In Mourning: The 2011 Philadelphia Phillies - It Wasn't Supposed to be This Way

I was in Manhattan at a friend’s apartment Friday night, October 7th. The Phillies were playing in their first decisive playoff game in my lifetime. They were playing at home. They had the best pitcher in baseball on the mound. We all know how it ended. I sat on the couch in silence staring at nothing for at least a half hour. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I shook it off eventually and continued with my weekend, but I knew the inner turmoil/anguish/depression and most of all an insane amount of disappointment, had yet to set in for real. It finally came when I was driving to my night class early Monday evening. I was listening to the end of the Mike Missanelli show on ESPN radio, which runs right into “Talking Baseball with Dutch.” The Eagles had lost their 4th straight game the day before, and each mounting loss seems to be more pathetic than the last, but that is not what was on the mind of the sports radio scene. The mighty 102-60 Philadelphia Phillies were on everybody’s mind. In four short games (the first one was pretty good) the Phillies offense went kaput, and so did all the hopes and dreams of the seemingly endless legion of red-wearing Phillies fans.

As I cruised down City Ave I felt serious pain for Dutch, Darren Daulton, the former Phillies catcher and heart of the 1993 NL Champion Phillies. It was Monday night, and the second game of the NLCS was being played, but the Phillies were not there. This entire season was a crescendo to the playoffs, and before we even knew what hit us, the dream was snatched away like the Lindbergh baby. The whole (Phillies) nation is in mourning. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Instead of talking about how Cole Hamels was going to dominate a Brewers lineup with his changeup, Dutch had to talk about how the offense resembled a dead fish (and even that is putting it lightly) and every single person on the team (except Cole Hamels and Doc) coming up small. How.. could this have happened? I have had my trepidations about the Phillies offense for some time now, but when we picked up Hunter Pence in late July and finally got the entire offense back on the field for the end of the season I thought we would be fine, just fine. Man! Was I was wrong.

There are a litany of observations and questions I have about this series. I just need to get some things off my chest about how I feel about this debacle/collapse/performance.

I am not sure where everybody else stands on this, and I know the entire offense is the main goat of this series, but Cliff Lee f__ked up. He f__ked up bad. There we were in game two up 4-0 after two innings; Ryan Howard was clicking and so was the offense, to the tune of 15 runs in 11 innings. Howard had accounted for 8 of them with 6 RBI and 2 runs scored. I was at this game. The crowd was going wild in the first inning and the Phillies had every ounce of momentum in this series. Lee had basically been unhittable since July and the Phils were ready to rip Albert Pujols’ heart out of his chest, but it was not to be. You have to give the Cardinals and (I hate to say it) their manager Tony La Russa a serious amount of credit for clawing their way back for a game 2 win. In the top of the 4th inning, an inning in which La Russa pinch-hit for his starter, the Cardinals turned it into a game with 3 runs, 1 with 2 outs. No big deal I thought, the Phils will score more and Cliff will shut the door from here. Logic would have you think that the Phillies would win this game with the Cardinals needing 18 outs from their bullpen and Cliff Lee being Cliff Lee. Some how the offense took a nose-dive and managed to get two men on base in the next 6 innings, which was a serious foreshadowing of things to come. Lee continued to struggle and gave up the tying run in the 6th and the go-ahead run in the 7th. That was all she wrote for game 2. Brutal, absolutely brutal, the Phillies lost a game they led by 4 runs with a man on the mound that had not allowed more than 2 runs in his previous 10 starts, and in 5 of those 10 he did not allow a single run. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

How much pain was Placido Polanco playing in? We could talk about the other guys who straight up choked in this series (Ruiz, Ibanez, Pence) but think about Polanco here for a minute. Polly is a career .301 hitter. He hit .105 in the series and hasn’t driven a ball past an outfielder’s head since before Labor Day it seems. Apparently he was playing with a double (a double!) sports hernia. Has anybody ever had a hernia? Good God, they are painful, doubly painful in this case. Polanco is a gamer, I will give him that, but could Mike Martinez or Wilson Valdez have provided some sort of spark for this team? Polanco had two hits in the series. There was not much to lose by starting somebody else at third base in game 5. Just saying.

How hurt was Ryan Howard? After hitting one of the most impressive and important home runs of his career in game 1, and stroking a bases loaded single in the first inning of game 2, Ryan Howard forgot how to hit a baseball. How clueless is this guy against left-handed pitching? So clueless that Hunter Pence was intentionally walked in game 3 to get to Howard with men on first and second. So clueless that he (seemingly) likes to swing at balls and look at strikes. So clueless that my dad is constantly in my ear that Howard should be in a platoon for left-handed starters (he is due to make $125 million the next 5 years). So clueless you could switch him with this guy, and he would fit right in this movie. Having said all that, he had to have been playing in some serious pain right? For the second season in a row Ryan Howard was up with 2 outs and the season on the line. For the second season in a row, he did not come through. He hit a routine groundball into the shift and SNAPPED his Achilles tendon. What was up with his foot/heel/ankle problems over the last month of the season? I don’t think your Achilles tendon can just snap on a whim. He was playing baseball when he probably should not have been, and it is going to cost him the beginning of next season most likely. I cannot fault Ryan Howard for going Oh Ferrr his last however many at bats in this series. He had two of the three biggest hits in it, and that is a whole lot more than you can say for the rest of the position players.

