole idea was supposed to be that the team was building more or less the greatest short-series baseball team that ever lived. I mean, who is going to beat Halladay, Lee, Hamels and Oswalt in a 7-game series, especially when Philly has home-field advantage throughout the entire post-season, right?

Answer: The Cardinals. The Phillies lost 2 out of 3 games at home in the NLDS, and in those two losses the Phillies' starters were Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay. It's that simple, really. The Phillies lost 2 out of 3 games at home with their two near-unhittable aces on the mound. Now, for what it's worth, I think it's hard to say much about Roy Halladay overall in this series, who gave up just four earned runs over two full starts and looked pretty well dominating other than a couple of shaky first innings. But Cliff Lee had one of his bad outings in Game 2, giving up 5 earned in only about half a game, and the Phils couldn't muster enough runs to come back from that early deficit in eventually losing the game 5-3. And in a short series, those two losses were too much to be outweighed even by Phillies' #3 pitcher Cole Hamels' gutsy six inning shutout performance in what seemed at the time like a huge victory in Game 3 in St. Louis.

And let's not just focus on the pitching, as it was really more the Phillies' offense that completely weighted the team down and out of the playoffs for the second straight season. After an 11-run outburst in Game 1, Phillies fans were shocked and frustrated beyond belief in watching the team score just 10 runs in the final four games of the series. And putting even this great pitching staff in the position of having to give up two runs or fewer per game over four of the five games in the series, simply did not work. That strategy does not work in professional baseball ever, period. Carlos Ruiz and Placido Polanco, great contributors during the regular season and/or past post-season runs, couldn't touch the ball throughout this series. Ryan Howard, despite winning Game 1 single-handedly with his bat, totally disappeared in the rest of the series, culminating in Game 3 when Tony LaRussa actually pitched around someone to put him on base and face Ryan Howard -- the league's greatest RBI man over the past five seasons -- with another runner on base. Howard promptly struck out in one of the many horrible-looking at-bats he had in the series, but the fact that an opposing manager would ever even consider walking someone on purpose to pitch to Howard speaks volumes about how far Howard has fallen in the esteem of some opposing coaches (although it should be mentioned that LaRussa made an unbelievable ass out of himself in that same game by intentionally walking Carlos Ruiz and then promptly giving up a 3-run home run to a pinch hitting Ben Francisco to take the loss). But the guy sure had Ryan Howard's number after the first game, there's no debating that point. Some of the other Phillies hitters had decent series at the plate, but nobody was really able to step up and come up with that one huge hit the team desperately needed to stay alive in this series. And when you combine the team scoring 2.5 runs per game through most of the series, with Roy Halladay giving up 3 runs in the first inning of Game 1, Cliff Lee ceding five earned runs in five innings in Game 2, and Roy Oswalt allowing five more runs in 5 innings in Game 4, that is simply not a winning combination, no matter how much better on paper one team is than another.

I think a lot of the reason for the despair right now, at least with me if not anyone else, is that there is just this sinking feeling about the nucleus of this team being past its prime, that there just may not be other chances as good as this season again. I mean, look at this objectively. The Phillies won the World Series in 2008, on a team on which Cole Hamels was the only great pitcher and which saw him win the MVP of every series as he utterly dominated all comers on the way to the franchise's second world championship in 50,000 years of existence. And although mostly everyone fought me on it at the time when I declared this the day after that historical championship victory in 2008, it seems painfully obvious to everyone now I am sure that the 2008 Phillies were, in fact, the best team in the major leagues that year, hands down. So the Phillies won the World Series as the best baseball team in the world in 2008, and then in 2009 they made it back to the Series but lost this time to the Yankees. Then in 2010 with the best record in baseball for the first time in 35 years, the Phillies lost in the NLCS to the San Francisco Giants who also completely shut down the Phillies' lineup, and now in 2011 -- again with far and away this time the league's best record -- the team has lost in the NLDS to a totally run-of-the-mill below average playoff team in the Cardinals. So it's been four straight years of WS - WS loss - NLCS loss - NLDS loss for the Phillies. Anybody else seeing a trend here? And even more disurbing is that the payroll has climbed every year since 2008, and the team has signed major free agents in each of those years as the "star power" on the team has skyrocketed. To think that that 2008 team outperformed this 2011 Phillies squad is mind-boggingling if you just look at the rosters, and especially at the starting rotations. I mean, it's just not close.

But you know what has changed on this team since 2008? The hunger. I wrote about this three years ago, not even knowing until last year's Giants series and now especially this year's with the Cardinals just how right I was, but this team lost the eye of the tiger. That win in 2008 was just so amazing, so special, and so cathartic for those players, the manager, the fans and the entire city of Philadelphia, the team just let up a little. There's just no doubting this fact anymore. They've lost that hunger, that insistence that they win. Whereas in 2008 it was Cole Hamels on the mound instead of Roy Halladay in a big spot like this Game 5, he could have pitched the identical great game that Halladay did the other day, but that scrappy never-lose 2008 team would have found a way to score a couple of runs late in the game and to move on to the pennant. If you knew that 2008 Phillies team like I did, then you know what I am saying is right. Back then, this city, and that Phillies squad, were desperate for a win, they would have done anything for a win, and they did repeatedly, using late-game heroics throughout each series to nab wins from the jaws of defeat and never disappointing the fans at home in the playoffs. Over the past two seasons, however, far superior Phillies teams in terms of raw talent -- I mean, squads that aren't even close if you look at the numbers on paper -- went and lost each of the past two seasons in a one-run elimination game at home in which they never even really put up a significant threat to score and come back to make a game out of it. It's hard to believe, really, but the Philadelphia Phillies won their world title in 2008, and since then they just haven't been trying nearly hard enough, haven't been wanting it nearly bad enough. And they're all guilty of it -- everyone except Hamels anyways, who has been more or less fucking awesome every time he's gone out there in the postseason since and including 2008 -- but everyone else is to blame for this. Rollins, who is a shell of the player he was in 2008. Utley, same thing. Howard, same thing. Ruiz, same. Victorino didn't do much in this series either. Guys like Halladay, Lee and Oswalt, who weren't even on that team in 2008 and never really lived through the lean century the Phillies have just recently emerged from. The list just goes on and on. Like Sylvester Stallone at the beginning of Rocky III, the Phillies have just lost the eye of the tiger, and unless they find some way to get it back under country bumpkin Charlie Manuel, there won't be any more baseball titles in this town anytime soon. And, I should mention, this is why I celebrated that 2008 championship so fucking hard when it happened. Because as a lifelong sports fan, I know how hard it is, how rare it is, for a team to be able to duplicate success like the Phillies had in 2008. Especially in Philadelphia, I don't think that town has ever been ready to deal with having a dynasty yet, which is exactly what the Phillies would have officially become if they had won it all this year. I mean, WS - losing WS - losing NLCS - WS reads a heck of a lot better than WS - losing WS - losing NLCS - losing NLDS, don't it? But thanks to a lack of true desire, effort, and desperation to win, the fans of Philadelphia won't have to worry about this again anytime soon.

And the fans are also depressed here because, after posting the best record in baseball in 2010 with 97 wins, the team shut down on offense and lost in 6 games to the Giants in the NLCS last year. And now this year they posted the best record in the National League in years with 102 wins, head and shoulders above the rest of the league for pretty much the final 80% of the regular season this year, and now the Phils didn't even make it past one round against a team that had all but given up at Citi Field just a month ago. All of this leaves us Phillies fans with this feeling that the regular season just doesn't mean anything anymore. Best team in baseball two years running, and we've haven't even sniffed the World Series? Huh? If you think anyone in Philadelphia is looking forward to next season right now, you don't have a clue how those people feel. Right now, the feeling about the 2012 baseball season in Philadelphia is somewhere between dread and apathy. Many people will just dread being let down like this again next year, and those who don't dread it like myself are certainly at least sharing my feeling that who gives a fuck what the Phils do during the regular season next year. It means nothing. We can't beat worse teams in critical games at home with our ace on the mound anymore when it counts, so why get excited, right? That's how it feels to me anyways, and I'm sure about ten million of my closest friends in and around the Philadelphia area these days.

You ever hear that adage that great pitching always beats great hitting in the playoffs?

Not always.

--Part II of "The Despair" is coming later this week. You can guess what other Philadelphia sports team that has to do with.

Incredible End to the MLB Season

Has this ever happened before?

With only Game 162 of the scheduled regular season remaining in Major League Baseball, we're sitting here with not one, not two, not three but four different teams, all of whom straight-up control their own destiny as far as nabbing the final two post-season spots, one in each league. I certainly cannot recall such an exciting finish to a baseball regular season in my recent memory, and while I know we've had some close calls before and certainly we've had several examples of one-game playoffs to determine who rolls on to the post-season and who heads home for the winter, I'm not sure it's ever happened quite like this. The fact that we're ending so excitingly in both the AL and the NL stands in stark contrast to what most of September shaped up to be in MLB -- the most boring September in years. With all six division races nicely tied up within just a week or two into the month, and with near double-digit leads for both the Braves in the NL and the Red Sox in the AL for their respective wildcard spots heading into the month, it seemed as though there would be little of interest to keep baseball fans glued to their tvs until the playoffs came around.

