Well, now you don’t have to keep going to the Phillies’ website and watching clips from games they played back in July, basking in the warmth of knowing that victory is assured because you’re watching a game that already happened.  This sport is quite enjoyable when you remove all elements of mystery and drama.

Which is why you and everyone you know will probably freak out when I tell you that the Phillies finally released their 2011 video yearbook, Making History. (more…)

Is Oswalt having as much fun as the final few months of last season?

“Yeah,” he said flatly.

It was an unconvincing answer…

–Matt Gelb, Philly Inquirer

We’ve been calling the guy “Lil Roy” for months and we’re just now suspecting that he’s irritated?  There’s pictures of this guy on the internet holding a deer carcass by the horns and not smiling.  He might actually hate us right now.   (more…)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The 2011 PHREAK SHOW, where people who know and don’t know anything about the Phillies are brought together to create a thunderstorm of guest blogging, lightning strikes of nostalgia, and relentless downpours of snarky comments.

Today, we open our celebration with an old friend:  Bureaucratist.  Hello, Bureaucratist.  Please water us with your thoughts.

FEAR AND REMEMBERING IN PHILADELPHIA

by Bureaucratist

It is a strange, disorienting time to be a Phillies fan.

I was born in 1975, on a significant historical anniversary, just as the baseball season was beginning. (Mike Schmidt would go on to hit his 500th homer on my twelfth birthday.) Through 1983, the Phillies and their Eagle/Sixer/Flyer brethren enjoyed a run of success that shaped my life as surely as the Delaware shapes New Jersey.  In those eight years, my four hometown teams made the playoffs in 27 out of 36 possible seasons, with championships for everyone but the Eagles (of course).

The names associated with those teams are still like magic to me, like giants out of fairy tales:  Schmidt, Carlton, Rose (oh, yes–Pete Rose will always be a Phillie to me), McGraw, Luzinski, Jaworski, Bergey, Montgomery, Carmichael, Erving, Malone, Cheeks, Clarke (who lived down the street from me), the messianic Parent.  What a roll call, and I tingle even now, three decades on, alone in my crappy studio apartment, naked from the waist up with my gut spilling over the top of my pajama pants at two in the afternoon, to the thrill of recall.

But memory is so strange.  Do I really remember sitting in the Samolis’ living room in Deptford, New Jersey, in October 1980 as the room exploded to its feet when Rose snatched Bob Boone’s bobble out of the foul air? or Kenny King’s 80-yard initiation of disappointment in Super Bowl XV? Or even Moses Malone’s famous “Fo’ fo’ fo’,” uttered when I was eight years old?  Surely this is is old enough to remember specifics.  Surely my insatiety for breathless children’s athletic biographies complemented my memories but did not create them.  Surely this strength I feel, this sense of destiny, this certainty that I am a winner, is real, as real as my DNA of which it seems a part.

It must be so, for even now, after all this time, there remains an irrational part of me that cannot understand how anyone could deny that the Philadelphia teams are quite literally and objectively the best teams ever. (more…)