The Phillies are in serious trouble right now, by Joey Bagadonuts
April 19, 2010 by Joey Bagadonuts
Filed under Analysis & Opinions
Raul Ibanez can’t hit, Kendrick can’t get anyone out, the Marlins just showed they can beat us, the Braves are right on our tails, Moyer’s old as hell, Jimmy Rollins is hurt, Lidge is stinking it up in the minors and won’t be able to close, Danys Baez and David Herndon can’t hold a lead, J.A. Happ and Joe Blanton are missing starts, Chase Utley stopped hitting homers, the Cardinals have Albert Pujols, Placido Polanco’s average is below .400, nobody’s stealing bases, fans are projectile vomiting on little girls, I still don’t trust Cole Hamels and I’m worried about what’s gonna happen with this team.
One of the first things the Phillies need to do is bench Raul and give Ben Francisco a chance out there. We should be able to trade Raul for some bullpen help, which is what we need anyway. I just don’t know why Charlie keeps putting him in the lineup when he stinks like this. I’m pretty sure Domonic Brown is ready by now. Why don’t we bring him up to take Raul’s place? What’s the hold up here?
The Marlins and Braves are seriously on our ass in the NL East and I think it’s gonna be a serious battle the whole year and there’s a chance we could miss the playoffs. The Marlins just beat us in two out of three games and even though the Braves are hitting .233 as a team right now, when they get going, they’re gonna be dangerous with the pitching staff they have. I just don’t feel right about our chances right now.
There are so many other things we need to fix before we can consider ourselves a real contender in the National League. I’m as optimistic as they come, but I’m freaking out right now. I know we’re only 12 games into the season, but if this isn’t time to hit the panic button, then when is?
Procrastinating Phils finally get around to clinching division
The Philadelphia Phillies clinched their third straight NL East title after putting it off for the past week by spending entirely too much time on Failblog and Hulu-ing those old episodes of It’s Always Sunny they missed.
“It was rough, man,” Ryan Howard said of the Phillies’ late-season procrastination. “As much as we wanted to secure our spot and get it over with, someone would send out an email about a funny video and by the time you start looking at all the related videos, you look up and it’s the ninth inning and you’re down by like 10. At that point, you just try again the next day, but then Chase [Utley] starts talking about how Journey is the greatest band of all time, which starts a three-hour-long debate and you end up in the same place as yesterday.”
The Phils finally pulled it together on Wednesday to down the Astros 10-3, though technically the team clinched the division a few minutes before the game ended due to Atlanta losing on an epic Matt Diaz baserunning error to end the game against the Marlins.
In a moving gesture to once again prove his commitment and eternal love for Brad Lidge, Charlie Manuel called on the team’s pseudo-closer to record the final out of the 10-3 route in a non-save situation. Lidge warmed up for about five minutes and threw one pitch to Lance Berkman, who grounded out to Ryan Howard at first base to end the game.
“Any other guy would have left me by now, but Charlie isn’t just any other guy,” Lidge said after the game. “We pledged our lives to one another when I signed here and I’m blessed to be able to have him right by my side no matter how badly I screw up. I’m definitely one of the lucky ones.”
The Phillies also paid a fitting tribute to the late Harry Kalas by embracing the HK sign in left field after the game. Harry is still very much a part of this team and I personally hope the Phillies are able to pay the greatest tribute to him by rolling down Broad Street one more time, in his honor. Go Phils!
Philly hit with over three inches of Halladay-generated drool
The mere thought of adding Roy Halladay to the defending World Champions’ roster has left some Philadelphians waist-deep in their own slobber and without power last night.
The situation in the Delaware Valley may get worse before it gets any better as more and more fans realize just how freaking incredible the Phillies would be with Roy Hall-of-Fame-some-a-day atop their rotation.
“I was out at P.J. Welihan’s with my boys talking about the whole Halladay situation,” said Ryan Billings, a South Jersey Phillies fan. “The next thing we know, everybody in the bar is talking about it and we’re all wallowing in our own saliva. Sounds really gross, but we didn’t really care. We just want Halladay.”
Halladay would give Phils fans the opportunity to look back 10 years from now and say they witnessed not only the greatest team in franchise history, but possibly one of the greatest in major league history.
