This Just In: Professionals Still Somewhat Better Than Amateurs!

Baseball's back! In an exhibition game yesterday, the Phillies beat the Florida State Seminoles 6-1. The game was tied until the seventh inning which started with back-to-back hits by Pete Orr and Eric Kratz. Other highlights of the game included the first hit of the season for the Phillies by some dude named Tuffy Gosewisch, Hector Luna's two-run blast, and eight scoreless innings pitched by young arms hoping for AAA date cards. From the regular guys, Hunter Pence chimed in with a double in the fourth inning and Domonic Brown hit Big Truck's big truck during batting practice earlier in the day.

I know, I know. Exhibition games against college teams don't really matter to anyone outside of that young or old pitcher given a shot at the majors and the 2009 Manatee Community College baseball team that beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 6-4. I'm just happy to read a fresh box score.

Tune in this Saturday as the Phillies take on the Yankees who once played an exhibition game against my own hometown's heroes, the 1947 Waterbury Timers. It won't be '47 Phil Rizzuto, Yogi Berra, and Joltin' Joe or the '09 Manatees against Cole and the Gang, but it'll still be a good sneak peek of baseball to come!

Any predictions on who will be the team to beat in 2012? Greg Dobbs has already done J-Roll's whole "we're the team to beat" schtick which I'm pretty sure won't work twice. Leave it in the comments!

Jayson Werthless

There was a time not too long ago when I was sitting with my brother in the bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium listening to chants of "Werthless" directed toward right field. My brother is a Yankee lover despite the fact that he has no problem matching the baseball cap of any AL or NL team to whatever color polo shirt he's wearing. I will never understand this phenomenon in bro fashion, but I have to admit that while morally questionable, his wall of caps is pretty impressive. His bedroom is just like Lids if Lids smelled like Axe and had a bed in the center of it. My brother wisely chose to go with one of his many Yankees caps that day while I donned my beat-up Phillies cap. I felt like Elaine Benes at Yankee Stadium, booed as much as Jayson Werth while returning to my seat with a birthday Bud Lite for my favorite Yankee bro.

While Phillies fans are infamous booers and will probably greet the new Natty beau (heh, see what I did there?) with louder rounds of boos than the Yankees did, they have their reasons. The Yankees fans that surrounded me that day were itching to boo anything that wasn't branded with a Yankee symbol. This included Jayson Werth, me, and could have included my Yankee brother had he chosen a different shirt/hat combo. The bleacher creatures of Yankee Stadium do not discriminate. Their chants of "Werthless" upset me, and not because I was a Phillies fan, but because they were unfocused and followed by chants of "you suck" at all things non-Yankee. That said, I don't think that Werth will be received kindly when Philadelphia takes over Nationals Park today, but at least there will be a method to the Phillies fan's madness.

I used to like Werth. I was sad to see him go. I almost cried when he talked about noticing the change in leaves for the first time after returning from 2010's loss to the Giants in the NLCS, and that whole "this is definitely not the same game I played in my grandparents' backyard as a kid" bit. Then the man chose money over baseball while his buddy Cliff did the opposite, and went on to pout for months about how he was on one of the worst teams in baseball. Werth was then caught swinging a bat while saying, "I hate the fucking Phillies." Of course the fans are going to turn. To quote Nadine's own father: "I have a bounty on Jayson Werth's head. 500 bucks to the first person to hit him with a battery."

Werth's obviously not over us either. In his first game with the Nationals, he chose "November Rain" by Guns N' Roses as his at-bat music:

Cause nothin' lasts forever and we both know hearts can change

It's hard not to read more into that. It's like watching John Cusack hold up a boombox outside a window in Say Anything. Werth's trying to tell us something. "November Rain" is an epic ballad about the misery of a former rock star reminiscing over a past relationship that ends in suicide—a newly married bride's gunshot to the head. In the music video, she kind of reminds you of newly married to the Nationals Werth, but then again, so does the down and out Axl Rose and the lost in the desert Slash wailing on guitar. After all, November was when the Phillies gave Werth an offer that he turned down to become a free agent. Either way, it will be interesting to see how this soap opera plays out. I know that Charlie's ready for Werth, as he was recently quoted saying, "I’ll be on him. I’ll be getting on him. I’ll be getting on J-Dub. I’ll be hollering at him."

