Bird that Sings

October 14, 2010

Every Season tells a story#5/A tale of two cities revisited

Filed under: Sports,The Philadelphia Perspective,Uncategorized — Tags: , , — admin @ 10:55 pm

And then there were two.

Just as it’s finally cooling down in the East, it’s heating up on the West Coast after one of the coldest summers in memory. However the contrast between the baseball atmosphere around the San Francisco Giants versus that of the Philadelphia Phillies is less than the similarity.

While even contenders like Atlanta, Cincinnati and Tampa Bay struggled for attendance this year, in Philadelphia and San Francisco, sellouts and full houses were the rule.

Both Citizens Bank Park in Philly and AT&T Park in SF were more alive and vital than anywhere  west of the Last-Days-of-the-Raj grandeur of New Yankee Stadium with its six thousand dollar a game seats in the Legends-of- Investment Banking mezzanine and whispers of lap dancing and cocaine rimmed flutes of champagne in the VIP lounge.

The Yankees are an empire unto themselves, but more on that next week.

For now we’re looking at what promises to be a seriously competitive National League Championship Series.

Much has been made of the “year of the pitcher” in baseball, and while some of that may be due to the decline in the use of steroids and Human Growth hormone in the game, this series does feature the two best starting pitching staffs in the National League, and probably baseball.

Going into the Series, the Phillies have to be considered the favorite since they not only have the 3 Aces — Halladay, Oswalt and Hamels — going for them, they also have, when healthy, the best one through eight hitting line-up in the league.

The problem with being the favorite of course, especially in a tight Series with good pitching, is that the pressure is on the Phillies, while the underdog Giants are playing with house money.

The Giants start with their pitching and sometimes end there, but the result is that they’ve played a lot of very close games. In fairness, they’ve lost a lot of them too, but it hasn’t been the fault of their young starting rotation anchored by 26 year old, two time Cy Young Award winner, Tim Lincecum, 26 year old righthander, Matt Cain, and the sometimes erratic, 27 year old Lefthander, Jonathan Sanchez.

In fact the Giants, with their young front line pitching, along with their patchwork line-up and eccentric closer, Brian Wilson, remind me a little of the 1969 New York Mets.

1969 was the year the Mets shocked the world, winning the World Series behind 24-year-old future Hall of Famer Tom Seaver, 26 year old left hander Jerry Koosman, 22-year-old Gary Gentry and 24-year-old closer, Tug McGraw of blessed memory.

Like these Giants, those overlooked, lightly regarded Mets also featured a patchwork line-up built around two good players, left right fielder Cleon Jones (La note: thanks Dave Margolis) and center fielder Tommy Agee along with a cast of part timers; Art Shamsky, Ron Swoboda, Ed Kranepool, Donn Clendenon, Wayne Garrett, Ed Charles, a young Amos Otis, et al.

It must also be added that the 60’s were an era when Great Players roamed the earth, and like these 2010 SF Giants, the Mets didn’t have any.

These Giants do, however, have a lot of pieces. Aubrey Huff has always been a pretty good player and now is in the first post season of his career. Pat Burrell is as dangerous a power hitter as he was in Philadelphia, without the pressure of being a franchise player. Freddie Sanchez is not quite the player he was when he won a batting title with Pittsburgh in 2006 but is still an excellent contact hitter.

And rookie catcher Buster Posey is the real thing. If he doesn’t win Rookie of the Year, he got rooked.

The Giants can’t match the power of Philadelphia up and down the line-up. They don’t have a Chase Utley or for that matter a Ryan Howard, or a Jason Werth, but they have enough to win, especially if the Pitching match-ups work out in their favor.

We already got a glimpse of this with Giants manager Bruce Bochy and Pitching coach Dave Righetti flipping their starting rotation so that Jonathan Sanchez will pitch the second game of the series in Philadelphia, where he previously 2-hit the Phillies on August 19th.

It is entirely possible that Tim Lincecum could outpitch Roy Halladay in the first game of the Series and then Sanchez once more shut down the Phillies left handed loaded lineup. If so, the Giants would go back to San Francisco up by two.

For Phillies fans like myself, this is a scary prospect, but that’s why they play the games.

I say, the Phillies in six… or seven.

October 6, 2010

Every Season Tells a Story, Don’t it #4: The 3 Aces

Filed under: Sports,Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , — admin @ 6:01 pm

A good rule of thumb might be that anyone who says they know what’s going to happen in the National League playoffs doesn’t, but here are some things we do know.

