With two days left in the baseball season- we've got three pennant races: AL Wild Card, NL Wild Card, and the AL East. Does it get any better than Yankees-Red Sox, tied, after 160 games? I for one am rooting for another one-game playoff, giving Boston the chance to exorcise the ghost of Bucky Dent once and for all.
As for the Phillies, after being left for dead earlier in the week (for about the 50th time this season), they're now one game behind Houston with two to play, and may actually, somehow, either force a playoff or qualify outright. This despite a fan base that has seemingly rooted against the interests of their own team for virtually the entire season.
The loathsome Howard Eskin, for instance, gleefully predicted on Friday that the Phils would be eliminated after losing that night's WIP-broadcast game, throwing both his own team and his own employer under the bus simultaneously. If the Phils manage to overtake Houston, he'll probably have a heart attack on the air on Monday. Then he'll blame it on Ed Wade.
UPDATE: Here's something interesting: remember last week's Eagles/Phillies split SI cover? The Phillies story by Tom Verducci, "Look Who's Playing Tough," told the story of how this year's Phillies team is tougher, less lazy, and less susceptible to folding than previous Phils teams. The piece was a welcome ancedote to the tiresome naysaying and sky-is-falling doom and gloom more commonly heard in local Phillies coverage.
But an interview with Verducci posted on the blog PhillyBurbs yesterday tells quite a different story. In the interview, Verducci bashes the team, especially Bobby Abreu, for laziness, and calls for management to "blow up this team and go in a different direction." In summation, he calls them "not an especially tough team."
Now maybe something happened in the intervening two weeks to make Verducci do a complete 180. But what's SI's top baseball writer doing making statements that are the diametric opposite of what he wrote in the magazine? Did his editor order up a "Phillies are tough" piece, and for some reason disallow Verducci's conclusion that "the Phillies aren't tough"?
Posted by Stephen Silver at October 1, 2005 01:55 PM