As for me, I'm just happy that Ben Francisco's been doing such a great job in right field since we lost Werth, who truly wasn't worthless to the Phillies at all. He played great baseball here—hit home runs, dove for balls, had interesting facial hair. However, one area where Benny excels and is continuing to excel compared to Werth is hitting with runners in scoring position (RISP).

So the real question is, to boo or not to boo Werth in the April rain? It's hard to hate Werth all that much. Maybe Axl Rose is right: "everybody needs some time on their own."

The He-Man Brew that the Gals Love Too!

Philadelphians love drinking beer. Heck! They love drinking period. They even have self-declared holidays centered around the sport like Philly Beer Week, and Philly Beer Year, which lasts for an entire year after the Phillies win or don't win the World Series.

This Ortlieb's ad from an old Phillies' scorecard and those billboards for Miller Lite and the Iggles got me thinking about what the beer of the Phillies should be. While lager means Yuengling here and the special (PBR + whiskey) is known citywide, I'd like to think that we could do better than that. Philadelphia's a land of microbreweries and dive bars and microbrew-stocked dive bars, and CBP probably has the best stadium beer selection ever. Even the Yankees have a beer, $10 Bud Lite based on last year's trip to Yankee Stadium, so why shouldn't we? Feel free to chime in here about your favorite ballgame libations and what you think the unofficial beer of the Philadelphia Phillies should be.

Also, check out this dude's flickr page for more neat Phillies stuff like this old Tastykake ad and sweet cover of the '77 Phillies yearbook.

Radio Days

Opening day cannot come soon enough. With more cold on the way and the most depressing day of the year still to come (January 24th or Blue Monday which is a "scientific fact" according to the internet and New Order), I've begun counting down the days, hours, and seconds until the Phils take on the Astros at 1:05 PM on April 1st.

Thanks to the folks over at The700Level and those awesome dudes on 610 WIP, the wait for April has become slightly more bearable due to this wonderful audio montage of Phillies highlights from 2010.

While the ending does not change no matter how many times you play it through (I'm on my fifth listen and Howard's still watching that meatball go by), it's bound to get you pumped about 2011 as memories of 2010 loop in your head.

Call me old fashioned, but there's something special to be said about radio. Seriously. Radio's great. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to experience the first half of the winning World Series game for the 2008 Phils during the most poorly timed power outage of all time, or have been able to ignore those annoying announcers on TBS and FOX during last year's postseason. Oh, and I will never forget driving into work last month sipping my coffee, watching the snow fall, and listening to an excited Philadelphia call into the 610 morning show with Angelo Cataldi after the Cliff Lee news hit. "Those fat Yankees fans will be eating flapjacks this morning, drowning their sorrows in carbohydrates," he said. Ah, the memories.

Baseball man Bill Veeck once said, "There are only two seasons- winter and Baseball". This is ringing especially true in the coldest and most depressing of months and in the wake of how the Birds played last night. So until opening day, it's going to be a lot of sitting around with my coffee and the radio, daydreaming about the Phillies of yesteryear.

Hearts On Fire, Strong Desire

I miss you, Philadelphia. Since I moved in with you just five short years ago, my childhood bedroom in Connecticut has slowly morphed into a storage room for old perfume bottles, partially rewound VHS tapes, and terrible CDs from the mid to late 90s. It's kind of like the box of stuff you'd return to an ex if you hadn't taken a baseball bat to it first. Someone even tacked up a 1999 World Series pennant in here. The Yanks walloped the Braves in four games that year, while '99 for the Phils went from "promising to disastrous in the blink of an eye" (probably explains why it was also the year those batteries were thrown).

