Author Archive

First, a bit of news, in case you haven’t heard by now: Chase Utley will be in the lineup tonight, batting second. The National League is officially on notice.

On Saturday, we went over three of the teams currently in the playoff picture, and laughed at related Google image search results. Now, the others, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Presumptuous as it may be to look ahead to the postseason when the Phillies would be putting their broms in the closet if the season ended today, we’re all pretty confident in this team. Two straight NL pennants and a 16-5 run largely without two of our three best hitters will do that. Shit, we’ve managed to stay in the thick of the race with Wilson Valdez playing every day; expectations should be high upon the returns of Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, particularly the latter. And as we’ve all heard and orgasmed over by now, Chase begins a rehab assignment in Clearwater this very evening. He’s targeting Tuesday’s series opener against the Giants for his return – which, btdubskis, is also the date Howard is eligible to come off of the disabled list. Ladies and gents, we may be looking at our full Opening Day roster playing together for the first time since The Great Depression.

Anyway, there’s the small matter of securing a playoff berth standing between us and a third straight World Series appearance (a few bounces from being a potential third straight championship, but hey…two out of three ain’t bad). This recent run has done a lot of good work toward brushing aside these charlatans who would fain eliminate the possibility of having their faces broken by a Doc-headed triumvirate of terror and a fully operational Death Star of a lineup, but we’re not there yet. Ergo, scoreboards must be watched.

After the jump, a look at those who would dare take our title, including how they stack up against us in a postseason series. Heavy lies the head that wears the crown, bitches.

Read the rest of this entry »

That is all.

(P.S. I’ve been busy as hell this week, mostly with my new job, but I will have the day off and a massive hangover on Saturday, so I promise at least one actual post.)

In the meantime, let us all join together and laugh heartily at a 300-pound bull of a man being made the Phillies’ bitch yet again.

The Moon Shot

The Double (predicted immediately beforehand by our very own Liney)

The Shitshow

Folks, we’re sorry.

We’ve been the Eric Bruntlett of blogs lately, and that just ain’t cool.

There are any number of reasons as to how and why this happened. The Phillies stunk on ice for a while, and that shit is depressing enough without writing about it. Ryan lost his job a while back. I moved for the sixth (!) time in 15 months, and my grandfather passed. Liney’s been swamped by thesis defense and doing whatever it is that assistant GMs of soccer clubs do, which I am assuming involves a lot of penis. Chris has tripped and fallen over the first of 12 steps so often that AA kicked him out. And A Team…that turncoat bastard got himself a cushy gig writing for The Hardball Times and left us. He did not turn around, to see our hearts breaking. We didn’t want him to see us cry, anyway. Actually, we were all planning to step on one another to reach infinitesimal Internet fame, and just pissed that he beat us to the punch.

However, I have made it my mission to get things rolling around here again. Chris has hiccuped assent. Together, we will lead this blog into a glorious new age of prosperity and wonderment, an age where posts appear more than once or twice a month.

To show how much we mean business, I will invoke the most sacred rite I know.

I’m off to scream Meech’s name from the top of a mountain that I climbed in tennis shoes.

By now, everybody knows how I feel about Ruben Amaro. Disdain threatened to evolve rapidly into seething hatred if, as was rumored earlier this month, he attempted another ill-advised “three-team” deal to acquire pitching and ship out Jayson Werth.

Well, here we are on July 29th, and the situation has worked out better than any sane, rational Phillies fan could have hoped. Werth isn’t going anywhere, and Amaro deserves credit for getting Roy Oswalt for pennies on the dollar. Granted, he was dealing with Ed Wade, so it wasn’t exactly a triumph of intellect, but I can’t be as harsh toward his many failures without giving the man credit for his successes. Not without being a Mets fan giant hypocrite.

Ed Wade (Artist's rendering).

Seriously, folks, this could’ve been so much worse. Word ’round the campfire was that the Astros wanted Jonathan Singleton, that they wouldn’t kick in a significant amount of cash, and that Oswalt wanted his $16 million option for 2012 guaranteed as a provision for waiving his no-trade clause. Any and all of that would have been terrible for the Phillies. Read the rest of this entry »

Howdy, folks. You haven’t seen me around much lately (or any of us, for that matter). Let’s just forget the month of June happened. I’m sure the Phillies would like to.

