That Balls Outta Here » 1993

Somebody Finally Arrested Lenny Dykstra

Justin Klugh — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 17:20:50 +0000

Once upon a time, Lenny Dykstra was a cool guy.

He had a fun nickname. He ran around everywhere. He wore hip hats for appearances on David Letterman. He was “…always on base, always stirring up trouble,” as Harry Kalas put it.

And he went from second in NL MVP voting to an easy target for the bloggers faster than he could have said “What is a blog and why do you want to put me in one?” in 1993. Just kidding. He’d have said, “Yes, put me in your blog. It will cost you $3,000 and I get to come to your house whenever I want and get more money from you. And also let me park my boat in your driveway.”

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Harry Kalas and Whatever It Takes, Dude

Justin Klugh — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 16:00:06 +0000

I commemorated Harry’s death last night by digging through a plastic bin of Xbox games and DVDs I don’t watch anymore (Who bought Spider-Man 3 and put it in a collection of all of my belongings?!) and finding the VHS copy I have of “Whatever It Takes, Dude,” the 1993 Phillies video retrospective narrated by HK and Lenny Dykstra.

Harry is, of course, at home in the voiceover booth, cradling each sentence in his dulcet voice before laying it down comfortably to rest in your ears. Lenny sounds like he’s falling down a never ending staircase.

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Oh, There’s the Playoffs!

Justin Klugh — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 05:20:26 +0000

Forget everything I said yesterday. I know there’s a lot of you out there hanging on my every word, but just forget it. Erase it. Its gone.

Watching the Tigers-Twins one game playoff was everything you would need to be reminded that baseball is a chess game being played on a battleship in the middle of a firestorm.

I don’t even care about this race too much and I felt like a guy waiting to hear how somebody’s surgery went.

It’s great to be a playoff team.

Growing up, post-’93, we were never there. I was always watching other teams play in October. The Phillies were on all through the summer, and that was fine, but when it started getting colder, it was that bullshit period where the only teams on were the Yankees and Braves.

Years and years this went on, until 2007, when I couldn’t actually believe what I was seeing. Like I had snuck into a party I had no business being at.

And then, it turned out, I didn’t, and it was a quick October followed by a very, very, long winter.

So it seems appropriate that again, we took the division title. Again, we’ll be up against a Rockies team that had to try their darndest to get here, and again, I’ll be sitting in the upper deck for the first of what I can only hope is a whole bunch of playoff games.

"Here's a free one," Cliff Lee said to the Rockies leadoff hitter. "Everything after this will be blurry."

Phils-Rockies, 2:30pm, Citizens Bank Park, Cliff Lee vs. Ubaldo Jimenez