The Phillies are the best team in the National League, and on those grounds you would think, the favorite to win the Pennant. However, the Phillies are also a team that can go mysteriously dead at any given time for no particular reason: a great team but a flawed team.

So, factoring in the Phillies’ unpredictability, there are two reasons to pick them to win.

The first is the humility factor.

The Phillies came out of Spring Training knowing they were the team to beat in the National League only to have the wheels come off in May.  After an unbelievable series of injuries and  slumps left the team adrift in the doldrums of mid season, local sportswriters and fans pretty much wrote off the team for this year.

On July 21, the Phillies, who finished 97-64, were only two games over .500, at 48-46 and in third place behind the Braves and the Mets. And not only were they in third place but the injuries in particular at that point seemed endemic; Chase Utley, out for seven weeks, Jimmy Rollins missing half the season with three different injuries, Placido Polanco on the disabled list, then coming back and actually playing through a broken elbow. On and on it went.

The reason for the Phillies’ humility then is that they pretty much had the arrogance knocked out of them this season. At this point they are happy just to be in the playoffs, and for a team with as much sheer ability as the Phillies, that kind of hunger and focus is going to make them hard to beat.

The other reason to pick the Phillies over the Cincinnati Reds in the first round has to be The Three Aces.

Philly will open the series with probable National League Cy Young award winner, Big Roy Halladay facing Edinson Volquez, back with the Reds after losing a year and a half to Tommy John surgery.

Game 2 is scheduled to feature little Roy, Roy Oswalt, pitching for the Phillies against one-time Boston Red Sox 4th starter, Bronson Arroyo.

The first game in Cincinnati will feature 2008 World Series hero Young Cole Hamels vs. Johnny Cueto for Reds.

Nothing against any of the three Reds starters: They are all good pitchers, but the Three Aces of the Phillies have the pitching match-up advantage over the Reds in each game of these playoffs.  Especially since, if the Series goes to games 4 and 5, the Phillies are going to come back with Halladay in game 4 and Oswalt — the team’s best pitcher down the stretch — in game 5.

The Reds’ strength is their offense led by potential National League MVP Joey Votto, and they certainly have a hitter’s chance. Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if this Series goes the full five games, but as a Phillies fan, I’m hoping for the Phils in four.

In the other National League first-round series, the Braves vs. the Giants, the Giants should win on their superior offense, especially as it’s been bulked up by mid and late season acquisitions such as Pat Burrell, Jose Guillen, Cody Ross, and the very recent return to form by last year’s Rookie sensation, third baseman Pablo “the Panda” Sandoval.

In a short series, the Braves’ starting pitching is at least as strong as the Giants and their bullpen probably better, but on the strength of the Giants’ offense as well as home field advantage, gotta take the Giants, in five.

But like the man said, I don’t know nothing.

October 2, 2010

The Brother Miliband

Filed under: Politics,Uncategorized — Tags: , — admin @ 2:22 pm

 “The desired effect is what you get when you practice your interplanetary funksmanship”—George Clinton

Though I can think of a few people funkier than the Miliband brothers, David and Ed, it is indisputable that their contest for the leadership of British Labour Party created, in the end, the desired effect for the Party, measurably strengthening it for the struggles ahead.

The central dilemma for Labour Party members in this election was whether to support David Miliband, the most credible and accomplished candidate in the field — who also conducted the broadest and most interesting campaign — knowing that by electing him Leader, they risked revivifying the now discredited New Labour, Blairite establishment of the Party.

Astonishingly, and by a very, very slim margin, the Labour Party said no, implicitly rejecting the old status quo. Instead they elected the younger brother, Ed Miliband, less because of who he is, than what he’s not.

In his acceptance speech Tuesday, Ed Miliband, echoing John F Kennedy, declared that he was in fact the candidate of a new generation, and that New Labour is dead. Whatever his failings, Mili-E is certainly correct about these twined suppositions.

For me personally however, the most interesting part of the speech was where Mili-E begins to hold forth about Values.

“I believe in responsibility in every part of our society . . .

What does it say about the values of our society, what have we become, that a banker can earn in a day what the care worker can earn in a year?

I say: responsibility in this country shouldn’t just be about what you can get away with.

And that applies to every chief executive of every major company in this country.

And, just as businesses have responsibility to ensure fair pay, so those who can work have a responsibility to do so…

…Work is a central part of life. But it is not all that matters.

We all care about making a living but we don’t just care about that.

Here is our generation’s paradox: the biggest ever consumers of goods and services, but a generation that yearns so much for the things that business cannot provide…

…New Labour embraced markets in our economy and was right to do so.
But let’s be honest, we became naïve about them.