July 1st is one of the more exciting days on the sports calendar. Both NHL and NBA free agency begin, and the hot stove usually kicks into high gear leading up to MLB’s trade deadline at the end of the month. And boy, did Jerry Crasnick crank up the heat this morning, breaking the news that the Phillies are interested in Dan Haren, and that Arizona scouts are checking out our prospects.

I’ll pause for a moment while you close your eyes and dream of a Halladay-Hamels-Haren playoff rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

So, we suck.

That’s all there is to it. Right now, we are a disgrace to the game of baseball.

We couldn’t get runs after a night of all-you-can-eat Chipotle. We score about as often as those head-bobbing guys in A Night at the Roxbury. Ryan Howard’s homer last night was our first since the Grover Cleveland administration – the first one. Jayson Werth has followed his beard into the abyss. There’s rampant speculation that Chase Utley is hurt. Ross Gload hit leadoff on Monday. Ross. Fucking. Gload.

I have begun to seriously consider the possibility that aliens from a distant planet have stolen the athletic abilities of our best players, 14 years after dire warnings of just such a occurrence by the Nobel Prize-winning documentary Space Jam.

Pictured (from left): Polanco, Howard, Rollins, Utley, Werth

Everyone: Take a deep breath.

As horrible as this stretch has been – and it has been atrocious on a level that has been thankfully rare in recent Phillies history – we can’t lose sight of the big picture. Even with the Braves sweeping us to run their winning streak to eight, even after losing nine of our last 11 games, we’re still four games over .500 on June 2. Last year, we were two games over .500 on July 2. We survived.

There’s simply no way that this futility continues. Our big guns will come out of their simultaneous slumps. Our numerous, crippling injuries will heal.

We’ll be fine.

That’s us, right now.

Back to back shutout losses. For the first time since 1998, AKA the Dark Ages. To the fucking Mets. Blanton gave up a homer to this fucking guy.

It’s a long season. We’re still in first. The Mets are still in last, and not really a threat anyway.

All the same, we are playing some awful baseball right now.

Hamels tomorrow to avoid the reverse brom job. The way things are going, he’ll have to throw a no-no for us to win.

Ugh.

With the quarter pole of the MLB season approaching this week, and with a streak of posts by Ryan Edmund that simply must be stopped, it seems as good a time as any for a State of the Phillies Address. Platitudes and neverending ovations are not, strictly speaking, necessary, but the latter would be appreciated. H/T to MooseWithFleas for the general concept and some statistical legwork.

Since we never play our reserves, I’ve declined to analyze their performance, but everybody else gets the treatment after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, you’ve probably heard that the current back-up plan to Brad Lidge in the ninth is one of our resident Cuban defectors. Fortunately, it’s the good one. In your face, Ryan Edmund!

I suck. Just like TheRuckus said I would!

Jose Contreras is, to use the technical parlance, owning the shit out of the hitters right now. His velocity is up, and his breaking pitches look awesome. His swinging strike rate is an eye-popping 22.3% – to put that in perspective, Brad Lidge’s 2008 mark was 15.3%. His 16.43 K/9 is second in the majors behind Carlos Marmol (or CarLOLs MarmLOL, as the case may be). All caveats about small sample size acknowledged, so far Contreras is doing a good job of making me look like the genius I am.

Last night against the Cardinals, he entered the game in the 10th, quickly striking out Ryan Ludwick on a two-seamer that the stadium gun recorded at 98. Of course, that gun also clocked Hamels at 95, so it was probably a little hot. Let’s move on before I have to make a dumb taser joke. Anyway, Contreras had Albert Pujols looking mortal on a couple of splitters before surrendering a double on a 1-2 pitch that was more a result of terrible defense by Ben Francisco than anything else. He bounced back to fan Matt Holliday on an absolutely filthy split and got David Freese to foul out to first.

Lidge looked decent last night, but Charlie rightly wants to ease him back into the swing of things. Contreras is pretty clearly the best reliever on the team right now, and it behooves us to use him as such. Hopefully, more like we did last night than with a three-run lead in the ninth, but I’ll take anything that keeps Danys Baez from pitching multiple innings. Or at all, really.