How pathetic is the Phillies approach at the plate? Announcers, pundits, writers, and people who know the nuances of this game must sit there and shake their heads at the at-bats the Phillies offense puts together. There is obviously no strategy being employed with this offense, and I am not sure if it is lack of direction from the coaching staff, or a lack of discipline from the hitters, but I could have used a few Jayson Werth 13-pitch at bats in this series. For years and years Jimmy Rollins has been a professional about popping up foul during the second pitch of an at-bat. It is hard to say anything bad about Jimmy in this series, he had 9 hits (none in game 5), but why does he continue to not work counts? I am little tired of defending him by saying, “That’s just the way he is.” Obviously the approach the team had was not working so it would have been worth trying to work some counts for a change. Cardinals pitchers were virtually never threatened after the second inning of game 2. The Phils threw up 1-2-3 inning after 1-2-3 inning. In the final 34 innings of the series, the Phils went in order 19 times. 19 times!! You don’t need a calculator to know that Cardinals pitchers didn’t break a sweat during an inning more than 50% of the time. Not only did they go in order a lot, but it just seemed like at bats were over before they started. Cards pitchers got ahead early and the at bats rarely would go longer than 3 pitches. A lot of baseball is making the opposing team’s starter work hard to earn his outs, so that he will wear down and you can score runs because he cannot possibly stay sharp while constantly battling the hitters. I saw way too many innings pass where the pitcher threw less than 10 pitches. Pathetic!

On the flip side of this scenario, the Cardinals hitters were up to the task. The Cardinals were faced with a much more daunting task offensively than the Phillies but they took the Phils best punch and are still standing. They started the series with Lance Berkman crushing a 3 run home run in the first inning off Roy Halladay. This was the first 3 run home run Halladay had given up since 2008. You kiddin me? Regardless of the outcome of that game, the Cardinals could walk away from that game knowing they got to Roy Halladay. Serious confidence boost. One thing that stood out to me was the Cardinals hitters’ ability to continuously foul off 2 strike pitches. Halladay, Lee, and Hamels all know how to put hitters away. If not for Hamels missing a few starts, all three would have had 200 strikeouts this year. They may have eventually gotten their strikeouts, but the Cards hitters made them work by constantly fouling off two strike pitches. The Phillies, on the other hand, did not seem to know how 2 strike foul balls work. They give you another chance for the pitcher to make a mistake. If you keep giving yourself the opportunity to come through, chances are you will be able to. I can’t come up with a word that will clearly describe my thoughts on this matter. It is a combination of words that emit emotion: Pathetic. Sad. Maddening. Frustrating. Insane. Gross. Awful. Yikes. Put those all together, close your eyes, and put your head down in shame. After being the better team in every series they played all year, the Phils were not the best team in this series.

What does this terrible outcome mean to a passionate fan? The bottom line about sports is that they do not really matter. If your job sucked on Friday when you left, then your job probably will still suck when you get in on Monday (and vice versa). The difference is when the Phillies win a game, or a postseason series, your job, or your girlfriend/boyfriend trouble, or your daddy issues, or your relationship with your sister, or your credit card debt, or your school loans, just do not seem like as much of a burden, or less of a burden anyway. There is no tangible effect that the Phillies have on your life per se. What they do have is the ability to make you forget about all the bullshit in your life and concentrate on something that you care about that makes you happy. The load you are carrying around in your head seems a little bit lighter when Cliff Lee is on the mound. You expect good things to happen when Cole Hamels comes out in the first inning and makes hitters look foolish flailing away at his changeup. Your heart skips a beat when you see the ball rocket out of your television screen as Ryan Howard drops his bat, dips his shoulder, and admires a moon-shot home run. You are happy for a 3 hour-distraction that can make everybody else around you feel good too. You were happy looking forward to meaningful baseball games. You always want something good to look forward to; it makes life worth living. Of course, all of the opposite is true for this when they lose. The insane amount of build up and expectation for this postseason was not like anything we as fans have experienced with a baseball team (see the Eagles from 2002-2004 for a Philadelphia team to have this kind of experience). So we got up and went to work on Monday morning. When I go over the events in my life of the past few days and my mind lands on the Phils, wow, it just makes my heart sink. So, as much as I can I just try to not think about this carbuncle. It took me 5 days to even have the gumption to start writing this piece. It hurts, not physically, but in every possible way mentally.

I feel the same way Bill does at the end of this scene.

I just keep thinking to myself. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.