Talk About a Letdown: The Phillies Are Done, Folks
Uncategorized October 4th. 2007, 5:43pm
Essentially, the Phillies have six outs left in their season. First, Jeff Francis channels Nolan Ryan and stymies the Phillies, striking out Chase Utley four times. Now in Game 2, the Rockies are battering the sorry, no-account Phillies staff – Kaz Matsui looks like Ichiro – and on the verge of taking a 2-0 lead back to Colorado. [UPDATE: It's gone final: Phillies 5, Rockies 10.] Despite the cheating and bullshit calls at the plate, this is still an incredible run by the Rockies.
14 Responses to “Talk About a Letdown: The Phillies Are Done, Folks”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
October 4th, 2007 at 6:33 PM
I agree the Rockies surprised me. Bastards…
October 4th, 2007 at 7:34 PM
Is it really a letdown when the Phillies got in as a result of a monumental fold job by the Mets?
October 4th, 2007 at 8:00 PM
Talk about East Coast bias! Phillies! Are you kidding me? Rocks win 14 of 15 and the nation picks the Phils because they knocked out the Mets. Come on! National sports journalism needs to get its crap together. Peace.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:24 PM
TBL- you’re embarassing yourself. i’ve been reading all your posts about baseball since last weekend. your consistent distaste for the rockies is heniously obvious. great underhanded compliments here- “this series is really more about the phillies being bad than the rockies being good. despite the fact that they’re huge cheaters, and only made the playoffs because the umps handed a berth to them… yeah, i guess the rockies are on a good run.” please. there’s always next year for the padres, or dodgers, or whoever the hell your team is. get over it and give the rockies their due. they’re probably the best team in the NL and have been been since june. i know it’s really hard for people from either coast (as i assume you are) to acknowledge the fact that not only is there a baseball team in colorado, but that they might actually be good. i do wish you would try a little harder though.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:35 PM
Tom, I believe TBL is a Padre fan. Anyway…it is not the fact the either coast can acknowledge that there is a team in Denver it is the fact that the team has Kaz Matsui and he is doing all sorts of clutch things. Anyone from NY can tell you that the person wearing the Matsui jersey is not in fact Kaz Matsui and I am looking for photographic evidence to prove my point.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:45 PM
BillOReilly is right…this isn’t a letdown to anyone who’s followed either the Rockies or the Phillies closely. I’m a Mets fan, and I can tell you that the NL East has been insanely overrated all year. The Phillies have shaky pitching and a streaky lineup. Oh, and their manager is a doofus. But everyone sees them overtake the Mets (a total paper tiger all season long, btw–mediocre starting rotation, atrocious bullpen, and a tendency to play down to the competition), so they must be good! Wrong.
This isn’t about “momentum” or “heart” or a “letdown.” This is one team simply outplaying the other in every aspect of the game.
And sheesh, TBL…give the Rockies some credit, will you? The Corpas thing is shady, but it’s not the Rockies’ fault they got a botched call in their favor. They’re still manifestly better than the Phillies.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:56 PM
a) Not a Padres fan, just picked them to reach the WS
b) The Rockies are the best team in the NL – right now. No question.
c) How can you argue the Holliday slide? And the Corpas jersey? He never touched the plate and Corpas is beyond shady.
But as they say, better to be lucky than good …
October 4th, 2007 at 8:56 PM
thanks RomanWarHelmet. definitely makes sense.
October 4th, 2007 at 10:08 PM
As far as Corpas goes, what would he drink that could help his breaking ball? This isn’t a Kenny Rogers smudge, it is simply someone pouring WATER down his shirt. I have always thought moisture was bad for pitchers, thats why most of them are constantly wiping their hands off on their pants.
Seriously though, if he is willing to ingest vasoline or some other slimy substance to get another inch of break on curve, I say he earns that inch with the slippery shits he is going to have for the next few days.
October 4th, 2007 at 10:23 PM
Mojo – simply put, we don’t know what the substance was. Here’s what is known – he poured a substance on his jersey, and he then touched it on multiple occasions before pitching.
If he’s got nothing to hide, why didn’t the Rockies address this yet? Or did they, and I didn’t see it?
October 4th, 2007 at 11:01 PM
Clint Hurdle basically said he hadn’t had time to discuss because he has other things going on… like the playoffs. I see what your point s, that he poured “something” down his shirt, but let’s be logical about it at least. He drank the shit first, that should be enough to show that it wasn’t a typical “foreign substance”.
I live in CO, and ironically lived in Detroit last year during SmudgeGate, and the local media is barely even paying this any attention, unlike the Detroit media did last year for Rogers. Denver has a number of sports writers (Bernie Lincicome (sp?) and Woody Paige among others) who simply are not Rox fans and would cherish the opportunity to jump on one of them for cheating. But they aren’t.
I am a Tigers fan (since birth, no bandwagon here, I was at the final game of the 84 Series at Tiger Stadium) but even I admit that Rogers cheated, you could see his curve and even his fastball move differently. Corpas’ didn’t.
Now the Holliday play is a different story….
October 5th, 2007 at 7:32 AM
You really, seriously, definitely need to let the Holliday play go. You can’t say definitively that he didn’t touch the plate, he was blocked by a catcher who didn’t have the ball, the tag was never applied even after the ball was retrieved. What more do you need?
By the way, do we “know” that Corpas touched his jersey “on multiple occasions”? And have you ever heard of a pitcher gaining an edge by having water or Gatorade on his hand? (Cheat sheet: answers are “no” and “no”.)
I’m not even a Rockies fan, and this is pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenty of bitching/moaning from you.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:32 AM
first, i’m neither a phils or rockies fan but as a former shady pitcher, almost any liquid, be it water or gatorade can be used as an advantage on the mound. gatorade is sticky. certain pitches like a fastball, slider, curve can greatly benefit from having a better grip on the ball. this can be the same for just water. if it’s poured on your jersey, then you wipe the jersey with your hand, and then dry your hand on your pants, almost the same effect can be created. combining it with sweat can be just as helpful. granted a pitcher who throws splitters or change-ups relies heavily on letting the ball slide out of the hand with as little friction as possible, so that type of pitcher probably wouldn’t benefit. corpas throws primarily fastballs and sliders, so there’s no doubt in my mind that he could have benefitted from this. just stating that because there’s a rosin bag behind the mound, most people think that pitchers want their hands as dry as possible while pitching, which isn’t always the case.
October 5th, 2007 at 1:10 PM
It’s okay we still got the birds, oh shit…they suck too, LETS GO FLYERS