Tooth and Nail

Phillies 8, Yankees 6 (NYY leads series 3-2)

Have you ever left your house with an adamantly unshakable feeling that you’re walking to your death?

ESPN, the New York Yankees, and most fans of baseball would have told you earlier that tonight was the last game of the World Series.  And for a few minutes in the 9th inning, it almost was.

Even as I made my way home via SEPTA, people stopped to ask me about the game.  Well, not the game, really.  Just one of the teams playing it.

“Did the Phillies lose?” I was asked three times.

We’re not there yet.  We’ve just completed the first step in a process that has two more, residually intensified and unsubtly crappy steps ahead.

Cliff Lee did what he’s become a machine designed to do (7 IP, 7 H, 5 ER, 2.81 ERA), though going deeper into counts than a normal (superb) start. In the end, like so many times before, it depended on our offense’s ability or inability to outrun the bullpen.

Chan Ho Park managed to hold a lead but allowed a run, and also spent, like, a full minute tying his shoe in the top of the 8th.  It was almost as mystifying as Jorge Posada trying to call time out in the middle of a pitch.

Fortunately, the bats were working.

Unfortunately, so were the Yankees’.

Fortunately again, Chase Utley tied the record for most World Series HR’s (with the first player in baseball history to be nicknamed a month).

“Back to back in the Bronx!” the guy next to me kept saying.  Again, and again.  He really liked how it sounded (a fact he also told me; “Boy, I like how that sounds.”).

My personal feelings for AJ Burnett aside, he had that inning analysts had been warning the public about, and left much, much earlier (3rd inning) than anyone in New York would have preferred, giving up 6 ER like a smarmy jackass.

There’s those personal feelings again.

And so, with the gun in our mouths, we travel up the turnpike once more, to play baseball for our very lives (Wednesday, 7:57 pm).

As Lenny Dykstra points out, “If you don’t like being out there with the game on the line, you shouldn’t be playing the game, dude.”

And he’s bankrupt.  So you know he’s capable of taking risks.

POST GAME BITCHING

• There was a Mets fan at the game holding a sign that begged the Phillies to beat the Yankees.  It said the phrase “Go Phillies!”  Remember this moment in less desperate times, Mets fans.
• Seriously, the middle of a god damn pitch.
• Putting in Ryan Madson is like going up to Joe Girardi and asking “Are you sure you don’t want to win?” while arching your eyebrows and smiling suggestively.
• $8.00 for a travel mug the size of my wrist bone.  It wasn’t the last game of the season at CBP, was it?
• We all saw you at the game, DeSean Jackson.  Question is, who were you rooting for?
• “Phillies Post Game Live” is the craziest thing I have ever seen.  A split screen of Ricky Bottalico stumbling over two-syllable words and Darren Daulton smiling like he just met the friendliest lizard are a recipe for a sitcom, not “topnotch analysis.”