SO THERE I WAS dancing under Billy Penn's hat on South Broad Street last night and wearing my 1976 Bicentennial Phillies pinstripes home jersey with the number 45 in front and the name McGraw, when who do I see but my doppleganger. Make that my Tuggleganger -- a guy wearing a 1976 powder blue Phillies awa jersey with the Number 45 on front and the name McGraw on the back.

Hail fellow well met. Not only did he have Tug's shirt on his back but in his hand he carried the Daily News extra edition declaring WE WIN, the same headline that appeared in the Daily News in October 1980 when the Tugger fanned Willie Wilson of the Royals to nail down Philadelphia's first National League World Championship.

What a night. Can't wait for the parade.

Continue reading "You Bet Your Ass We Win!" »

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OK, OK, IT WAS BAD ENOUGH when William Penn was acting alone. But now he's got Mother Nature chiming in on his evil scheme to deny the Phillies a World Championship. Evidently not impressed with the tiny pewter statue of himself placed by iron workers on the uppermost beam of the Comcast Center so that MISTER BIG SHOT could be once again the "tallest" person in Philadelphia, William Penn did a shout out to Mother Nature to have her rain on the Phillies parade.

Mere mortals -- or at least non-Philadelphians -- may not understand that William Penn has placed a curse -- and he calls himself a QUAKER! -- on Philadelphia major league sports teams because, you know, we built a building taller than William Penn's hat on his statute atop City Hall. No Philadelphia major league professional sports team (sorry, Soul, Kixx, Wings) has won a championship since One Liberty Place surpassed the height of William Penn's hat (548 feet) in 1987. The last Philly team to win the big one was the Doctor J Sixers in 1983.

So Philadelphia union construction workers try to appease the "ego" of William Penn by installing a talisman on top of the highest girder alomost 1,000 feet above the ground and what does "His friendliness" do? He calls in his chits with Mamma Natural and has this monsoon wipe out the Phillies winning moment.

I got news for you Mister Big Hat. The Phillies will rise above your curse. The Fightin's will find a way to wake the quake, whack the hat, send the Friend. . . And afterwards we will dance in front of your statue. Because that's what we do.

Continue reading "I got your hat right HERE, pal!" »

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JUST ABOUT MY ENTIRE LIFE -- at least since I learned to read newspapers -- I've thought everyone in Philadelphia had tuberculosis. Whenever I read a story on the sports pages, especially in out-of-town newspapers, I saw Philadelphians described as "lung-suffering sports fans."

I always thought this was unfair. If everyone in Philadelphia had TB, emphysema or any number of respiratory ailments, how could we yell so freakin' loudly and continuously after all these years. Then I wiped my glasses clean and realized that what these writers were saying was that Philadelphia sports fans are "long suffering."

Well, DUH! Who don't know that? Especially us. I was thinking that as I watched with pride a stadium full of Philadelphia sports fans waving toweles until almost two in the morning yesterday. In Los Angeles they would have been gone hours earlier. What I loved about the crowd I saw -- on TV -- was that I recognized my city. I recognized the longing and the suffering. And the longing for the suffering to be over. Oh brother, whereart thou, Whitey? You should be here to see this.

The Phillies are going to win the World Series. Again. If God has a conscience. I also noticed how young the crowd was. Tickets for this game cost a small fortune and yet there were thousands of kids in the stands learning how to be Philadelphia fans.

The Tampa Bay Rays are a talented and respectful baseball team. Rays manager Joe Maddon required his players to wear khakis and dress jackets on their plane ride from Florida. "Going to Philadelphia, it's a preppy kind of situation," Maddon said. "I just thought I'd give the guys a taste of that." So why did preppy Philadelphia sports fans shout "SUCKS!" after the name of every starting Rays players was announced by Citizens Bank Park announcer Dan Baker Saturday night? Because WE wanted to give them a taste of THAT! Welcome to your nightmare, Fishboys.

A sports writer for the Edmonton Sun described the game this way: "The Phillies hit three solo home runs to edge the Tampa Bay Rays 5-4 before 45,900 fans, some of them sober. . ." Just imagine what he'll write about the parade down Broad Street. I suggest that "none" rhymes with "some."

Continue reading "We Are So Going to Win This Championship" »

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THAT'S ONE. The Fightin' Phillies won their first World Series game since 1993 Wednesday night over the Tampa Bay Rays. That's one. The same number worn by Richie Ashburn, the Nebraska boy who grew up to be one of Philadelphia's most beloved athletes and broadcasters.

