Choking on the Whine

I write this for all the whiny WIP fanboys who will be up early this morning pissing and moaning about how the Phillies choked last night.

You know who you are. You are the 35-year-old wankers who lived in mommy's basement like spoiled brats until the age of about 27, when you finally moved out and got your new yuppy apartment and your meaningless corporate cush job that pays you way too much, where you use a lot of buzzwords to make yourself sound smart in your endless meetings. 

You are the little punks who got your participation trophy at age 12 despite the fact that your crappy little league baseball team went 1-11. That's the last time you played any kind of baseball, let alone the competitive kind where you stand 60'6" from a big, mean, talented SOB who's only goal is to get your skinny butt out even if it means throwing a pitch right down your throat. 

Lesson are learned, my immature friends, when you LOSE. Any moron can win. It's easy to win. Everybody smiles, hoists up glasses, brags, and goes home happy. 

When you lose, you see someone's true character. Do they handle it with grace and thoughtfulness or do they, like you, call out their teammates and whine on the radio like babies for weeks on end?

The Phillies stomped a Marlins team that was simply not ready for prime time (hint: they likely WILL be next year). They then rose up and beat a Braves team they had no business beating, a team that was talented and deep, but whose pitching happened to be thin at the wrong time (just like the Dodgers, amazingly).

They beat the Braves in a pressure-cooker situation in which they played pretty good baseball in a short series. There were cracks in the façade even then, which you would have noticed if you were really paying attention, but I'm sure you were too busy celebrating, name-calling, and pounding your hollow chests. 

So here in the midst of your arrogant reverie come the Arizona Diamondbacks, a team that is well-coached, young, hungry, and on a post season roll, playing well at the perfect time. To opine that the Phillies easily navigated the pressure cooker of the Braves series, but then "choked" against the lesser known Diamondbacks just doesn't make an ounce of sense.

The Phillies got the best of them early, but even in those moments the DBacks were learning where the chinks in the armor were and how to penetrate the fortress.

The Phillies were out-pitched, out-run, out-fielded, and out-hit over the next four of five games. They were solidly beaten by a team that was simply playing better than them. The better team won no matter how you wanna rationalize it. 

Guys like Costellanos and Turner went cold at a bad time, helped along by a Diamondbacks pitching staff that was consistently on point but for a few instances. Harper had several key at-bats where he JUST missed and left balls on the warning track instead of in the seats. Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in professional sports, which is why the very best players in the world fail 70% of the time. 

Have YOU ever been in an ill-timed baseball slump, jackals? I'll answer for you: no, you haven't been. 

Well, it's a frustrating, horrible, helpless feeling. The baseball somehow shrinks. The bat you've held in your hands for something like 100 years suddenly feels like a foreign object. Every first pitch is a strike. Every close pitch goes against you. Every pitch they throw you is perfect. You feel like you'll never get another hit. 

There is only one way to get past it: time and extra hitting. Do that and eventually everything will go back to normal again. The bat will once again be your friend. The pitchers will return to their prior status of "human" rather than superhuman. And the world will be right again. 

Unfortunately for Nick and Trea, this absolution will come too late. The series is over, the season is over, and the anguish of a long winter spent wondering what could have been lays ahead like a deep fog just around the bend. 

My message to you idiots is simple: grow up. There are times in life when you lose. You don't have to like it, but you have to accept it and learn from it. Then you have to figure out what steps you need to take to keep it from happening again. 

That's what the Phillies will be doing in the months to come: figuring out what they need to do to prevent this from happening again. They'll be doing this while you guys are on the radio whining like babies, calling Craig Kimbrel names, blaming the manager for the players' performance, and generally embarrassing yourselves. 

The manager is not at fault in this. He wrote the same names down in April as he wrote down in October. There were no magic potions he could have pulled out to stop this. Arizona played good. The Phillies played bad. They lost. It happens. Live with it. 