We must never again give the impression that we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

In eschewing ideological politics for the politics of values, it is not so much JFK that Miliband is invoking but Robert Kennedy: yes, the younger brother. And the red thread that runs through the values argument is not the Socialist argument of Ralph Miliband, the Jewish immigrant Marxist father of the brothers, but rather a strain of radical Catholic thought that also ran through Robert Kennedy’s late political framework.

For a politician who will need to confront both the hegemony and destructive immorality of the world political-economic order as well the furious, defeated neo-liberal wing of his own Party, this is a clever stance, and it might just win the day for Ed Miliband.

It is also an argument tailor made for opposing the draconian budget cuts that the current Tory-Liberal government is about to implement even in the teeth of the ongoing long… recession. By this time next year, or even next spring, as the streets of British cities fill with rage and protest, it is the values argument against the immorality of a Finance driven system, utterly without them, that will hold sway on the streets of the UK.

September 14, 2010

A Tale of Two(or Three) Cities/Every season #3

Filed under: Sports,The Philadelphia Perspective,Uncategorized — admin @ 12:08 pm

As the requiem-for-Labor Day weekend drew to a close, the baseball pennant races in both Leagues kicked into gear, but especially in the National League, which appears to be where the action is this season.

In the East, the Phillies and Braves were locked in a Chinese death match, with the two teams still to play each other six more times– including the last three games of the season in Atlanta. In the Midwest, Cincinnati had pulled decisively ahead of St Louis, although the Cardinals remained in the hunt for the Wild Card. In the West, the San Diego Padres had come back to the pack with the Giants and the fatefully fast closing Colorado Rockies coming on.

A week later, there are now less than twenty games to go in the season, but in baseball, sometimes even ten games from the end, you still don’t know what’s going to happen.

Three years ago, the Phillies looked dead in the water when the Mets suddenly collapsed in the last two weeks of the season and the Phillies got to their first playoffs in years. Then in 2008, the Mets came out of Labor Day weekend up by two and half games, only to fade <em>again</em> as the Phillies rolled to their first World Championship since 1980.

On the other hand for Phillies fans, there will always be 1964: six games up with twelve games to go. Because of moments like September 1964 in the Phillies star-crossed history, this year’s abundantly-talented team is contending not only with Atlanta and the Wild Card contenders from the West, but with the ghost and demons of Phillies teams past.

Meanwhile, in the West, while the Padres are interesting because they came out of nowhere, and the Rockies because they mysteriously get hot every September, the team with the most to lose—and therefore the most interesting— are the San Francisco Giants.

At the turn of century, the Giants were a team built to win in their new “naming rights here” ballpark, and win they did. But as the great Barry Bonds slowly faded, GM Brian Sabean tried to build the team from the outside-in around Bonds, and it didn’t work. Now in their third Bonds-less season, the Giants have to win, or Sabean may be sayin’ goodbye.

By any measure though, the Giants GM has done a good job with this year’s team, piecing together a respectable offense out of a collection of prospects, spare parts and castoffs to go along with the already strong, young pitching.

This weekend was big for the Giants. They went into San Diego, took three out of four from the Padres and pulled into a mathematical tie for first place in the West.

The Giants had been out of the Division lead since the end of May. It should have been a triumphant moment, but on Sunday one of the key spare parts, 32 year-old Centerfielder Andres Torres, went down with a sudden case of appendicitis.

Previously pretty much of a career minor leaguer, Torres became the Giant’s spark this year: a base stealing, home run hitting lead-off man, whose speed in the outfield compensated for the incredible lead-footedness of fellow cast-offs Pat Burrell in Left and Jose Guillen in Right.

Losing Torres is bad, but even worse for the Giants is the irresistible, “who are those guys,” rise of the Colorado Rockies who have now won ten in a row, putting them a game and a half behind both San Francisco and San Diego.

The Giants play three more games with Rockies the weekend of September 24-26, and they better hope they can hold their own until then.

If I had to lay a wager today, I would bet on the Phillies to win the East, the Giants to win the West, Cincinnati in the Midwest and Colorado to take the Wild Card.

Perhaps fortunately for me, I don’t have the money to lose.

I’ve also made a personal decision to try and ignore the National Football League until the end of baseball season. I don’t know if this will make me a better person, but . . . it couldn’t hurt.