By 2019, Chase Utley will have officially become the greatest second baseman to play the game. Ryan Howard will be the most prolific home run hitter since Babe Ruth. Jimmy Rollins will have punched his ticket to Cooperstown with his 3,000th career hit. The rotation of Roy Halladay, Cole Hamels, Joe Blanton, Jamie Moyer and Pedro Martinez may end up with the largest career win totals of any rotation ever. Jayson Werth will have his own statue in front of The Bank, capturing his signature strikeout, fall-on-one-knee swing and best of all, the Phils will have won back-to-back World Series and quite possibly an unprecedented twelve-peat.
EDITOR’S NOTE TO PHILLIES FRONT OFFICE: Stop farting around and get this done.
If The Athletics Stayed: Philly would love the Bash Brothers
Introducing a new feature called If The Athletics Stayed, that will likely appear whenever one of our cherished teams does something precious like lose to a team they just historically reamed the night before. In said feature, we will take a quick look into what life would be like as a Philly baseball fan had the Athletics stayed in town instead of moving to Kansas City in 1955 (and eventually to Oakland in 1968).
For this edition, we’ll take a look at the “Bash Brothers” of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire and how this town would likely still hold a spot in their hearts for the two poster children of the steroid era had they played for the Philadelphia Athletics.
Would Philly be any different than any other love-struck town like LA, San Francisco and New York if we had a couple of star athletes that were later found to be dirty? I’d like to think so, but the obvious answer would be “no, we’d be no different.”
After Mike Schmidt (who fell off after 1987, coincidentally when the Bash Brothers were just heating up), the Phillies had a major power outage for the next 15 or so years until Pat Burrell and Jim Thome came to town. Can you imagine how popular the A’s would have been in this town over the lowly Phils teams of the late 80′s and through the 90′s (1993 aside) if we were able to see Canseco and McGwire “across town?”
Now of course, this assumes that we didn’t know anything about steroids back then, and I think the bulk of fans didn’t have a clue (myself included, since I was in high school at the height of the steroid era in 2001). Contrary to what Mike Missanelli would mislead you to believe, the big talk was about a “juiced ball”, smaller ballparks and diluted pitching due to expansion, not about steroids.
I say this because we would have probably accepted the “Bash Brothers” like we do Ryno and Utley today, and even when the news broke that McGwire was catching whatever Jose “The Candyman” Canseco was pitching (take that however you want), we would probably forgive and embrace them just like Oakland did. Sports fans are like naive, abused girlfriends: You can cheat your ass off, but as long as you throw in a couple “please baby, baby, baby please’s”, they’ll take you right back.
If the A’s stayed in town, you know Philly would have gone nuts for the “Broad Street Bash Brothers” or some other corny 90′s nickname. Don’t deny it.
Derek Lowe, Braves totally kill everyone's World Series buzz
Derek Lowe pitched out of his mind for eight innings, allowing only two hits while striking out four as the Braves cock blocked what was supposed to be a continuation of our World Series championship celebration.
Brett Myers, who was filling in for an injured Cole Hamels, gave up three ‘no-doubters’ to Brian McCann, Jeff Francoeur (who couldn’t hit a beach ball off of a tee last year) and Jordan Schafer (who hadn’t seen a pitch above the Double-A level until Myers’ meatball in the second inning).
“I threw three very costly mistakes out there today,” Myers said. “If that one to McCann was just a half an inch lower and to the left, it might have at least stayed in the lower deck.”
Myers settled in after a rough first two innings and finished with six strikeouts in six innings while giving up eight hits and four runs. The bullpen then took over and smacked the Braves silly for three perfect innings.
In true Fightins fashion, the Phils tried to mount a comeback in the bottom the ninth inning with the Salsa dancing Mike Gonzalez on the mound for the Braves. Eric Bruntlett scored on a Jayson Werth single pushing the score to 4-1. There were two on base after Chase Utley took a walk, when lefthanders Ryan Howard and new Phil Raul Ibanez struck out to end the game and any hope for an undefeated season.
“We couldn’t come through and give everyone the win we knew they wanted,” Charlie Manuel said. “We can’t give the fans too much confidence in our team, though. The next thing you know, they’ll start acting like unbearble pricks like Red Sox fans…no sir…not on my watch.”