Are we in store for another letdown with the Phillies?
June 16, 2007
| By Gavin Young
| 
Discuss
It's Sunday in the summer, and it's hot. Never mind the sun beating down through the window or the steam rising off the first summer's barbeque burger. It’s hot for a different reason. It's mid June and your prize possession of the afternoon, a Phillies victory, has slipped into some kind of morose nightmare that would rival anything Eli Roth has put out in the recent weeks. You know what I'm talking about. It wasn’t the Fahrenheit that made you sweat. It was the double-digit runs that the lowly Kansas City royals had amassed against our beloved baseball squad. A game that was easily in hand. A game that was winnable. A game that shouldn’t have been much more than an afterthought. A minor speed bump between the recent Mets sweep and the ensuing White Sox sweep. Here you sit watching, and you are terrified.
With every crack of the Royals’ bats, with every run that is tacked onto the score box, with every demoralized sigh; you see it happen all over again. Like every summer before, you watch and wait for the meltdown. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the upsetting feeling of watching your favorite ball club struggle from out of its early season slump only to be hammered in such a fashion that would even make iron Mike Tyson cringe. From there the season seems to double over and lay down. Another season squandered, another post season spent at home.
After all it wasn’t necessarily the most convincing run a team has had in the MLB. Sure the Phils had some exciting times. Walk-off homers, late inning heroics and games won in extra innings. They sure didn’t make it boring for the average fan sitting at home with his Steve Carlton jersey on. But to be honest, they also found themselves in precocious situations. Squandering leads, unable to drive in early runs, stranding runners on the bases. Late inning heroics became the staple of the past week and a half because that was what is required to win when you don’t dominate from the opening pitch.
In creeps the same underlying doubts; is the lineup top-heavy? Does the pitching suffer from the same problem? Are the injuries mounting with Brett, Flash and Freddy off the field? Are the struggles of June going to hamstring us come September and October? Soon after the trade deadline, ideas will start to fly and all baseball as we know it in this town will once again be thrown into speculative anarchy.
But hold on, stop worrying. Maybe not all is lost. Before this weekend's slip up the city had already begun to crown their favorite ball team as the eventual NL champs. We had the Mets shaking in their spikes and we had the rest of the league on notice of our heavy bats and sure-handed young ace. But now it’s wake up call time. Now the team has to be reminded that nail biters are exciting to the fans but not the way that championships are won. Perhaps what we have been doing squeaks out wins, but with Myers and Gordon returning and the batting order getting its hits, now isn’t just the time to win but the time to turn on the juice. Because a rout in any baseball game isn’t exciting, but it sure does fill the trophy case quite well.