I was here in '64. I was here in '77 & '78. I was here in '83. I was here in '09. I know the pain and suffering of being a Philadelphia Phillies fan, and yes, I also reveled in those couple of successes we had in 1980 and 2008. But I will wake up tomorrow and still be a Philadelphia Phillies fan. It's what I am, and no amount of disappointment is going to change that simple fact. 

I hope you guys eventually grow up and learn how to lose gracefully. With me, it did come with age. In my youth, I was as big a hothead as anyone, and every loss was like a thorn in the bottom of my foot. But I eventually realized that losing, like death itself, is simply a part of life you need to come to grips with. 

I recommend you learn this lesson sooner rather than later. It will save you a lot of grief. 

As for WIP, I stopped listening to those idiots decades ago. They thrive on motivating the masses to new levels of hysteria to drive ratings and make money. 

Well, I ain't ever helping their cause. My dial is never, ever turned to that channel, and I've begun blocking them on Twitter so u don't even have to read their endless whining and second-guessing.

Who needs it?

The Motivational Power of Trash Talking

Due to the circumstances of the Phillies' victory yesterday, I thought I would tell you a sports story today, one from a long time ago in a place that no longer exists.

This was a time before the internet and before cable TV, at time where we got our news from either the Courier-Post or from Jim Gardner. There were pretty much not other options. It was a time called "the 1980s". It's a story about a softball team, one best-of-five championships series, and it is a tale of motivation by accident.

Before I played hardball for 25 years with the Washington Township Senators, I had a whole 'nuther "life" in sports as the centerfielder for a softball that existed for 15 years. That team was the Avalon Bar/White Lantern Inn/Richie's Tavern/Oaklyn Manor Bar Softball Club.

There were several reasons why I did not continue to play hardball after the age of 18, which was my last year in the now-defunct Garden State Baseball League. First of all, I didn't think I was good enough. I was a late bloomer, and there were only two league in which "men" could play in those days: The Tri-County League and the Rancocas Valley League. These were VERY good leagues with the Tri-County League featuring great player like Pete Conlin, Doug Kepple, Dave Koerner, Danny Barbara and many others. Secondly, these league played 3-4 nights per week with 6 PM start times, and I was a married man working in Philadelphia. There would have been no way for me to make the games, and to spend 3-4 nights PER WEEK not showing up at home until 8:30-9:00 PM was not a hill I was willing to climb.

Softball, however, was thriving in South Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. There were literally hundreds of teams, there was coverage daily in the Courier, and the standing published in the Sunday paper were massive. It was a virtual cottage industry around here. So with Mike Veneziani, Rick Veneziani, Frank DeNinno, Mike Deninno, Lou Martelli, Mike Carducci, Chubby Carbone, Danny Martelli, Mike Piontkowski, Pat Dunleavy, Joey Martelli, Jimmy DeClemente, Harry Cristino, Charlie Chambers, Dom Albanese, Billy O'Connor, Stan Howard, and probably some others I am forgetting (with apologies), we started a team in 1977 at the Avalon Bar on Van Hook Street in Camden.

We moved from the Avalon after the 1978 season and played one season for the White Lantern Inn on the White Horse Pike in Stratford, but that turned out to be a horrible fit for us city boys, so in 1980, we made some personnel changes and moved to Richie's Tavern at 4th & Viola in Camden, where we won our first championship in 1981, beating Chuck Seibold's Mutual of Omaha team in the finals. People like Lee Abt, Frank Rose, Mike Schilling, Art Watson, Bill Ernst, Eddie Ciemnicki, Bill Banks, Mike Carbone, Joe Dilks

We stayed at Richies for the next couple of years, finally settling at the Oaklyn Manor Bar in about 1983 (memory is fuzzy on this; I'm sure someone will correct me). We won another championship in 1985, taking out Infotron in the finals with an exciting victory in the finals at their field in Cherry Hill after they beat us handily in a game at our Whitman Park, Camden home field.

At this point in our softball "careers," we were getting a bit long in the tooth, and although we added probably the BEST player to ever wear the uniform, Steve Cordner, we moved to a new league in 1986 and got trounced. Didn't even make the playoffs for the first time in the history of the team. It was demoralizing. 