But then cue not just one but two concurrent historic collapses.

First, the Braves. Entering this month, the Braves were 80-55, well behind the Phillies in the division but way out in front in National League wildcard race, leading the Cardinals by 8.5 games in that category. But in September, the Braves' offense has all but disappeared, averaging just a hair over 3 runs per game in losing 17 out of 26 games, while the Cardinals have turned it on, winning 17 out of 25. Superstar Albert Pujols has put the Cardinals on his back this month, hitting .366 with 20 RBIs in 25 games, and star pitchers Chris Carpenter and Jaime Garcia have recovered to go a combined 7-0 with an ERA in the 2.4's over the past four weeks. Meanwhile, the Braves' perfect foil has been pitcher Derek Lowe, who went 5-0 with a 1.17 ERA in September of 2010, joining Tom Seaver in 1969 and Randy Johnson in 2002 as the only National League pitchers to pitch in at least five September games and win them all with an ERA that low, but who now in September 2011 has gone 0-5 with an ERA of 8.75, making him the first National League pitcher ever to pitch in at least five September games and lose them all with an ERA that high. And the Braves' slump has come over 26 games in September, 18 of which were against the non-playoff-bound Nationals, Marlins and Mets, so it's not like the schedule has been particularly cruel to Atlanta.

Meanwhile, the story in Boston is pretty much even worse. On September 3, the Red Sox were sitting at 84-54, a couple of games behind the Yankees in the AL East but holding an even more comfortable 9-game lead even later in the season than the Braves. Since then, the team has stunk out loud, going 7-19 overall in the month of September, while the Rays have simultaneously gone on a tear, rolling off a 16-10 record and giving up four or fewer runs in 8 of their last 12 games. The Red Sox's 19 losses in September (and counting) are the most by the team in this month in 59 years, since the Sox went 7-20 in 1952, a mark they could tie with a loss tonight to end the regularly scheduled regular season in Baltimore. And, like the Braves in the NL, the Red Sox do not have the schedule to blame, as September has seen them face off for six contest with out-of-it Toronto, and a total of seven games against the hopelessly horrible Orioles, in which so far the Sox have gone 4-8, with one final game against the O's tonight at Camden Yards for all the marbles.

With both leagues' wildcard races now tied with just one game remaining, the very real possibility exists of two one-game tiebreaker games on Thursday, which again I doubt has ever actually happened before. As far as those tiebreaker games go, MLB has announced this week that any one-game playoffs would be played on Thursday. First pitch for the American League tiebreaker between the Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays in St. Petersburg, Fla., is scheduled for 4:07 p.m. ET, if needed. The St. Louis Cardinals and Atlanta Braves would start at 8:07 p.m. CT on Thursday night in St. Louis.

With both underdog teams having won the season series with their opponents, each of the Sox and the Braves have their work cut out for them tonight, which will be I think for both teams their last best chance to salvage a post-season run out of the 2011 regular season campaigns before having to go on the road to win a one-game playoff against a much hotter team rich in the belief that destiny is on their side. And the odds seem stacked in favor of us having a second team to the 1964 Cardinals as the only team ever to have overcome a deficit of at least 8.5 games in in September to reach the postseason in Major League Baseball.

What a Difference Success Makes

If there was one thing that stood out to me during my many travels with my family over the past month -- other than the increased security at the busier airports, of course -- it would have to be the effect of wearing my regular Phillies apparel in multiple airports along the east coast. Ten years ago, #1 I'm not sure I would have been caught dead wearing any Phillies apparel other than your standard baseball cap in public, and #2, if I did, I could have walked through the nation's airports basically unnoticed. I mean, how often do you really pay attention if someone walks by you wearing, say, a Colorado Rockies t-shirt, or a Padres cap, etc.? Especially given the total lack of historical success out of the Phillies prior to the team's current incarnation, believe me when I tell you, I spent 20-some years of my life as a long-suffering and apparel-wearing Philly fan across the board, and nobody ever said boo to me about anything I ever had on my back, my head, or anywhere else attached to my person, be it at an airport or otherwise.

Fast forward to last month, and as the Hammer Family muddles through a very long security line at JFK International Airport, Hammer Wife and I are trying to get everything back together after our bags, computers, shoes, belts, younameits all come out of the scanner while simultaneously keeping tabs on and quieting down three young kids including a very young one who can't be trusted not to do something crazy at any time depending on what is attracting him at any particular moment. At one point my 2-year-old grabs one of his sisters' shoes and starts running with it, stopping just before running under the line barrier and back into the security line all over again. Trust me when I tell you, having to go and retrieve him, and I'm sure being forced to wait with him all the way through that whole security line again, was about as daunting a thought as I could imagine at that particular moment, and then I saw the big burly TSA guard standing right near where my boy was dangerously close to really screwing things up. I ask the guy if he could please just stand in front of my boy for one second while I come and collect him -- he was only maybe 10 feet away from me at this point -- and the TSA guy takes one look at my Phillies shirt, sneers up the corners of his mouth just a little bit, and says "Not for a Phillies fan, I won't." And he was serious. Luckily I managed to grab the kid before he got away from the security-cleared end of the line, but it wasn't with any help at all from the TSA guy, who told me he was a Mets fan. After a quick condescending laugh at him, I told him I feel bad enough for him already and I could get my own kid. But the simple fact is, ten years ago, there's no way anyone in New York would ever have even mentioned me being a Phillies fan. That fact would have been of no consequence whatsoever to a Mets fan 10 years ago, even when the Mets were bad themselves. The Phillies were a lifelong embarrassment, and pretty much the last franchise in all of professional sports that would have caused any agita, jealousy and negativity whatsoever in the mind of any other city's or sport's team fan.

A week or so later, we're flying back out of the airport in south Florida, and once again I am sporting some Phillies apparel, this time my old red hat that I've had for going on a decade or more now, and this time in Marlins country. The hat is ratty and gross, but it's mine and I love it, and I pretty much always bring it on vacation in case I need the extra protection or convenience that it affords the wearer. The Hammer Family rolls in to the airport with exactly nine bags, only two of which are being carried by anyone other than me, and I am taking a beating in the 100 degree heat. Mercifully I see one of the airprot's luggage hand trucks unattended, and I am just starting to put my luggage down on it when a skycap walks up from across the room and says those are only for skycap use. I look at him, sweat pouring down my face, back aching, and with true desperation in my eyes and ask can I please just borrow this to lug my bags to the security line about a mile away in the airport, and that I will personally bring it right back to him in 15 minutes or so when I get the bags there, and I take a minute to point out to him how utterly deserted the airport is at that hour and how many other hand trucks there are available for him and his team to use. The guy takes one look at me -- the sweat, the pain, the desperation -- and says, "Sorry, no Phillies fans are using any of my carts today." And that was it. I carried seven bags about a half a mile across a couple of terminals because I was unfortunate enough to once again be wearing a Phillies hat in the land of another, this time different, NL East team. What on earth a Marlins fan really has against the Phillies specifically I'm not sure I understand -- I mean, the Marlins are after all in last place in the division, they lost 17 games in a row this year, and the Phils have never really taken on the Marlins head-on in any of these past few years of Philadelphia sports success -- but I guess that's just it: the Phillies' success is what does it. What will soon be five consecutive years of NL East domination -- the only other team in division history to win five straight other than the Braves dynasty of the 1990s -- must just be too much for the fans of every other team in the division to take.

A couple of weeks later, we are at our first night at the beaches of Delaware (Washington, DC beach country, mostly), and I went out to pick up dinner at the Hammer Family's favorite local restaurant, and I'm once again wearing my Phillies shirt that in fact was a recent gift from my brother in law who was there getting dinner with me. When I get there I realize they have not included the dressing that my sister in law had specifically requested with her salad as part of the order, so I ask them to include it, and the guy behind the counter mouths off to me that he normally doesn't give dressing to Phillies fans. Now, unlike the first two instances above, this Nationals fan did eventually give me what I had asked for, but not before getting in his own barb against my beloved Phillies team. After he took the time to ask me where was that right-handed bat in our lineup since the Jayson Werth trade, I could not resist pointing out that the Nationals management has been asking themselves that same question all season long, and we parted ways both with smiles on our faces.

Three examples of NL East rival fans mouthing off at me in the span of under a month, just for the team that I liked? To a Phillies fan? If you needed anything beyond Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee both accepting less money to play at Citizens Bank Park to show how far the Phillies franchise has come over the past half a decade or so, that is pretty much it.

Back and Stuff

Man, what a difference a quarter makes.

Just three months ago, I was in between several trips back and forth across the country, to some of the grossest places the USA has to offer in fact, and mired in without a doubt two of the very worst transactions my career as a lawyer has ever taken me. I was barely seeing my family, I was struggling to keep up with the backlog at work to boot, and I was as close to miserable as I ever get, and it seemed like it would never end.

