“If you throw a shutout and the team doesn’t score any runs for you, you’re not going to win.”

Whoa!  Whoa.  What are you talking about, Roy Oswalt?  Not scoring runs for a quality starter is how you play baseball.  Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s how Abner Doubleday designed the sport.  A pitcher comes out, throws the game of his life, keeps the other team from scoring at all, maybe gets a base hit to give the crowd a larff, and finally, throws the last pitch in the ninth and in the locker room, gets what he undoubtedly deserves:  the 1-0 loss.  If he was a good pitcher, he’d have won.

Right?  That’s baseball.

“If you give up one run, pitch nine innings and lose 1-0, you still pitched a pretty good ballgame.”

I have… a lot of research to do.

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How is Kyle Kendrick already pitching again?  I feel like it was just a few days ago that I was silently chewing mouthfuls of a giant sandwich while staring menacingly at the TV as Kyle slowly but surely allowed another one of his patented disaster innings bleed into a Phillies loss.

And yeah, maybe my caffeine intake is “dangerously high,” and my hours of sleep every night are “dangerously low,” and the broken bottles I throw at the wall are “really dangerous,” but watching Kyle take the mound is like watching your kid go into surgery.  Only he’s performing it on himself despite being unconscious the whole time.

“How will this work?” you ask during the pregame.

Sometimes it does, and your genius child winds up on the cover of science magazines.  And other times, a lot of times, it doesn’t, and we all watch him fail and die.

YOU ARE THE REASON I DON'T BELIEVE IN YOU.

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There are a lot of words floating around to describe the Phillies right now.  ”Lifeless.”  ”Inexplicable.”  ”Talented.”  Basically the team’s potential does not have a nything to do with how they play.  Why?  Why can the Houston Astros be a a bonafide threat and the San Diego Padres, the team with the best record in the NL, are no match for the awesome power of the Phillies offense  when it is actually being used.

In securing at least a series victory from the Padres, the Phillies are attempting to scuttle back from the humiliation of the last series, and seem to be sort of capable to do it.  What reasons could they possibly have for falling to Brett Myers’ latest foster family but being able to bounce back?  Only a handful of explanations make sense.

• Wizard’s curse
• Thought it’d be funny
• Only way to avoid seeing Brett Myers throw embarrassing temper tantrum
• Secret addendum to J.A. Happ’s deal was that he gets to be part of sweep in first series back in Philly
• Everyone distracted by skyrocketing Philly porn scene

“It’s baseball,” Shane Victorino said.

Oh.

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When I was a kid, I had a birthday party with all the cool kids in my class.  It was the first time I was having kids who weren’t related by blood over for  box social of any kind, so it was kind of a big deal.  There were LEGOs.  There were party favors.  There were uninhibited guessing games.  It was the social event of the season.

Then the clown showed up and everything to a turn for the disturbingly intoxicated.

Clearly drunk, he proceeded to take a scoop of the cake out with his bare hand, challenge the Klausen kid from next door to a fist fight, and made off with a few of my LEGO sets with higher street value.  The display was made even more traumatizing as my father whispered to my mother that he hadn’t even hired a clown.

The 22-7 party the Phillies have been throwing since July 22 has come screeching to a halt.  The Houston Astros became out personal drunken clowns as we got swept out of our own home for the first time since Citizens Bank Park became a building.  Blame the umps (you could), blame Kyle Kendrick (you always can), but as I stated yesterday, you don’t have to be Bill Baer to point out that the Phillies have failed in one particularly critical area for a team desiring to make the playoffs.

It’s our party, and we’ll not score any runs if we want to.

Astros 5, Phillies 1

You know what’a harder than beating a team that’s under .500?  Beating any one of the 10 National League teams that are better.

What was Ryan Howard’s thing this series?  1-for-12?  Probably worse?  And how many times did he strike out?  I’m currently writing this without an internet connection so the info isn’t right at hand as usual, so my generalizations and grossly miscalculated statistics will have to replace “common sense” and “actual information” for now.

I do know that Ryan struck out a shitload of times.  That’s not a fact you need the internet to back you up on.  Knowing he went down five times in one game (I’d mention the Scott Barry hissy fit doesn’t count, but he probably would have struck out anyway even if Barry had claimed he didn’t go around on strike 3) is enough to be sure that this series absolutely blew for Howard.