That's Whitey sliding into home in a cloud of dust and a hearty hi-yo-Silver against the Dodgers in 1950, the year the Fightin's were officially born (see yesterday's column). During his years as a center fielder with the Phillies (1948-1959) Ashburn lived up to the accolade paid to the World Champion 1980 Phillies center fielder of whom it was once said, "Two thirds of the planet Earth is covered by water. The other third is covered by Garry Maddox." Or Richie Ashburn.

Whitey (a nickname he earned before his naturally blonde hair turned naturally white) was a .308 lifetime hitter, a five time National League All-Star game selection and a Major League Baseball Hall of Famer. He was also Harry Kalas's best friend. I'll never forget listening to Whitey and Harry talking on the radio as I was driving on the Schuylkill Expressway durng a rain delay in a game against Montreal. The subject was power hitter Mick Schmidt, who was in the midst of a baffling slump. It was a long languorous conversation just to fill time and Whitey misspoke, referring to Schmidt as the word that rhymes with Schmidt without the "m."

The word hung in the air like a bad check. Or a ripe turd. "The thing about Schit. . ." Whitey said, stopping suddenly and waiting for salvation. All you could hear was crowd noise and vendors yelling, "Beah heah!" It was excruciating and hilarious. Finally (maybe five seconds) Whitey said, "Harry, I was hoping you'd help me out there." To which the K Man said, "I wasn't going to touch that with a ten foot pole."

And after more that 30 years of broadcasting thousands of often Schitty Phillies games, Whitey died in 1997, having lived to see his Fightin's win one of the three World Series where he was able to announce "Oh Brother."

Whaddaya say 2008 Phillies? Let's win this one for Whitey.

Continue reading "Let's Win This One for Whitey" »

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COME WITH ME NOW TO THOSE THRILLING DAYS OF YESTERYEAR when the Phillies became the Fightin's for the first time by beating those same Dodgers, then from Brooklyn, to arrive at the World Series. I was barely born, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

The Phillies had been called the Philadelphia Nationals in their first World Series appearance in 1915. By then the frequent champion Boston Red Stockings of the American League had already gone hip hop by calling themselves Sox. The Sox crushed the Phils 4-1. Our only victory was a first game 3-1 triumph in Baker Bowl by Grover Cleveland Alexander who, with the game on the line, faced a Boston pinch hitter representing the tying run. A rookie named Babe Ruth. The Babe lined out to first.

Did I ever tell you that Babe Ruth ate dinner at my grandfather's house at 1532 Erie Avenue when my mother was in college. All mom remembered about the Bambino was, "Boy, could he eat." Her younger brother, my Uncle Bill, got Babe Ruth's autograph on a baseball. And he prompty went outside to play baseball with it after showing his frriends, who were, as my mother put it, "hanging from the trees."

It was a time of innocence. A time of consequences. Time it was, it was.

In some weird way, in some weird Philadelphia fuck you way, I am so proud to be alive right now to see the Phillies win this World Series. I was 30 years old when they won the first one in 1980. Before that I had actually made peace with myself that I may never live to see a Phillies world championship. But my son would. I was certain of that.

This is how fucked up my thnking was. I had actually turned over the graille in my heart. I didn't believe that I would ever live to see it. And I was as wrong as wrong could be. I know the Phillies are going to win this. I've figured out the pattern.

If I live to be 90 maybe I'll see three.

But back to the Fightin's. . . I love these guys. This is a worthy franchise. I don't want to jinx it but I must speak of names you can't forget from a team called the Whiz Kids because they were so young:

Richie Ashburn. Robin Roberts. Dick Sisler. Andy Seminick, Del Ennis, Stan Lopata, Curt Simmons, Jim Konstanty , Granny Hamner, ( I swear to God -- his name was Granny), Mike Goliat, Eddie Waitkus, Willie Jones and -- the Phillies player with arugably my favorite name -- Putsy Caballero.

Putsy Caballero is not a name, it's a destiny.

Shane Victorino? Now that's a mixed metaphor. Which part of either Shane or Victorino sounds Hawaiian? I refuse to call him anything but the Pesky Polynesian.

Chase Utley. Now that's a great baseball name. Seriously.

Chase Utley. Who can forget that?

Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Cole Hamels,

But listen to the music of Feliz and Ruiz

Dobbs, Stairs and Moyer

Myers, maybe Werth and Madson

Romero, Condrey-ko and even Brad Lidge-o

I predict that this will be a Pat Burrell week.

And if I'm wrong there will be another Phillie to make it right.

Imagine that. I actually believe they can't lose.

Continue reading "These Fightin's Have Been Waiting Years For This" »

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THE GRINS WERE WIDER than Joe the Plumber's crack. Everyone who saw, heard, watched live (or on the internet) or talked to friends about the candidates' comedy performances during the last few days couldn't help but smile from ear to ear.

