Phillies Mistake Tim Wakefield For Guy From That Shut Out That One Time

You have to walk down a crack alley to get to my front door.

There’s a gate separating us from the outside world, but the problem is, the lock on it broke almost a year ago.  We try to keep to ourselves, but based on the sounds that have come out of that alley, you can run into anyone from a cracked-out 3am street-walker cursing at empty bottles, to escaped zoo animals just out on the town.  So we wanted our gate locked.  If there’s anything that deters deranged alley cats, its a grafitti-coated wooden fence.

But it wasn’t until after informing our landlord we’d be moving out that he showed up with his tools and put a shiny extravagant locking device on the gate that would no doubt keep us safe from whatever’s slithering around back there.  And all we had to do was wait eight months.  It was an experience that taught us, with enough time, truly anything can be accomplished.

Anyways.  Tim Wakefield’s pitched 3000 innings of baseball.

“That’s pretty special,” Terry Francona said, quickly bringing the conversation back to a topic with an actual point of some kind. “Unfortunately we lost today.”

Phillies 5, Red Sox 3

In that same vein, the Phillies pulled off a win today.

Offensively, the lineup managed to not get shut out by Tim fucking Wakefield, which I guess is something we need to be proud of these days.  Raul Ibanez did strike out twice, but managed to hit a home run, so the question is now which of those stats will be used to demand that Raul be released immediately and/or is a hero.

The pitching actually linked up with the key hits and together, they made a win.  Cole Hamels was the author, though he seemed to feel okay about ruining everything in the 6th when he walked Victor Martinez on 15 pitches to give the Sox a viable scoring threat with one out.  And then Adrian Beltre–that’s highest-Sox-BA-sensitive-scalped Adrian Beltre–was up, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity for some terrible thing to happen.

Somehow, Cole (7 IP, 5 H, 1 ER, 2 BB, 8 friggin K) got the hottest bat in the lineup to strike out and we all lived happily ever after.

Until the 9th inning, when J.C. Romero and Brad Lidge orchestrated a tag team of “WTF” moments that made the photographer of this picture look like a straight shooter.

Runs, hits, and walks stretched the inning far past its due date.  Every time I looked up Jayson Werth was retrieving a ball out of the right field corner.  David Ortiz and friends skipped two more runs across the plate before finally, Lidge got Marco Scutaro to sky a pop up and pointed at it desperately from the mound.  And the bleeding stopped.

Next, this parade of nightmares goes through Minnesota and New York, and then Cleveland, which are two series that could prove just as impossible as this one did.  And one against Cleveland.

We even got to see some of that timely, appropriate Cole Hamels humor:  “I probably should have drilled [Adrian Beltre] on the first pitch.  Just kidding.”

That’s funny.  That’s Brett Myers funny.  And what we need more than ever right now, in the wake of this ridiculous month, is to smile, because if you we are going to get slaughtered by the Yankees and it is stopping me from getting any sleep.  I’m sorry that sentence became another sentence about halfway through but that’s the type of fear it is.

The Yankees are playing Class A ball right now, too, but that’s the thing.  They’ll be playing us, so they won’t really have to.  They could come into the series with two starters tied behind their back and it’d still be a pretty tight matchup.  We’ve seen that putting Doc on the mound isn’t a one-way ticket to Victory Boulevard–he can apparently get every single hitter out and it will still have no overall affect on the club’s performance.

This comeback, whenever it gets here, will have to be epic to make up for the lost ground.  Was this minor victory–I feel sort of compelled to label it more of a “reverse loss” than a “win” based on Werth’s little brain fart in right field alone–the start of it?  I don’t know, haven’t we been asking that after every win for the past four weeks?

I will say this, though. You do not want to let crisp Cole Hamels starts like this go to waste.  Don’t want his emotions taking over and putting a fastball in Adrian Beltre’s eye.  Apparently.

At least Pukemon’s still out there, learning his lesson.