Mercifully, with June came the closing of the two deals, and since then I've barely had to travel at all for work. In fact, here just three months later, I've been able to take Hammer Wife and and the kids away to three different beaches along the east coast, for what the Hammer Kids have been calling "Beach Camp" and having a blast. Seeing my older girls get out there with me and bodysurf in the ocean now that they now how to swim is just priceless, watching them get completely wiped out by that wave that nobody even saw coming, disappear briefly below the shallow surface of the water, but then pop right back up, dust themselves off, and hurl themselves back at mother nature for another go-around. It really makes a daddy proud. And to think back even as late as early Spring, I could literally never have even seen such fun times coming in the future. It's just crazy how life can be sometimes.

Anyways, so Beach Camp has definitely had a negative effect on my blog frequency, but the positive effect on life is immeasurable. And now I'm back. I had written a monster post about the baseball season, reviewing all of my preseason over-under picks and analyzing all the teams, and then hungry blogger ate it right up. Gluttonous pig. Rather than re-write that whole thing, I'm just going to post up my random thoughts from the past week or so below and get that all out of the way in short order.

I thought that the Mets might finally starting to understand the notion of buying low and selling high. Right now is clearly the time to offload Carlos Beltran, who is having a strong first half of the season just in time for his go-year to get himself a fatty new contract. Remember the last time Carlos Beltran busted out of nowhere to come onto the scene and get himself a huge mega contract? Remember that postseason blowout with the Astros that led him to the Mets in the first place? The Mets are doing a good job dumping Beltran now when his value is clearly at its highest. They didn't get a ton in exchange for him, but the Giants are only renting him for a couple of months here, and in my view they almost certainly won't resign Beltran at season's end when he becomes a free agent. So the Mets did ok with the Beltran situation, and so did the Giants IMO. It's the team who signs Beltran to the next big deal who's gonna get screwed here, cuz this guy has shown it over and over again: when the motivation (money) is gone, so is the performance.

But then the Mets turn around and make the same mistake all over again, this time with Jose Reyes. Here is Reyes, another guy in his go year to get a new contract, and suddenly he's busting out with far and away his best season of all time, and really his first-ever awesome MLB season. He's not missing 67 games due to a stubbed toe, he's running out all his hits and making a great all-around effort, and he would be at the top of the list for the National League MVP if his team wasn't as bad as it is. But if anybody, ever, was at their highest value right now, it's Jose Reyes. If the Mets knew what they were doing, they would dump this guy in exchange for a big young starting pitcher, and a prospect of some kind, right now. Signing Jose Reyes to a long-term deal will be a total disaster, as the Mets will be forced to pay Reyes his overinflated value right now, only to watch him miss another 70 games in 2012 and hobble through his 30's as the team buys him when he is high instead of selling when they have the chance. As a Phillies fan, I like seeing the vestiges of the old Mets remaining with the organization -- the Wilpons might be the literal worst owners in all of baseball these days -- but it's amazing how obvious the truth can be to some people while others just consistently misread the situation.

Speaking of my Phillies, not many fans want to come right out with this, and I know I've seen some better overall records at this point in the season before, but I'm going to do what most Philadelphia fans are afraid to do right now and just say it: this might be the best Philadelphia Phillies team of all time. There, I said It-That-Must-Not-Be-Said. We already saw in 2010 how the Phillies failed to step up in the NL Championship Series when expectations were at their highest in a generation...now how will the current squad deal with even higher expectations here in 2011?

Oh, and Charlie Manuel: How the fuck do you reintroduce that shitbag Brad Lidge to the mix with this team the other night, after finally being free of him all season long so far? For a guy who is perhaps one more World Series victory away from Cooperstown, the Phillies manager certainly has a consistent way of over-trusting his veterans to the detriment of his team.

And to finish out my baseball rants, how the fuck they allow that umpire to continue calling games after the debacle in the 19th inning in Atlanta the other day is beyond me. I mean, it's just like that assysniff ump with the perfect game from Armando Galarraga in Detroit last season -- there are fucking major league baseball umpires for crying out loud. In that spot -- especially in that fucking spot -- you have absolutely no fucking right to make that call unless you clearly see that a tag was missed, the runner clearly got a step in there ahead of time, etc. Which obviously did not happen, since both calls weren't even fucking close, and in the case of the Braves the other day, that runner still hasn't even touched home plate at all, let alone ahead of the tag. It's simple, really: that idiot Jerry Neals already decided long before the play at the plate in the 19th inning that he was sick and tired of working -- he had already put in more than two full games' worth of work and it was nigh on 2am -- and that the next schmuck who even came close to home plate, he was going to rule safe and call it a day. And an umpire who ever makes that kind of a predetermined decision -- under any circumstances whatsoever -- without a doubt, should be banned from calling baseball games for the rest of his life. They should ban his ass from major league baseball stadiums, period.

Oh, and about my preseason over-under picks. Suffice it to say that right now my biggest misses on the season are the Pirates on the downside, and the Reds and the Rockies on the upside in the NL, and the Indians and the Tigers on the downside in the AL. Overall I am looking at 14 up and 14 down among my preseason picks, with two of the picks a virtual tie at this point with about 104-105 games in the books for most teams on the 2011 regular season. So, as usual, it looks like it's going to come down to the last week of the season to find out if I can continue my streak of over-.500 preseason over-under picks in baseball and football.

And to at least begin the 2011 NFL ranting season, can I just be the first to say that the owners officially accomplished nothing by their silly fake "lockout" which was really nothing more after all than a standard negotiating tactic that the owners were not ultimately willing to allow extend into their 2011 regular season. When the Cardinals are paying unproven Kevin Kolb a five-year contract extension worth $63.5 million with $21 million guaranteed -- this for a guy with just a handful of mediocre NFL starts under his belt, and 11 lifetime tds vs 14 interceptions? $21 million guaranteed? And you locked out this year to get this? I mean, just look at the Carolina Panthers, coming off a 2-14 season last year and with a new head coach in town. First, it was defensive end Charles Johnson, whom the Panthers signed for $72 million over 6 years with $32 million of that money guaranteed. Then it was runningback DeAngelo Williams, who scored a 5-year, $43 million deal, with $21 million guaranteed. Sidney Rice signed with the Seahawks for a 5-year deal in the $40 million that includes almost $19 million in guaranteed money. Santana Moss. Santorio Holmes. Steve Breaston. The list just goes on and on and on. The NFL owners have the exact same problem today that they had before their fake lockout that they refused to follow through with in the end -- their player contracts are not guaranteed, so the players simply insist on extracting as much signing bonuses, up-front and guaranteed payouts in the contracts as is humanly possible. The players clearly have the upper hand in the real world in the NFL -- regardless of what the owners say about the outcome of collective bargaining negotiations -- and to think that this is the situation just literally days after agreeing to end their lockout of the players, this is about as weak as the NFL owners have ever looked against what has traditionally been the weakest of the four major sports' players unions in this country.

On the Road Again

In between more trips halfway across the country this week, I thought I would pop in with some general thoughts swirling around my brain while I have some internet downtime courtesy of free airport wireless from Boingo! So what's happened since last I checked in here?

The Tournament. Damn. What an incredible run this time around, quite possibly the best March Madness in history if you're a fan of upsets and of the Little Guy. Everyone said there were no great teams this year, but by the time the tournament actually came around, I think it was pretty clear that Ohio State and Kansas at least were a cut ahead of the rest, with Duke pretty much right on their heels behind them. And yet somehow, the whole "no great teams this year" ended up proving out, as we have an amazing 11-seeded VCU in the Final Four, joined by 8th seeded Butler to accompany #4 Kentucky and #3 UConn. It's the highest sum of the four Final Four seeds in NCAA tournament history, and Saturday afternoon's VCU-Butler matchup will be the highest sum of two teams matching up in the Final Four in tournament history as well. It's the first time we've had no #1 seeds into the Final Four in a decade, and the first time with no #1 or #2 seeds in tournament history. Suffice it to say, these are four teams as befitting of the "there are no great teams this year" mantra as any collection you could find.

This Butler story is simply amazing. There are just no other words to describe a guy out of that tiny school, that unknown basketball program, and that weakass heretofore disrespected conference and make it to the Final Four. Twice. Consecutively. What Brad Stevens has done this year cannot be put into words, but go read my post about him last year if you want to know what I already thought of this guy's coaching skills after last season's run. Stevens' career has been on the upswing for years, and this latest run of back to back Final Fours could be just the beginning for who has got to be thought of at this point as America's best college basketball coach.

