Results tagged “Phillies” from The Sports Desk

I blame the Boston Red Sox. When they won the 2004 World Series, it was their first championship in 86 supposedly cursed seasons, and writers and broadcasters correctly jumped all over the story of the long-disappointed baseball town's relief.

But that story sold too well, and now it seems like the "first title in X years" angle has to be the one anybody writes and talks about when a team wins a World Series or other sports championship.

The Philadelphia Phillies' World Series victory is their first in 28 years (and their second ever). Yeah, OK, but is that really such news?

Since baseball returned from the 1994-95 strike with a new playoff format, the World Series winners have included the Red Sox as well as the White Sox (first title in 88 years), Braves (81 years), Cardinals (24 years), Yankees (18 years), Angels (first title ever), Marlins (first title ever) and Diamondbacks (first title ever).

World Series winners ending long droughts are the rule rather than the exception. In the same recent span, the Red Sox won twice in four years, the Marlins won twice in seven years, and the Yankees won three years in a row.

I can only compare it to what happens in the NCAA basketball tournament every year, when journalists react with gleeful surprise that a Cinderella story develops. Hey, you put 64 teams in a single-elimination tournament, and one of them is bound to go a couple of rounds farther than expected.

A team that hadn't won since the Carter Administration has won it all. What else is new?

If these are the new Dodgers, not the pre-September Dodgers, then they have every chance of winning this game the Phillies once led 8-2. The Dodgers have scored 9 or more runs four times in the past 11 games, after doing it zero times in the previous 44. Most relevant, as I write this with the Phillies leading 8-5 in the middle of the fifth inning, in four of those recent high-scoring games, they scored four, five and six runs from the seventh inning on.

USA Today columnist Christine Brennan says there's something wrong with the playoff format when the teams with the best records over a 162-game schedule (Angels, Cubs) are knocked out in best-of-five first-round series while the club with the 15th-best record (Dodgers) is four wins from the World Series. Chris says it would help if baseball went back to two divisions in each league, the top two teams from each division advancing.

One reason short series can produce odd results in baseball is things like we saw in the first half-inning of the Dodgers-Phillies series a few minutes ago. Manny Ramirez's RBI double stayed in Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia because it struck near the top of the 19-foot-tall wall and screen 409 feet from home plate and just to the left of dead-center field. It's a home run if it flies a bat-length to the right, where it would easily clear a 6-foot-high wall.

Random happenings like that are part of the game and ballpark architects' fetish for weird nooks and crannies, imitations of old parks in which odd dimensions often were dictated by available space. You hope the randomness evens out. But in a short series, you never know.

Further thought: It's not often that tiny Citizens Bank Park prevents a home run. I came across this quote from Atlanta pitcher John Smoltz about the way the Philly park was built: "I don't know if you can even call it a baseball field. Whatever dimensions they have posted, they aren't right. It's the worst decision ever made."

On Chris Matthews' "Hardball" a few minutes ago, Philadelphia talk-show host and columnist Michael Smerkonish mentioned that he had just interviewed Barack Obama on the radio and asked the senator who he's for in the Phillies-Dodgers series.

"I got him to weigh in on Phillies-Dodgers. He's a Phillies man, so that scores big points," said Smerkonish, who was wearing a Phillies jacket on the MSNBC show.

The conversation among Matthews, Smerkonish and Pat Buchanan was mostly about John McCain's attempts to make Obama seem un-American. But now I'm wondering if it's true that Obama is rooting against the Dodgers. The voters demand answers!