August 28, 2010

Every Season Tells a Story, Don’t it #2

Filed under: Sports,The Philadelphia Perspective,Uncategorized — Tags: , — admin @ 3:00 pm

While the rest of the country, not to mention the Northern Hemisphere, cooks in the cauldron of Climate-Change-Alert summer, this has been coldest summer in memory in the coastal towns and cities of the San Francisco Bay. That is until this week when an offshore flow more associated with September and October swept through and brought baseball weather to the cheering packed house down at 24 Willie Mays Plaza, home to the San Francisco Giants.

For the Giants, and certainly their General Manager Brian Sabean, this is a make or break season.

When the Giants played at Candlestick Park, on Candlestick Point, the coldest, most windswept, godforsaken spit of land in the State of California, the typically spare crowds were mostly hard-core and hard drinking.

Then in 2000, the Giants moved to Pac Bell Park, now meretriciously renamed AT&T Park.

In the new millennium, with Barry Bonds–love him or hate him, the greatest hitter of his era–breaking home run records, the Giants in contention, margaritas at the bar, Orlando Cepeda’s Caribbean Cha-Cha Bowls at his concession stand and the once nerdy tech guys and girls basking in their new found dot-com wealth, everyday at the new ballpark was a celebration.

Then came the dot-com crash and the failure of the Giants to win the World Series in 2002.  Bonds got old, then indicted and as Sabean desperately tried to build another contender around his aging superstar, it became clear that for ordinary players, it was really hard to hit home runs at Whatchamacallit Park.

The fans–new and old– went on the warpath, calling for Sabean’s head, but the GM was saved by the emergence of a young pitching staff headed by “The Freak,” Tim Lincecum, and his formidable partner, Matt Cain.

The pitching made the Giants a fashionable choice to take the NL West for the past two years, but the anemic hitting of the post Bond’s era continued, so this year, in mid-season, Sabean went on a wild binge.

He picked up Pat Burrell, the one time Phillies slugger, who had been released by Tampa Bay. He picked up Jose Guillen from the Royals, Mike Fontenot from the Cubs, and this week, Cody Ross, a solid hitter with some power from Florida.

They joined a cast, which, against all odds, was already potent, headed by Outfielder/first baseman Aubrey Huff, having the season of his career. There was career journeyman, Andres Torres, at 34, winning the Centerfield job from one time all-star Aaron Rowand. There was this year’s prize prospect, catcher Buster Posey to go along with last year’s prize prospect, 3rd baseman Pablo “The Panda” Sandoval.

Add to the mix, ex-batting champion, 2nd baseman Freddie Sanchez, and power and clutch hitting shortstop, Jose Uribe and suddenly these Giants had hitting up and down the line-up. They seemed ready to challenge the more than surprising San Diego Padres in the West.

However after losing 2 out 3 to San Diego in San Francisco, and then 2 out 3 in both Philadelphia and St Louis, the Giants came back home to play Cincinnati, a game behind Philadelphia in the Wild Card and 6 games behind San Diego in the West.

The Giants won the first two games of the series and were playing a day game Wednesday afternoon. I was out myself: I needed to go food shopping and was walking over to my first appointment with the local CityCarShare, which I joined after my wife totaled our car. It was still hot, but the weather was already changing. You could feel a slight breeze and smell a hint of the Bay.

I found the reserved car just where it was supposed to be and put the electronic sensor up the window: nothing happened.

I walked home and turned on the game.

The Giants were down 10-1. I went to make lunch . . . and the Giants started rallying. They scored two in the bottom of the 5th, two in bottom of the 6th and then six in the bottom of the 8th to go ahead 11-10.

The fans were going nuts.

Meanwhile Atlanta had lost a 10-1 lead in Colorado, losing their third game in a row, this one 12-10. This was good because my team, the Phillies, had just lost the night before at home in sixteen innings and were chasing Atlanta in the East while trying to stay ahead of the Giants in the Wild Card.

You’re not supposed to lose extra inning games at home when you come from nine runs down to go ahead, but on Wednesday afternoon the Giants did, losing to the Reds, 12-11. Then the Phillies lost that night, at home, 3-2, behind their ace Roy Halliday. Then the Phillies lost again today–four in a row at home to the out of it Astros– while the Giants were off.

It’s now late Thursday afternoon and the fog’s rolling over San Francisco, that sad, gray city as Jack Kerouac once wrote.

The Phillies are flying to San Diego to play the Padres tomorrow. The Giants are hoping that one of them loses, and everybody’s starting to worry about Colorado.

There’s five and a half weeks left to play in the season.

To paraphrase Curtis Mayfield, gotta keep on pushin’.

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