And enough with the talk about the Big East. The Committee hopefully learned something this year about parity, as they allowed in 11 teams that beat the crap out of each other for three months in to the big dance from the Big East, surpassing the Big East's own record of 8 teams into the NCAA Tournament back in 2008. I'm all for allowing in all the teams that deserved it, but frankly I did not think Marquette did quite enough to get in, and I though the way Villanova ended the season -- including losing in the first round of the Big East tournament to lowly South Florida to cap a horrible second-half slide to their year -- also made them prime ground to be bumped out for a more worthy squad. I mean, the Big East deserved to break that record this year, but they probably should have had just 9, or at most 10 teams in. Crushing the all-time record like that, and allowing in 11 of 16 teams in a conference as a result, was I think kind of a mistake. But don't be one of those clowns who points to the Big East only getting two teams into the Sweet Sixteen. That's just bogus. Number one, nobody ever said that inviting a team into the Big Dance means they are going to win the tournament, or win four games, or win two games. It is and ever was only a way of rewarding a team for a good season, and in that sense the committee let in who they thought deserved to be let in. They let the Ivy League winner into the Big Dance every year...does that mean they think Princeton has a legitimate shot at taking the whole shebang down? Of course not. So just because a lot of the Big East teams didn't last long, that really is not actually related at all to whether they deserved their bids.

Frankly, I think most of the pretty much bad Big East teams lost early, and that is just the way it should be. I mean, I just said up there that I probably would not have let in Marquette or maybe even Nova, but those decisions are defensible to me, and the fact that Nova, Georgetown and Louisville all got crushed early did not surprise me much. I profited from my expecting that in my pools, in fact. Same thing with Pitt and Notre Dame, who paying close attention to the Big East this year led me to have fairly low expectations for come tournament time. The thing with the Big East this year is that, while quite probably the deepest conference in college basketball history, it really was not in my view the best conference in college basketball history. Not by a longshot, really. I don't even think this year's Big East crop was quite as good overall as a couple of years ago, when Villanova and Pittsburgh had that amazing late-tournament showdown. That year, the Big East had about eight teams ranked in the Top 25 all season long, which was sort of like this year although maybe not quite as deep. But that year, the conference also had arguably three of the top four teams in the country in Nova, Pitt and UConn. We were looking at a conference with legitimately five of the ten best teams in the land all concentrated in it, and three or four tournament-worthy teams to boot as well. That was a crazy strong conference in my view. This year's Big East was crazy, crazy deep -- the conference's 9th place team in UConn is very close to winning the national title right now -- but at the top, the small handful of very best teams in the country at no point included anyone from the Big East, all season long. The closest anyone in the conference has come to being one of the country's best is right now, with UConn, who with Kemba Walker is playing as scary as anyone in the sport, but it's the first time all year. The Big East may have had 8 or 9 ranked teams through most of the 2011 season, but very rarely did we have anyone ranked in the top three or four, and not at all more than one at any point. And with soft Pitt and Notre Dame teams at the top of the conference by the time the seedings for the Big Dance were handed out, I did not pick either of those teams to make a deep run. The deepest I had any Big East team going this year was UConn, based on the way they played and the way Kemba Walker stepped up in the Big East tournament, although I did not pick any Big East teams to make this year's Final Four. Which makes perfect sense to me, and certainly does not mean that these teams did not deserve to be in the Big Dance to begin with, but I never thought the conference had a top-5 team in it all year, albeit having several teams in the 5-25 range on the national rankings.

Getting away from the tournament for a minute, the Phillies are heading into the 2011 season with a major whimper, as second baseman Chase Utley sounds to me like he is going to be sidelined for a good couple of month at least with a still-ailing kneee, Brad Lidge is looking like he will start the season on the DL as well, and even star pitcher Roy Halladay took a beaning line drive off the bat of Manny Ramirez right in the back of the head the other day. To this Phillies fan, it feels like the year has slipped away before it even started, and with the problems this team had scoring runs in 2010 as it is, plus the loss of 100-rbi man Jayson Werth's bat from the starting lineup, and Utley likely not 100% if in there at all for a good half the season, things are not looking good for this team to make it back to the World Series anytime soon, even despite their vaunted pitching staff. You heard it here first -- this Phillies squad isn't going to score enough runs to be as great as everyone thinks they're going to be.

Oh and let's not forget Survivor Poker, which is winding to a close here as we have just three players left: smboatdrinks and veryjosie from the original Team Fish, and muchtim from the original Team Donkeys. Since I last checked in about the goings-on at Donkey Island, the Fish fulfilled their plan of banding together as soon as they had snatched the majority back from the Donkeys shortly after the merge, and summarily eliminated the remaining Donkeys player by player by player, until certain members of Team Fish pissed off their own ringleader with backstabbery and deceipt such that their own elimination became more important than finishing off the Donkeys. Thus, muchtim has managed to squeak his way in as the remaining Fish alliance of josie and boat have eliminated their own would-be mutineers in turtle and xkm over the past couple of games. Now on Wednesday, we all have a chance to really impact the outcome of Survivor Poker, because whoever wins immunity out of josie, boat and muchtim gets an automatic pass into the final two, and they get to pick which of the other two remaining players to bring along with them. I think it's a safe bet to assume at this point that the two surviving fish would vote for each other if either of them wins immunity on the day, but the really interesting thing would be if muchtim manages to pull off that feat. Who will muchtim choose to bring along with him to the final heads-up showdown? The person he has been secretly allied with for weeks? Or the person he has been secretly working against all the while? Or are those one and the same person? Wednesday should be good times at the Dank at 10pm ET on full tilt, and I definitely expect to be there along with a nice crowd of bloggers. Take a big chunk of the stack of any of muchtim, smboatdrinks or veryjosie on Wednesday night, and you will be personally influencing the overall outcome of the series in a meaningful way, so hopefully I will see you there for the festivities.

Assuming I am back home in New York by Wednesday night, that is.

How Can Yankees Fans Live With Themselves?

Well, I'm still here basking in the glory that is Cliff Lee returning to the Phillies, now more than 24 hours after the news shocked the baseball world and sent Phillies Phans around the globe into an absolute tizzy. I've read just about every story on every major media outlet, every blog post from a Philly blogger, everything I could devour since Tuesday's big announcement, and it looks like I'll be taking at least one more day before focusing on what is still missing from this Phillies team before we can pencil in another World Series championship for the Fightin Phils.

Today, my focus is on exactly how all this happened. I mean, ultimately, Cliff Lee had an awesome time in Philadelphia in 2009, he loved the team, the players, the coaches, the stadium, and he loved the area in general, including the home he bought in New Jersey when he was traded to the Phils a couple of years ago, which he never sold even after leaving the team for Seattle, Washington, and then Arlington Texas in the middle of the 2010 season.

But, having lived in New York City all through the past baseball season, I can't help but think that the Yankees fans themselves literally played a big part in why Cliff Lee walked away from 34 million more guaranteed dollars offered by the Yanks to sign a shorter-term deal to return to the city of brotherly shove. For those of you who don't live in the area and/or don't follow post-season baseball like I do:

According to a report in the USA Today on October 26, 2010, while the American League Championship Series was being played in Yankee Stadium, the wife of Texas Rangers ace Cliff Lee was reportedly not happy with how the Yankees fans treated her while she was sitting in the visiting family section at the Yankees' new stadium in the Bronx.

Kristen Lee said there were ugly taunts. Obscenities. Cups of beer thrown. Even fans spitting from the section above.

“The fans did not do good things in my heart,” Kristen says.

“When people are staring at you, and saying horrible things, it’s hard not to take it personal.”

Well there you have it. The comment about the fans "not doing good things in my heart" really sticks out to me for some reason. Does that sound like a woman who would want her husband to turn down $24 million a year to play in the city they both loved, in favor of committing to two more years at around $23 million a year in the city whose fans "did bad things in her heart"?

Is it truly possible that Yankees fans are such fucking pigs that they literally chased away the only chance they had of Cliff Lee coming to play for them?

What must Yankees fans be thinking about themselves right about now?

Coming Home

Brian Cashman: You're fired!

Cliff Lee is coming back to the Phillies. Seriously!! I know it's not really "home" at all, but it sure feels that way for the Philly fans, who never for one second wanted to see Lee leave after the 2009 season. And apparently, Cliff Lee never really wanted to leave either, or maybe he just didn't realize it yet. The word is that Lee is signing a 5-year, $120 million contract with the Phils, who have surprised everyone by besting the Yankees and the Rangers who were believed to be the only players in a two-team race for Lee's services. There is so much to be said about this and I'm sure I'll have plenty more -- over the next half a decade in fact now -- but my initial thought is more or less like all the other long-suffering Phillies fans out there:

Euphoria.

I mean, the most amazing part of all this isn't even about Cliff Lee specifically, to me anyways. I've written a little about this before, but the most incredible aspect to all of this is that over the past five or six years, Philadelphia has actually become a place where free agents in baseball actually want to go play. All growing up in Philly, the total opposite was true. I'm not sure I can remember a single big signing that any of the major sports franchises in Philadelphia made. Well, I guess there was Moses Malone in the early '80s. But really, that's about it. It was always New York, or LA, or Chicago, or somewhere else. If anything, Philly was known for making young players into big stars and then being the place where they left from to go chase the big money that the Philly teams either couldn't or wouldn't pay them, typically in one of those cities mentioned above. It was horribly frustrating as a kid, believe me, watching these guys turn into your heroes, the guys you wanted to be like, and then eventually always knowing they were going to leave for the big money grab. Having to watch them usually just travel 90 miles up Route 95 to the Big Apple made it even worse, but in general, you always knew around the corner that these guys were on their way out, and it was simply never a question of the team coughing up the big bucks to keep them, or to sign some other big name player to take their place. Philadelphia simply never used to be that place that anybody ever went "to take their talents", to use LeBron's phraseology. It just never happened, and the Phillies were perhaps the biggest example of all of this phenomenon. What big-name pitcher or hitter ever signed with the Phillies in the '80s or '90s? Why would you? They didn't pony up the big cash, and even though the city has easily the greatest, purest sports fans on the earth bar none, the team was also the losingest franchise in all of sports, and the Phils had more last-place finishes during my childhood than any other team. They were the Pirates before the Pirates were the Pirates, believe me. Nobody great ever wanted to play baseball here, and with good reason.

