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…)

Bureaucratist’s Eagles-Phillies Comparisons in Which Children Are Not Lied To

I can’t sleep, despite almost a bottle of Argentina Cab, two days of nonstop marijuana, two carisoprodol, and a handful of Tylenol PM.  I doubt it is the excitement of this afternoon’s loss to the Cowboys, although the quarterback’s scrambling attempts on the late game’s most crucial plays probably aren’t helping.

I say “attempt” because it is difficult to look your daughter in the eye after calling what Kolb did a “scramble.”  One does not “scramble” when it appears as though there are concrete blocks attached to one’s feet.  One must tell the truth to the children.

Item:  I do not have a daughter. (more…)

Go Phils.

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