“You Saw What They Were Capable Of…”

Some mornings I’ll step out of my door and the world will smell like fresh shit falling off the back of a garbage truck.

I’ll walk past some construction workers screaming at each other as a nearby traffic light turns green, and the person at the front of the line doesn’t move instantly.  Needless to say, horns are blaring as people are later for work by the second.

If only the Phillies got to the World Series every Tuesday.

Last night, I was biking into South Philly and stopped at a red light.  I craned my neck to look through the open window of a bar nearby where the game was on TV.  I couldn’t see.  To my right, a cab slowly inched up to the crosswalk.

“What’s the score?” the driver asked me.

“I can’t see…” I replied.  Leaning toward the the bar, I got the attention of a guy ordering a sixth round of whiskey shots and loving it.

“What’s the score?”

“6-3!” he yelled back.

“6-3,” I informed the taxi driver.

It felt like we were putting out a barn fire in the old west, handing each other buckets of water as the Phillies burnt the Dodgers to the ground.  We were working together as a team!  It was a rare, magical, citywide moment, that’s usually reserved for somewhere like Paris or New York, or a place that doesn’t have as many wererats living in the subway tunnels.

In a city where they had to grease the traffic light poles so people wouldn’t couldn’t climb them in celebration, the Phillies brought us together.  Beautiful.

Well… they brought me, a taxi driver, and a rampaging drunk together.  For a few seconds.

In a game that got to be not even close at a very quick pace, props can be handed out to almost everyone.  The offense. The defense.  The bullpen.  Even Cole Hamels pitched well enough to keep the Dodgers at bay while we piled up some runs in front of their dugout.

Strangely enough, Manny Ramirez said it best:

“They were better than us.  You saw what they were capable of doing.”

Let the same be said about Philadelphia police, because they kept us very well contained…no swaggering into the streets, no scaling the sides of buildings, no flipping news vans over with panicked camera crews possibly inside.

But the big congrats is obviously to our Phils.  Ryan Howard, NLCS Monster, gets the MVP, Brad Lidge gets a new dose of respect, the Phillies get to be the first NL team to make back to back WS appearances in 13 years, and the Dodgers, with their mascotless franchise and sour puss journalists, get to go home and think about what they didn’t do.

Again.