But it also must have blown for everyone else because these coveted starters we were so excited to get back have returned to a lineup that was doing just fine without them.  Now, they’re in the batting order and suddenly nobody hits anymore.  I hate to get all “Agent Scully,” but I’m sure there’s a scientific answer for this.

Or maybe there’s not.  Maybe there’s just no formula to explain how the Phillies get better and get worse at the same time.  They’re streaky.  But what explains streakiness?  Immaturity and/or patience at the plate?  God knows Shane Victorino seems to only have the will power to see three pitches before inevitably striking out on a pitch so far out of the zone it shows up on air traffic control radar.  Either that or he dribbles one down to third an “Aw, shucks”-it back to the dugout.

What happened to you, Shane?  I used to have respect for you.  I had to have it from at least 100 yards away at all times, sure, but it was still there. Now I don’t know.  It’s like you [continue to] not know I exist.

They say good pitching beats good hitting.  Well, clearly no mantra that ranks the various facets of baseball can be right all the time.  We obviously have good pitching–three aces, and an increasingly solid Joe Blanton.  But these guys are having their quality starts as wasted as my birthday clown, and for what?  And why?

If we’re standing on the cusp of a yet another downward spiral, this 2010 season may not be able to take it, and its nobody’s fault but the bats.  And the baserunning lately.  And Kyle Kendrick and the bullpen sometimes.

These Padres are even better than the Astros (which again, is not very hard to be).  We can’t get our shit together against Ed Wade’s Ex-Phillie Brigade, how can we do it against a team whose managed to get into first place in their division?

But with the sporadic appearances the offense tends to make, we could very well have a 20-run inning, then follow it up with a 7-0 loss the next night.  Who the shit knows.

A full body of vengeance greeted the Astros tonight.  The Phillies had something to prove, something to beat, something to kill.

After the debacle last night that ended in Ryan Howard trying to the rip the head off a human man in front of 44,000 screaming fans, and even stranger, Raul Ibanez playing first base, it was clear the Phillies needed to put on a show that only brought back victory, be recaptured the dignity that comes with losing to the Astros.

Tonight, vengeance wasn’t hitting the showers and leaving before reporters could talk to it.  Tonight, it was going to be right there on that field, as the Phillies prove they not going to lose three out of four to the freaking Astros.

It was like after the first scene of Hard to Kill,when Steven Seagal’s family has been murdered, and the bad guys think he’s dead too.  Only now, its six years later, and he’s got a beard and a brain full of evidence–and awesome karate moves, too, that’s important–and we know that with the darkness behind him, Steven’s going to rise from the ashes of his family of corpses and slaughter every B-movie stunt man the producers could find before lunch.

No, the OTHER Seagal movie that ends in "To Kill."

Astros 3, Phillies 2

Only in this story, the one where the Phillies go after the gang from Houston who murdered their family, Steven Seagal gets riddled with henchmen bullets 20 seconds into his first fight scene, and the last 51 minutes of  the movie are of his lifeless body floating face down in a creek bed.

Well, we certainly allowed Happ and Myers to stick it to us, which… I mean with Happ, its like watching your first son beat you at something for the first time.  Part of you, sure, wants to break his neck quietly, stuff him in the basement wall, and deny you’ve ever been defeated at anything, but the majority of you just tussle his hair and tell him you’re proud.

Myers, on the other hand, is like that punk-ass white trash neighborhood kid who’s been caught trying to sell your kids really sheisty weed.  And then he breaks into your house one night and brains you with a shovel.

YOU STAY AWAY FROM MY DAUGHTER YOU RUFFIAN

So these past few games have carried an undeniable sting, because as we slide slowly into a spiral, the Braves are doing the same.  The Phils are unable to close the minute gap between us, and we can all sit at our laptops or office computers, ignoring our workloads and reminders to pick up the kids from soccer, and say why we’re losing:  WE DON’T SCORE RUNS.  Also we have forgotten how to run the bases.