So as I sit here, in the room of my former self, awaiting this week's return to the land of late night pretzels, mummers, and these guys, I'm forced to reconcile with the fact that I once rooted for the team that won the pennant in 1999, the same team that beat the Phils in the 2009 World Series and that Cliff Lee didn't want to play for next season. But, hey. I had no choice. I was born into a Yankees family from central Connecticut, a no mans land for professional sports. (That is, since the Whalers left in 1997, and despite how much Connecticut folks still talk about missing the Whale and their sweet logo, I was always under the impression that they considered UCONN more of a pro team.)

I stopped caring about the Yankees and baseball at some point in the early 2000s when everyone got really into drinking steroid cocktails and bathing themselves in money (here's to you, Jason Giambi). Before that, I saw the Yanks as any kid saw the team they grew up with, as a bunch of good dudes that enjoyed the game - dudes like young Andy Pettitte, acoustic guitarist Bernie Williams, and old man Paul O'Neill that always got up to bat with the biggest smile on to "Baba O'Riley" by the Who. When I moved to Philadelphia in 2005, most of the good dudes were gone and I found myself without a team and no longer able to relate to the Yankees or New York. That's where Philadelphia came in, and shortly after my move, I officially dumped the pretty boy Yanks for the working class Phils, Steff from Pretty in Pink for Rocky.

That's not to say that I grew up not caring about the Phillies or hating the Mets. My family was a bigger fan of baseball than they were of the Yankees, and in '99 we payed close attention to the Phillies because of one player that grew up close to my hometown named Rico Brogna. Check out Rico as a baby.

Rico mysteriously disappeared from baseball two years after what was a pretty good year with the Phils and inexplicably ended up at my high school coaching football. I really want to make a Gerardo joke here, probably because "Rico Suave" would play in my head whenever Brogna and I crossed paths. I imagine that this happens to every girl that crosses paths with a dude lucky enough to be a Rico after 1990. Ah, "the price you pay for being a gigolo", but I digress.

I guess the point in all of this girl talk about dudes that play baseball, the good, the bad, and the suave, is that Rico was the first player that turned me on to Philadelphia. He was kind of like that dude that made you a great mix tape when you were fifteen and too stupid to know good music yet. When I moved to Philadelphia without a team in 2005, the rest was history. I found myself quickly falling in love with another team of good dudes that enjoyed the game. Jimmy and Chase and Ryan and Shane.

Sure, there are other great moments worth mentioning here that made me love the Phillies. Like that time an entire bar erupted into "High Hopes" after the Phillies beat the Reds in Game 2 of the NL Series this year. Or that time I was hanging out of a car on Broad Street screaming my lungs out about baseball and Tastykakes. We all have these moments, but ultimately the strong desire for the Phils that raged within, to paraphrase a song from Rocky IV, stemmed from my love for a bunch of good dudes like Rico.

Like blogging partner and fellow babe, Nadine, I'm a person that does not have any inside information on the Phillies. I'm a transplant to the city for Pete's sake. I'm just glad I didn't get kicked out yet. However, I do find myself constantly reading, posting, and sharing information about the Phillies, and until I figure out how to use my college degree in cognitive neuroscience to better understand why people love baseball as much as I do, I'll be doing this.

I originally wanted to make a Phillies blog titled "My Boyfriend, Charlie Manuel" in which I'd write about the Phillies from the perspective of Charlie Manuel's girlfriend - making him sleep on the couch during losing streaks and cooking him the juiciest of steaks after climbing space mountain to beat the Yankees. This just seemed a lot easier.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Until I see you later this week, Philadelphia, remember to keep checking the mail:

DEAR PHILADELPHIA,

YOU ARE... THIS IS...
I PROMISED MYSELF I WOULDN'T GET CHOKED UP.
I LOVE YOU.

XOXO,

LAUREN