But all that has changed now, a combination of new ownership, brilliant general managers, an incredible farm system, the best new ballpark in all of baseball, and a whole lot of success that big names actually want to be a part of. Just think about the last few years. When Brad Lidge was on the market after being run out of Houston following the infamous Albert Pujols post-season home run, out of nowhere the Phillies were there to scoop him up, and a year later the guy was putting the cap on a perfect season by striking out the Rays' Scott Eyre to bring the city its first World Series in 28 years. That year as well, the Phils went out and signed then 28-year-old Jayson Werth, who contributed greatly both at bat and in the field to the past few years' success in the city. When Cliff Lee was being shopped by the hapless Indians the following summer, you had your usual rumors out of New York and Boston offering ridiculous money, but then out of nowhere comes the Phillies to pick the guy up, and boom, fast forward three months and there is Cliff Lee completely befuddling the perennial all-star Yankees lineup twice in front of the world in the World Series, the first back-to-back pennants in the Phillies' gillion-year history as a franchise.

After that season, new Phillies GM Ruben Amaro approached Lee about resigning him, and got the word from Lee's agent that Lee was definitely looking for a long-term megadeal a la CC Sabathia's $168 million beast of a deal with the Yanks that past offseason. Amaro let the Lee camp know he was looking more for a 4- or 5-year deal, and when the Lee camp balked, Amaro sadly traded away Lee to the Seattle Mariners for prospects, taking those savings instead and signing AL pitching powerhouse Roy Halladay, who happily came to the team after making it very well known for weeks that Philly was where he really wanted to play more than anywhere else. Yes, more than the Yankees, more than the Red Sox, both of whom were, again, offering up more guaranteed money in terms of more years on the deal. But, amazingly to Phillies fans, Halladay wanted to come to Philadelphia, and was willing to accept a 5-year extension at a hefty $20 million a year, an amount that fit into the Phillies' burgeoning budget after having sold out every game for four year straight in their new stadium. I mean, can you imagine? A huge star like Roy Halladay, and he actually wanted to play in Philly, even to the point of accepting less guaranteed dough than he could have gotten elsewhere? Have you ever??? It was just unheard of to us old-school Philadelphians, believe me. Add in a trade for outfielder Raul Ibanez as a new power bat in the Phils' scary lineup, and Phillies fans around the world were just in awe.

Enter the 2010 season, with Halladay on his way to another brilliant season that would lead eventually to the second perfect game in major league postseason history. And as the trading deadline approached, it looked like the Phils' rotation was still one man short of total dominance. So as last year's trading deadline approached, when longtime Astros pitcher Roy Oswalt was announced by the team to be on the market, once again it was the Yankees and the Red Sox at the forefront of the rumors, with some Angels and Cubs sprinkled in for good measure as per usual, but then wake up one morning and the word is that it was once again Ruben Amaro and the Phillies who had made the huge coup, nabbing Oswalt from under the Yanks' and Sox's noses, and somehow getting the Astros to agree to pay close to half of Oswalt's salary on the remaining two years of his contract. Again, Oswalt was publicly thrilled to be coming to a team like the Phillies (can you imagine??), and his performance here last year showed it, as he was perhaps the best pitcher on the team in the second half of the season, nearly unhittable in most of his starts and winning over the city's fans quickly and completely.

When the Cliff Lee saga really heated up at the end of 2010 with his Texas Rangers making the World Series and losing out to the incredible pitching staff assembled by the San Francisco Giants, who had bested the Phillies and our amazing pitching staff fair and square for the NL pennant, everyone knew this would be all about the Yankees. Yes, the Angels were rumored, the Red Sox had made an early offer in the process, and of course the incumbent Rangers were doing all that they could without deliberately mimicking their mistake from the A-Rod contract that that team had finally just gotten completely out from under. But the Phils weren't really even mentioned, and, I mean, how could they? With a payroll last season of just over $140 million, would the team really ever be willing to kick in that much more money for this guy? Of course not, and could you blame them, after all the huge signings of the past few seasons for this team that was historically a place nobody ever wanted to come, and a place that never wanted to pay anyone who was willing to play here? No way. So you didn't hear a single Phillies fan in the world bitching about us not taking part in the Lee sweepstakes, and ultimately, with what has happened so far in this offseason, with the Red Sox signing two big hitters and the Yankees being basically shut out of the big free agent market (no, Derek Jeter does not count) for what seems like the first time in ages, it was obvious that Lee would simply be able to name his price, to pick any number out of a hat, and the Yanks would have to agree to it, and agree to it they would. Word was that the Rangers had offered Lee a six-year deal somewhere around $120 million, and that the Yankees had recently upped their offer to add a seventh year, coming in at a total of approximately $154 million. No other offer was even close to that amount of guaranteed cash, the Rangers were not willing to go there, and on Monday afternoon word out of Yankees' GM Brian Cashman was that the Yankees were officially not going to up their offer any further, not something you usually hear from this Yankees management over the past several years. It was a bit of a bold move by Yanks' GM Brian Cashman, taking a tough stance on a guy that the team absolutely, positively had to have, at any and all costs, period.

And suddenly, this morning. I woke up and immediately in the car heard the news on one of the local sports radio stations. Baseball fans around the country were dismayed, and New Yorkers were appalled -- both Yankees and Mets fans, believe me. Cliff Lee was coming back to the Philadelphia Phillies! And the most amazing part of it? He had signed for just five years, one less than the Rangers' offer and two years less than the rumored offer from the Yankees. The guy actually left $34 million of guaranteed money on the table in New York to come instead back to Philadelphia, to pitch in the best stadium in the country and in front of the best fans in the world. Brian Cashman's last-minute hard-line ploy had failed, and failed in a big, huge way, and Lee had turned him down in favor of less money from a big rival in a nearby city who had had some big success against his team already over the past couple of seasons.

And make no mistake guys -- the reception this guy will get in Philadelphia, the good will he will experience here, will be totally unparalleled by anything Lee could have ever even have hoped to experience in New York. Believe me, I have lived in this city for a long time now, I've had Yankees season tickets, I've been to the Mets' dump stadium several times, and I can tell you without hesitation, New York fans are spoiled, and they're not even close to real sports fans in other cities that have to try a whole lot harder and wait a whole lot longer for success. In particular in the Bronx, these fans of course like to win, but a guy like Lee would never be loved even for one second -- not even if he were to pitch the final out of a no-hitter in Game 7 of the World Series -- like he will be adored for every moment he will be in Philadelphia. Especially after Lee's performance back in 2009, to be returning to the city of brotherly shove will make these Phillies fans absolutely apoplectic for the guy, period. We love him in Philly, every one of us Phillies fans love the guy and could not believe we had to let him go. And Phils' GM Ruben Amaro has come through again in a huge way, using the Nationals' recent signing away of Jayson Werth, freeing up $14 million a year from our payroll just like that, to help afford the new $24 mil a year for five years for Cliff Lee, while at the same time getting basically exactly the deal he would have offered Lee back in 2009 to stay here to begin with, but which back then Lee had rejected in the hopes of signing an even larger deal. One which, if he had wanted to, he still could have signed with Brian Cashman and the Yankees, like, yesterday. Literally.

The bottom line? Cliff Lee wants to play in Philadelphia, far more than he wants to be in New York. 34 million times more to be exact. With Lee, the Yankees would probably have as good a chance as anyone of bringing Lee the first World Series title of his career, and even re-signing with the Texas Rangers seems a similar outcome -- how do you argue that after his Rangers just made the World Series with him this past season? And yet Lee opted to take millions and millions of dollars less in guaranteed money -- albeit a mil or two more per season than his other offers, as is obviously going to be the case in a shorter deal -- to return "home" to Philadelphia, to the greatest ballpark in the game today, and to without a doubt the most ferociously devoted, caring fans anywhere on earth. The Phillies ownership knows it. All of us fans know it. And, apparently, Cliff Lee knows it too. How Brian Cashman justifies his total strikeout in this offseason is way beyond me, but he is definitely gonna have a lot of 'splainin to do to somebody in that organization, and suffice it to say these are not happy times in the Cashman household in Darien, Connecticut.

Roy Halladay. Cliff Lee. Roy Oswalt. Cole Hamels. It just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

Move over Yankees, and move over Red Sox. There's a new team at the free agent party in major league baseball these days. And they're coming for you in a big way in 2011.