So again in 1987, there were personnel changes. Cordner had enough and moved on (who could blame him?), and some guys who had already come and gone rejoined the team. We moved back to a league that was more manageable for us, and we were once again a very good, if aging, ballclub. We made the playoffs and beat (I think) ICAC of Fairview to reach the finals, which were to be against a very good team, McMichael's Gym of Stratford.

After the ICAC victory, we returned to The Manor (as it was always called) to celebrate. While we were there whooping it up, a guy from one of the other teams happened to stop by. Wish I could remember who it was, but that information is lost in the mists of time.

Well, this guy told us that he had just come from whatever bar the McMichael's guys were hanging at, and he told us they were actually CELEBRATING because we had won the other semi-final series because they knew they were going to crush us in the finals. We were not supposed to hear this, I'm sure they would never have said anything like this to our faces, but the fates allowed it to get back to us anyway, and we were NOT pleased. Not a little bit.

Make no mistake: we were clearly going to be the underdogs in this series. Those guys were big, strong, and mean, and they even played at a bit of a band-box ballpark in Stratford, a place with a very short right field porch were the balls were known to fly out into the neighborhood, which gave them a big edge against our rag-tag bunch of skinny lawyers and geeks. And they would have the home advantage, too. So on paper, this was NOT a very good scenario for us, even though we played our home game at that time on a wide-open field that likely would favor our style of play, which was defense and small-ball.

But as the Atlanta Braves learned this week, it is never wise to poke the bear. The bear gets angry, and he eats you.

So let the snacking begin.

The first game was at their ballpark, and we came out hitting. We had a team meeting and decided to make NO mention of the incident, but to instead let our bats do the talking. We beat them up and down the field by a 20-7 score. This is slow-pitch softball, so there is always a lot of scoring generally, but we were not a team that scored 20 runs all that often. But we did on this day.

Game #2 was at our place, which I believe at this point was at a school in Pine Hill (if memory serves). It was an open field with no fences, which we hoped would negate their power advantage. This wound up being the closest game in the series, and we won by a score of 18-13 (could have been 17-13). We now had them on the ropes.

Nonetheless, I'm sure the McMichael's boys were confident they would bounce back, Game #3 being at their home bandbox park.

Well, not so much.

Our furious bout of offense simply rolled on, and we pounded them by a 22-4 score, taking the best-of-five series 3-0 in a beautiful, surprising, earth-shattering sweep. We were elated, and we celebrated much as you saw the Phillies celebrate against the Braves last evening. That stuff is a LOT of fun!

Of course, this was the last hurrah of the Oaklyn Manor Softball Club. As the next couple of years wore on, the core players began to drift away one by one, we couldn't muster any momentum again, and at the end of the 1991 season, we decided to call it quits. It was the right time.

I wound up playing one more year of softball in 1992, going "professional" for a single season with RPF Transport of Gloucester. I played with some GREAT ballplayers that year (the Cowgill brothers, John Chiodi, Keith Kowalski, Jazz Thornton, Michael Tompkins, Chris Nardone, Darryl Henderson, and others, won a LOT of tournaments, and played in over 125 games. It was grueling, as in addition to twice-weekly night games, we often left early on a Saturday morning and played all day Saturday and all day Sunday in tournaments. I had a lot of fun, finally determined that I could play that game on a big stage with pretty much any level of ballplayer, and achieved some very big numbers. A highlight was when we got up a 4 or 5 AM, had breakfast at The Club Diner, had a practice at Bellmawr in the early morning fog, drove to Mercer County Park for an 8 AM game against a team from Lynn, Massachusetts, and promptly scored 22 runs in the top of the first inning before they even came to bat.

But though it was all fun, nothing could possible top that series with the Manor boys, when a loose tongue from the opposition found its way to our ears, and cause a spark that brought us our final championship together. The Manor teams were legendary for rising above our level of talent to perform at a level that was beyond what should have been possible. Those are the things you can do when you have a team that believes in itself.

Like these Phillies.