We just don’t.  And its not a problem with a hugely obvious solution, like “OMFG COLE HAMELS IS ON FIRE.”  The bats are there, the atlent is there, but the two aren’t combining for anything significant, and even a minor league team (surrounded by minor league umpiring) can take advantage of that.

You know things aren’t pretty when Roy Halladay can’t even trot out there with a pocketful of menacing stares, erase the Astros, and still face an “L.”  The guy’s in the running for the pitching Triple Crown for shit’s sake and we still will not score runs for him.

It doesn’t take roomful of ESPN analysts to say, “The Phillies need to score runs to make the playoffs.”  I mean, Josh Elliot could come up with that, and he’s a cyborg built from leftover pieces of Tim McCarver’s jackassery with an extra “Cocky 2.0″ program thrown in the mix for no reason.

So if somebody’s going to decapitate an umpire, just do it.  Don’t lead us on by pretending to put runners in scoring position and then doing nothing with them.  I am sick of getting blue balled out there, whether its offensively, or blood lustily, so just follow through.

Well, Kyle Kendrick’s pitching this afternoon.  So maybe just schedule all of that winning for the next day.

What the hell is Twitter?  Well, TBOH’s on it.

Image courtesy of Green Apple Tree and Action Junkie.

The Phillies have class.  They may have murderer beards, and tempers, and clear evidence that they are correct, but they are not going to stand in the locker room and after a[nother] game ruined by shit-piss umpiring and insult the blues.  They are going to take the blame themselves for not being the offensive dynamos they are supposed to be.  They are going to criticize their own inability to put the bat on the ball when it mattered.  They are going to back away slowly and hope tomorrow goes their way.  They are not going to grab a reporter’s microphone and spout off against the immature, unprofessional, mentally slow “umpiring” that went on in Philadelphia tonight.

So I guess it’s up to me.

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It’s so bad-ass when a catcher lasers a ball down to first or second to catch a guy leaning.  The catcher’s got to be a sniper to pull it off successfully and make it more than just a dramatic warning to the runner.  He’s letting the rest of the would-be base thieves in the opposing dugout know that his is not an arm to be trifled with.

But Humberto Quintero didn’t even have to do that to throw out Jayson Werth at second base.  No, no… he just sort of winged it out there, like he was trying to knock a bird out of the sky, and, like a giant crushing a village, Werth gave a half-hearted stomp back to the base, just in the nick of time to be the first player I have ever seen called out during an intentional walk.

Tonight, we salute you, Jayson Richard Gowan “Werewolf” Werth.  Because that was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.

Well, OBVIOUSLY that's a lie, but it was still a very dumb thing.

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The gulls cawed silently to each other on the freshly moistened grass.

Craig Stammen was on his way to a particularly hellish inning.  He wiped his face.  It was pointless.  Everything was wet and gross and the filthy stank of a soaking wet Philadelphia was quickly invading 88,000 nostrils.  The afternoon’s radar was smeared with green and gosh, who doesn’t love a little humid, rancid baseball, while a gaggle of murderous sea birds conference behind the outfield wall.

Raul Ibanez is a man who hits home runs like a father stepping on a LEGO in the dark.  It comes out of nowhere, limbs go flailing, and the jarring yelps that follow are based mainly in shock.  But Stammen’s inning of relief was just the window Raul needed to slap a two-run shot.

The gulls’ eyed each other knowingly.  And it began.

Because they were sea gulls. And they did not care for Craig Stammen.

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“Holy crap, Ryan Howard’s back,” I said to the guy next to me at the bar.

He looked at me like I had just put my hand on his thigh, nodded, confused at my obliviousness, and pinned a “Most Out of Touch Phillies Blogger” badge to my shirt.

I have a lot on my plate now that I'm head of the terrorist-stabbing board.

I looked around.  Everyone was staring at me, positive I was joking.  The bartender toweled a glass sinisterly, giving me the stink eye.  Clearly, the news had been out in the open for some time, or at least a few minutes.  Whatever it was, it was enough time for everyone else to find out while I was pretending to peruse a beer list, and the bartender and I both pretended we didn’t know I was just going to order a pitcher of the cheapest swill on tap.

“Well… that’ll certainly help,” I muttered into my drink.

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