Bring on the Rants

So the World Series is over. I will admit to feeling a slight twinge as I watched the San Francisco Giants climb all over each other, a feeling that someone else was celebrating something that wasn't theirs, that belonged to my team. But in the end, that's a good thing. I'm from Philadelphia, and to be honest, as sports fans we are incredibly demanding on the micro level, often known for booing our hometown heroes when they fail to come through in a big spot in a given game, but on a macro level, we Philadelphians just have low expectations when it comes to championships. It's not like it's in the water or anything, but it's just a reflection of the historical reality: we haven't won much. When you go 25 years and 100 seasons between the four major U.S. sports between 1983 and 2008 without a single championship for the city to celebrate, when your baseball franchise remains the first and only franchise in all of professional sports to lose 10,000 games, when your basketball team has basically been hanging out in the pooper since the mid 1980s save for a few good years a decade ago under Allen Iverson, you just start to accept it. So yeah, I know the Phillies had the talent to win another World Series this year, and believe me as a long-suffering Philly sports guy I very tangibly feel our failure to nab that elusive World Series title this year while we had the chance and when we had come so close, but I mean, come on. I'm not a New York sports fan. These aren't the Yankees here. My Phillies have just won their fourth consecutive NL East for the first time in franchise history, we went to back-to-back World Series before bowing out to the eventual WS champion in the NLCS this season, and we've got an incredible pitching staff and most of our powerful lineup locked up for at least another year heading into 2012, plus one of the best, most devoted young GMs in the game today.

Try as I might, I just can't get crazy about the Phillies not winning the World Series again in 2010. I felt a twinge all right watching the celebration last night, but that's all it was. This Giants team clearly deserved to win the championship this year. As I wrote all about before the NLCS began, this Giants' staff posted the best team ERA in more than 60 years over the final 8 weeks of the 2010 season, and in the end it was their pitching that dominated, all through the playoffs really. Sure, it's easy for us Philly fans to get mad at Ryan Howard and his 12 strikeouts in the NLCS, or Chase Utley's and Shane Victorino's inability to get a big hit after coming through in the clutch so many times in postseasons past, but the rest of the sports-watching country sees the real reality: these Giants pitchers are fucking good. They made the Philly hitters look bad -- it's what they do. Matt Cain didn't give up a run in the entire postseason for the Giants. 21-year-old Madison Bumgarner pitched 7 shutout innings in a huge spot in the World Series. The Texas Rangers, who led all of MLB with a .276 batting average during the regular season, hit just .190 in the Series overall, with Giants ace Tim Lincecum beating superstar Cliff Lee not one but twice in the span of a week to clinch the championship in 5 games. This Giants team was the best team in the league when it came right down to it this year, and Bruce Bochy and those players deserve a hell of a lot of credit for coming together and peaking at the absolute best possible time, and playing their game despite consistently being picked to lose in the postseason along the way. Congratulations to the fans of the San Francisco Giants, who are celebrating like crazy today after the franchise's first championship in 57 years, and first ever while in the Bay Area.

But there is a lot of other crazy sports news going on out there today, isn't there?

For starters, this Randy Moss stuff is just craziness. Four games after the Minnesota Vikings actually trade away a third-round pick to the Cheatriots to acquire troubled wide receiver Randy Moss, Brad Childress up and cuts the guy after a bad loss to the Cheatriots in which Moss had just one catch for seven yards. Four games? For a third-round draft pick? I'm sorry, but is Brad Childress literally trying to force his owner to fire him? I mean, Chilly was already probably gone after this season -- after all, he is a stone cold jackass and has no control over this team -- but this move simply boggles the mind. Was Moss that much of a cancer in the locker room? Probably. Where hasn't he been? But how you simply cut a guy to waivers after four games when you gave up a 3rd round pick to get him, and when you will likely be on the hook for most of his $6 million salary now as well? That is some fucked up stuff right there. And meanwhile, Moss is quoted as saying he would like to go back to play for the Cheatriots again. Yeah right. For starters, the Cheatriots currently sit with 1 loss and the best record in all of the NFL, which means they are 32nd out of 32 teams on the waiver wire, and IMO Moss is not likely to slip through every other team in the league without being claimed by somebody desperate for some help on offensive in the ultimate win-now league. But even assuming Moss did manage to slip by without any other team in the league claiming him, I say no way he ends up back in a Cheats uniform. You're telling me that Bill Bellichik is going to take back the guy who nearly came to blows with the Cheatriots' offensive coordinator less than a month and a half ago about lack of focus on him on the offense? With his team sitting with the best record in all the league, he's going to welcome back a locker room cancer who's already caused trouble on this very team in this very season and who basically forced a trade after malcontenting his way through the preseason and five regular season games already in 2010? Fat chance, my man Randy. I don't think we'll be seeing you in a New England uni anytime soon, bro. Some bridges you just can't un-burn.

Another great NFL story from this past weekend, in particular for me personally -- is this whole saga with Donovan McNabb and Mike Shanahan in Washington. When the Skins took the ball with under two minutes to go in their game at Detroit on Sunday afternoon, Shanahan shocked the team by benching McNabb in favor of backup Rex Grossman to run the two-minute drill. Immediately following the game, Shanahan candidly told sideline reporters that he benched McNabb due to concerns over McNabb's "competence" with the two-minute offense, but then a day later after persistent questioning, Shanahan has now changed his story to the benching instead being about McNabb's conditioning more than his mental capacity to run the two-minute drill. For my money, it really doesn't matter a whole lot which one of Shanahan's totally different explanations is right, because either way we already know the true reason -- Shanahan doesn't think McNabb is good enough to be in there in that spot. That's it. With the game clearly on the line and his team down by less than 7 with 1:50 to go and needing a touchdown, the Redskins' head coach decided to bench McNabb in favor of a longtime shitty backup who hadn't really taken crucial game snaps in some two years. Whether McNabb's perceived failings were mental or physical doesn't really matter in the end. As I've been pointing out repeatedly during this season after the Eagles traded him away to the Skins -- within the division no less -- the Eagles obviously saw something (or many things) they didn't like in McNabb as the season wore down to a close, and it looks like they were right. And if Shanahan isn't careful (he usually isn't), he will soon get to experience firsthand what a pussywhining McNabb is like as well, another annual occurrence that the fans and the team management just got used to over time in Philadelphia, but which will likely be very poorly received in a new city, especially given McNabb's pace for his worst full season ever as a pro in 2010, including throwing more picks than interceptions and really failing to fully take the reins of the offense yet even through seven games of the regular season. I was always a big McNabb fan in Philly as I've written about here many times, but I won't lie -- I smiled a lil bit when I saw this story, and with every passing day as McNabb comes closer and closer to publicly griping about it, I am enjoying watching the Skins squirm more than little bit.

Oh, and here's another thing in the world of sports that I find utterly ridiculous right now: the BCS. I'm not going on a general rant here about how stupid the whole system is, the impossible to follow formulas, the computer ranking, or the lack of a playoff system or a true national champion which clearly keeps the sport from growing by probably several multiples with every passing year. No, I'm just talking right now about the unbelievable bias in this thing towards the big-conference teams. I mean, this shit is as close to a set-up for the big conference schools as it could ever be. This whole BCS thing, with each of the big conferences exerting some elements of shared control and manipulation, is one of the biggest scams I have ever seen accepted by the American sports-watching public. How many fucking teams have to lose before Boise State is given a chance to play for a national title? Just one chance is all I'm asking for here guys. If they play for a title, and some big-conference team with one loss during the regular season blows them out by 40 points, then I'll shut up. I'll stop complaining about it right away because then I'll know, then we'll all know. But instead, this team has been top-5 all season long. They were top 5 last year, and when given a chance during the regular season last year, they took down a top 10 team. They took down top-5 TCU in their bowl game last year. They started this year in the top 5 again, and they haven't even let anyone get close to them so far this season, including a solid beating of then-top 10 Virginia Tech this year as well. Boise State has played three top 10 teams in the last two seasons and beaten them all, so in the few chances they've been given at a fair shot at the top teams, they've risen to the challenge every single time. It's not their fault if none of the other big conference schools won't schedule a fair home-and-home series to play Boise State during the regular season -- these schools are scared to death of Boise State! They would rather play almost anyone than Boise, so Boise just takes their two shots a year at the big boys and dominates them all, and otherwise totally flattens everyone else in their path. Now this season was supposed to be all about Notre Dame, but they quickly proved that they suck by losing early. Perennial powerhouse Florida dropped a game in the earlygoing as well to lose their shot at a title. USC quickly lost as well to take their NCAA-embargoed self out of the realm of the unbeatens. Overlooking Boise State completely after three early favorites lost games, the BCS controlled solely by the big conferences lifted Ohio State to then the overwhelming favorite early on, until they too lost a shocker a few weeks back. Then it was Alabama leap-frogging Boise State, with all the talking heads on ESPN proclaiming that Nick Saban's team would never lose a game this year and roll on to another national title. Until they lost a couple of weeks ago to South Carolina. After Michigan State and Missouri both lost their undefeated records this past weekend, I figured the case for Boise State could no longer be ignored by the BCS, but then boom! Now it's Auburn -- another big conference school who had hardly been talked about at all until just a couple of weeks ago -- who is the new greatest team in the league this year. And when they lose the SEC championship game to Alabama in a few weeks, then you know what's gonna happen with the BCS, right? Then Alabama with one loss will be back to being ahead of Boise State again. With Ohio State right behind, how much you wanna bet.

Boise State is The Best Team in NCAA Football in 2010. Period. The big schools refuse to ever play them during the regular season except in unfair, highly favorable circumstances to the big school teams. The big conference-controlled BCS then promotes every single undefeated team over Boise State week after week, even switching it up over and over with every passing week as every single team without exception that the big schools have tried to inflate this year have done. This past weekend has now brought it all to a head as the BCS is now forced to start talking about promoting one-loss teams over Boise, who has beaten three top-10 squads in the last two seasons while dominating everyone. It's simple. Boise State is the best team in the league. Yes, they would beat Alabama if they played them right now on a neutral site, and yes they would beat Ohio State as well. Open your eyes and stop believing what the totally and laughably biased BCS is telling you and trying to change on you week after week after week after week. Congratulations to your Boise State Broncos, the real national champions of the 2010 NCAA football season.

End of the Road

So, the baseball season has come to an end for my beloved Philadelphia Phillies. What can I say really....The 2010 NLCS was a case study in the old adage that great pitching prevails over great hitting in the playoffs. Without really dominating in any of the games, the Giants quietly went out and took two of three in Philadelphia, and two of three in San Francisco to return to their first world series since Barry Bonds led them there back in 2002. The pitching was pretty much stellar, with only Jonathan Sanchez getting slammed up hard by the team, and Bruce Bochy's coaching is highly underrated in my view as he managed to find a way to take a team that does not run the bases well, does not steal bases at all, and really has very little offense to speak of, and eke out three out of four wins in one-run games against the team that led the entire major leagues this year in record in one-run games. In a lot of ways, the Giants did to the Phillies this year what the Phillies have done to the Dodgers in the past two NLCS's. Where in the recent past it was Jimmy Rollins leading the time to the amazing 9th-inning walkoff rally, this year in the key Game 4 it was the Giants finding a way to hammer out a run off of Phillies' starting pitcher Roy Oswalt in a rare bullpen appearance.

While the above made the NLCS painful for me to watch in a lot of ways, nonetheless I will confess that I am left with the feeling that the Phillies are still the class of the National League. The Giants' lineup is a joke for a World Series team, and it is quite obvious that they live and die by their pitching staff alone. I mean, if not for Cody Ross -- he of the three regular season home runs and 18 rbis all year -- going absolutely bananas out of nowhere in this series, the Giants would not have scored more than 8 or 9 runs in the 6 game series, and they would not have had a chance even with the Phillies' bats slumping as they did in the series. Ryan Howard struck out 12 times in the NLCS, and had a mind-boggling zero home runs and zero RBIs in the entire series after recording 17 rbis in the 2009 NLCS. Chase Utley, another of the most clutch bats in the postseason over the past four years, was pretty much worthless at the plate in this series. Several times in the series, Carlos Ruiz and Shane Victorino came to the plate with runners in scoring position or even with the bases loaded, and they failed to come through in the clutch as they have so many times in the recent past. Now to be sure, a lot of this is directly related to the incredible, historic strength of the Giants' starting rotation as I wrote about before this series began. But the Phillies deserve a whole lot of the credit for sucking up the joint in this series, be it at bat, or in the field where they made several uncharacteristic errors from guys like Rollins, Howard, Utley and Victorino -- all basically gold glove-worthy fielders in their own right -- including single-handedly committing three errors in the field in the third inning of the decisive Game 6 to let in both of the runs given up by Roy Oswalt on the day The official records say Oswalt's strong performance was one ER in six innings, but it was clearly zero if you know your ass from first base about scoring a baseball hit.

Anyways, try as I might -- and I freely recognize that this may just be the Philly boy in me shining through -- I just can't shake the feeling that while we might very well be looking at the best pitching staff in the last few generations, we're just not looking at the best team in the NL here in the upcoming World Series. Unlike the ALCS, where I would say it was painfully obvious that the Rangers are in fact the superior team over the overmatched Yankees. I mean, for all the talk of how Cliff Lee has the Yankees' number, and how much of an advantage that gives Texas in a four-game series, the guy pitched exactly one time in the ALCS. Yes, he won his start and utterly shut down the Yanks in Game 3, but the guy barely had a hand in any of the actual games. And those games for the most part were not close. The Rangers thrashed the Yankees in this series. As I heard a caller say on sports radio sometime today, this was a 6-game series that felt an awful lot like a sweep. The Rangers are superior, they were far superior at both hitting and pitching than the Yankees, they made the Yanks look old, and ultimately the Bronx Bombers never had a chance in this series, an outcome which in the end just didn't surprise me much at all.

One thing I will say about the 2010 World Series -- this is yet another victory for the little guy, for the small market team that is not the Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies or Mets. Despite all the talk heading into the LCS series, in the end it was not the top-5 payroll Phils or the sick-spending Yankees prevailing to face off in the sport's biggest stage. Instead, we're looking at Texas and San Francisco, not exactly small market teams, but not close to the big spenders on the top end of the spectrum in the major leagues. The Giants' opening day 2010 payroll stood at $97.8 million, good for 10th out of 30 teams in the majors, while the Rangers' team payroll was a paltry $55.2 mil, placing them in 27th out of 30 teams in terms of money spent on their players. So while the Yankees and the Phillies continue to show that money can generally buy some modicum of success over a 162-game regular season, once again baseball has two relatively new and rare participants in the Fall Classic, including the first-ever franchise appearance for a Rangers team that looks to be on a major roll heading into the final series of the season.

Before I go, I would be remiss if I did not mention that fuckass referee in the Packers - Vikings game on Sunday night in NBC, as that dickwad stood right there on national, prime time weekend television and just plain decided to give Brett Favre another come from behind victory by calling Percy Harvin in-bounds on the field with just 48 seconds left in what was at the time a 4-point Packer lead. I mean, this muthafucker is paid to be an NFL referee -- getting these calls right is his whole job -- and this jackfuck stood right there, not two feet away from where the catch occurred, in perfect position, looking right at the play right down on the ground, and called Harvin in bounds. This despite Harvin not being touched or pushed on his way up, and even though Harvin actually got not two, not one, but zero feet in-bounds. Go watch the play if you care to, but I mean this guy's first foot landed mostly in-bounds but on review his heel was clearly touching the out-of-bounds line at the back of the end zone. Then the second foot landed, with the entire foot well onto the white line, so much so that you could even see the white outline in front of the foot because literally the entire foot was that far out of bounds. And then the body landed, also hopelessly on the white well past the back of the end zone. And yet that fucksniffing referee still just up and decided to make the call on the field a touchdown, making it that much harder for replay to overturn the call and keep Favre from another stunning comeback victory at Lambeau Field. As I've written about several times here on the blog, this trend of sports officials interjecting themselves into the game and making sure that they actually affect the outcome instead of just shutting up, sitting back and calling the game correctly. The bottom line is, that referee in Green Bay cannot possibly miss that call from as close as he was and in the perfect position he was in, unless he is predisposed towards taking over the game. That's just the way it is. That referee is an asshole and he should be removed from the game immediately.

OK, /end rant.

Cowboys over the Giants tonight. Tom Coughlin always has a way of surprising you on the downside after a couple of big wins. Bank it.

Not Dead Yet

Kudos out to Roy Halladay who gutted his way through a first-inning groin injury -- that he told no one but his manager about and then insisted on going back out to the mound for six tough innings of 2-run baseball -- to nab his first win of the NLCS and an absolutely crucial victory for the Phillies on the brink of elimination in Game 5. To the rabid Phillies fans watching the game, it was very obvious just from the look on Halladay's face while he was out there and even in the dugout in between innings early in the game -- where Halladay was barely able to sit down without significant pain -- that something was wrong, and in a way it was a relief to hear about the groin injury in manager Charlie Manuel's end of game presser, indicating that this is not the new status quo for the Phillies' ace but rather just (hopefully) a temporary physical ailment. But for him to go out there and give the team six quality innings and to pitch through the pain like he did, this is the stuff that Philadelphia is made of, and the fans will not forget.

As big as Halladay was in the Phillies nabbing the win and sending the series back home to Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, the real story in Game 5 wasn't Halladay, nor Giants ace Tim Lincecum who took the tough loss after another solid pitching performance himself, but rather the Phillies' bullpen, easily thought to be the one glaring weakness on this team. After a scoreless 7th inning from Jose Contreras and J.C. Romero, Ryan Madson came in needing to hold on to a slim 1-run lead while facing the Giants' tough 4-5-6 hitters of Buster Posey, Pat Burrell and Cody Ross in the 8th inning -- the three guys responsible for mostly all of San Francisco's offense in this entire LCS series -- and Madson responded to the pressure by promptly setting down the side in order, throwing fastball after fastball by the heart of the Giants' lineup as he mowed down the most menacing players on the opposition like they were children with pitches that registered around 90-92 on the radar gun but looked more like 150 or 200 to this experienced eye. Honestly I do not recall the last time Ryan Madson (or any Phillies reliever, for that matter) came into a game late and struck out the side like this, but it provided a huge lift to the team and to their fans who I can personally tell you were not ready to pack it in for the season just yet. By the time Jayson Werth added his NL record 11th postseason home run with the Phillies in the top of the 9th inning, the team's spirits were high, and my nemesis Brad Lidge was perfect to close it out in the 9th.

So, the anatomy of each of the 12 historic comebacks from 3-1 down in 7-game series in MLB history begins exactly the same way -- with a win by the down team in Game 5 -- and that's what we're looking at here in the NLCS. And unlike the Yankees, who (1) have to win the last two games of their ALCS series on the road at Texas, and (2) who still have to face their opponent's #1 starter and known Yankee killer in Game 7, the Phillies have a somewhat easier rode ahead of them. No more road games, no more silly west coast time zone, and most of all, no more Tim Lincecum in any meaningful way in this series. Right now it's just about winning Game 6, which will feature Phillies pitcher Roy Oswalt's shot at redemption after taking the loss in giving up a 9th inning run in Game 4, going against Sanchez who the Phillies already touched up but good in Game 2 of this series, the only game where the Phils' lineup was really able to come together and do their thing. Here's hoping we get not just one but two Game 7s this weekend in what could shape up to be an incredible weekend on both the baseball and the football fronts.

team to rally from a 3-1 deficit in a best-of-seven series. The Red Sox were the last to do it, in the 2007 ALCS against Cleveland.

Barely a Pulse

The Yankees left AJ Burnett in just one pitch too long, that pitch a big three-run home run off the bat of Bengie Molina in the 7th inning that gave the Rangers back the lead over the Yankees on Tuesday night. Which, unsurprising given the way this series has played out so far, quickly turned in the later innings into yet another bitter, ugly blowout for the Texas Rangers who now hold a commanding 3 games to 1 lead in the 2010 ALCS. Knowing they have ripped the cover off the ball on offense in this series, knowing they have caused the Yankees and their vaunted starting rotation and bullpen to pitch to an ERA in the series of around 8 runs per game, and most of all knowing that they need just one more win and that they have a mister Clifford Lee pitching one more game, this one only if needed in Game 7 in Texas, the Rangers are suddenly looking awfully good to win this series. I 100% support the decision to pitch Burnett last night if I am the Yankees, but in the end this loss with Cliff Lee looming on the horizon seems as close to the death knell as you're gonna get without seeing Jete and A-Rod grabbing their bats with their heads hung low and heading into the dressing room after one more Rangers win here. The bottom line is this: the Yankees have not lost this series so much as the Rangers have won it. Texas has outplayed the Yankees in every facet of every single game so far, far outhitting the Yankees while at the same time clearly outpitching the Bombers as well, among both the starters and the bullpens. Give a ton of credit to manager Ron Washington, who I told you all just before this series started was saying all the right things as far as how to beat a team with the payroll and the individual accumulated skill of the players on the Yankees this year. He has his team not just thinking but knowing they are superior on both sides of the field than their big-money New York counterparts, and it shows. I haven't believed the Rangers were going to lose any of the games so far in this series, and with the exception of the 8th inning in Game 1 when the Yankees busted out with five unanswered runs, I've been totally right. The Rangers are the better team, they have better personnel and are far better coached, and the proof is in the pudding. One more win out of one more game in New York and then two in Texas -- including Cliff Lee in Game 7 if needed, did I mention him already? -- and the Rangers will advance to their first World Series appearance in franchise history. Exciting times to be from Texas these days. Except if you like the Cowboys!

Interesting, we could be just one day away from a similar 3-1 hole for the Phillies in the NLCS, as Joe Blanton of the Phils will face off tonight against 21-year-old Madison Bumgarner of the Giants in what is now a very big game for Philly after Matt Cain pitched a shutout against the Phillies in Game 3 on Tuesday afternoon. Joe Blanton is clearly not one of Philly's "big three" pitchers, but I like his chances against a very young kid in easily his biggest game as a major leaguer, and a guy with a WHIP of 1.30 who also is the clear #4 starter in the Giants' rotation. If the Phils can find a way to win this game on the road on Wednesday, we even things back up at 2-2 in the series and then we just need to win 2 of the last 3 games of the series, with Halladay, Oswalt and Hamels starting, and with two of those three games at home in Philadelphia. That should be doable for the Phils, if they can get their heads out of their asses when there are runners in scoring position. But if Bumgarner wins tonight over Blanton, then we're looking at another 3-1 series advantage for the underdog. And, while I think it is clear that the Phillies have more of an ability to still come back and win a series with homefield advantage and down 3 games to 1 than the Yankees would given the Phils' incredible 3-man combination in the rotation, at the end of the day it is very hard to like anyone to win three straight games against a team that features the level of historically incredible starting pitching that the Giants bring to bear.

Both series continue on Wednesday, this time with the Yankees having the afternoon game to fight to extend their season for one more day, and then the Phils needing to step up big time in the nightcap or risk putting themselves into a very, very deep hole.

Zombie Alert

I hate to stir up mass hysteria or anything, but I am pretty sure Cliff Lee is undead. I mean, the stony look on his face while he just goes out there and throws strikes by people is unlike anyone I can ever recall. He must be undead, it's the most sensible explanation for how someone could not just get the results Lee gets on the mound but more particularly do it how he does it. I don't ever recall someone with such ice in their veins in a huge spot over and over again -- I know I posted that video of the ridiculously blase basket catch in last year's World Series against the Yankees -- but Monday night's Game 3 of the ALCS in New York was a perfect example of the country's most famous zombie in action.

Do you realize the Yankees had just three baserunners in 8 innings against Cliff Lee last night? That Lee struck out 13 batters out of the 24 guys he mowed down on the night? You do realize this is the all-time all-star Yankees lineup we're talking about here, they of the Derek Jeter / A-Rod / Mark Teixeira / Robinson Cano / Jorge Posada and I could go on and on? Cliff Lee, even with all the spotlight in the world on him and the highest expectations one could have, he still performed.

And the thing that gets me most of all with him is he doesn't make you chase bad pitches. He doesn't set you up with three lowballs and then fire one in way high out of the strike zone to make you swing and miss. He doesn't even necessarily "paint the corners" like a Greg Maddux did so impeccably back in his heyday. Cliff Lee just throws effing strikes. You know he's going to do it. You can't just take the first pitch like so many other pitchers allow a good contact hitter to do. If you do, you'll just be behind in the count every time you get up there, which is not where you want to be against Lee. In two-hitting and shutting out the Yankees on Monday, Lee threw 122 pitches, 82 of them for strikes. I used to point this out all the time here on the blog last year when Lee was pitching for the Phillies, but this guy throws at least 2/3 strikes every time he goes out there. He just challenges every hitter with his perfectly-placed fastball, and he moves on to the cutters and the sliders once he gets ahead in the count, and the guy is deadly accurate. Forget pitching around certain guys, or being sure to avoid the top part of the strike zone against the cleanup hitter, forget all that stuff. Cliff Lee the Undead just goes out there with that same stoic look on his face and the same stoic approach to every hitter he faces: just throw it by them. Cliff Lee gives new meaning to the phrase "mowing 'em down", he really does.

I watched my own team's #1 pitcher throw a frigging no-hitter earlier in these playoffs, and I also watched Tim Lincecum throw a masterful 14-strikeout 3-hit complete game shutout of the Braves in Game 1 of this year's NLDS. But Cliff Lee's performance on Monday night at the Yankees is quite simply the most sensational pitching performance I have witnessed in the last few weeks.

With AJ Burnett slated to pitch tonight for the Yankees in Game 4, there is a very real chance that the Yankees are down 3 games to 1 in the ALCS with two more games still to play in Arlington to end the series. That is a horrible situation for the Yankees, not so much because they have to win three straight games, but because it means that under the best case scenario, they will have to beat Cliff Lee again to go back to the World Series. And this time it will be in Texas.

Nobody has really given this Rangers team a real chance to win the AL pennant (myself included) all season long, until perhaps today. For the first time this morning on the way into work, I found myself speculating about the possibilities. It's actually a pretty amazing story, albeit one I haven't even considered for one second until just today: Cliff Lee pitching against the Phillies in the World Series, the team that traded him after he dominated for us in 2009 and went and got Roy Halladay instead. Halladay vs Lee in Game 1 of the World Series....that one's gonna be even better than Halladay vs. Lincecum twice in the NLDS here.

Speaking of which, Game 3 of the NLCS kicks off at 4pm ET today, and as I mentioned yesterday this is a much bigger game for the Phillies than Game 1 was. Although winning today is certainly not crucial to either team, with Cole Hamels pitching today and Joe Blanton slated for tomorrow, clearly the Phils' best chance is to win with Hamels today and then take the pressure off for Game 4 on Wednesday.