Who are these guys? Who knew they could be so funny? I'm talking about Barack "Steve" Obama and John "I'm keeding!" McCain and Sarah "Caribou Barbie" Palin. McCain's and Obama's self deprecating remarks at a political dinner in New York, as well as Sarah Palin's performance on Saturday Night Live were hilarious.

They were so funny, in fact, that it might even backfire among core supporters of both party's candidates, "You mean this has all been a big joke? And now you're just admitting it?"

I knew that John McCain was capable of being funny. A couple of years back on Saturday Night Live he did a skit with cast member Fred Armisen who plays the campy Venezulan comedian who accompanies himself on a snare drum and uses catch phrases like "I'm keeding!" and "Adios mio!" The Arizona senator came out and said he represents a state with a large Hispanic population and he found the portrayal of the Latin comedian to be stereotypical and offensive. The actor looked downcast until McCain added, "I'm KEEDING!"

During the Al Smith dinner broadcast on MSNBC, McCain announced that he had fired all his advisors and replaced them with Joe the Plumber. "Already, my friends, my opponents have been subjecting Joe to their vicious attack machines." McCain said. "What they don't know is 'Joe the Plumber' recently signed a very lucrative contract with a wealthy couple to handle all the work on all seven of their houses."

Obama took aim at his own "Second Coming" status among some voters. "Contrary to the rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger.I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father Jor-El to save the Planet Earth," Obama said when it was his turn at the microphone. Obama admitted, "If I had to name my greatest strength, I guess it would be my humility.Greatest weakness, it's possible that I'm a little too awesome."

And Sarah Palin held her own with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler on SNL Saturday night, especially the way she responded to the rap song Poehler sang during Weekend Update with call out lines like line, "All the mavericks in the house put your hands up." and "shoot a mother-humping moose." complete with dancing Eskimos and hockey dads. It was drop jaw funny.

Continue reading "Who Knew She Could Be So Funny?" »

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THE STRANGEST THING HAPPENED TO ME Tuesday morning at Montgomery County Community College. There I was, minding my own business, when this crazy old white guy lunged at my throat. Fortunately I was able to beat off my attacker with my camera, but it was a close call, I want to tell you. I was able to provide police with a good description of the man because I took this picture at the moment he went berserk.

Whew! A couple of more inches and he would have shaken my hand.

I kid the Republican nominee for president of the United States. John McCain is a good man. Out of his freakin' mind, but a good man nonetheless. I stood in a gymnasium full of suburban Republicans to listen to John McCain's speech at MC3, and I came away with this impression of the crowd:

These people look just like me, and yet we have nothing in common. They were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly middle aged -- if we can call 60 the new middle age. I counted -- and it was easy -- two black faces in a crowd of perhaps 2,000 people who had come to hear McCain. Middle aged white men. Middle aged white women. Lots of grandchildren. Lots of under-voting-age youngsters. But virtually noone of color or obvious recent-immigrant background. The two black faces belonged to stylishly dressed professional women. I saw one Asian male. What I didn't see were more than a handful of people of any race, color or creed over the age of 20 and under that age of 45.

So what does that mean? You tell me.

Everyone that age was at work, you could say. But how do you explain the disproportionate number of school-age children. As far as I know, Tuesday was a school day as well as a work day in Montgomery County. McCain's visit was important enough for the kids to skip school, but not for their mothers or fathers to miss work. Is that a fair observation?

What struck me also was the evident ill-ease many in the crowd communicated, with body language and comments, about being on a college campus. I heard remarks I haven't heard since 1968 from some of the people standing in line outside the Phys Ed Building waiting to enter the two auditoriums where the candidate spoke either live or via video screen.

"Why don't they get a job?" one middle aged lady groused about the nine college-aged "protesters" (five white, four black, seven men, two women) who were ordered by the Secret Service to stand about 40 yards away from the McCain supporter's queue. To which I thought to myself, "Because they're college students, lady. And guess what? They probably all have jobs to pay their way through community college."

I kept waiting for someone to shout, "Get a haircut." but the only hippie length hair was on a white guy with a modest 'fro. These were the most polite demonstrators you ever saw. And all they did was stand silently holding Obama-Biden signs, with one comedian-provocatuer occassionally shouting barely loud enough to be heard, "Liberals do it better."

What struck me as comical was how so many in this Republican crowd seemed to take offense at this modest demonstration of political dissent on a college campus. These kids were as polite as the first black demonstrators who tried to sit at a lunch counter at Woolworths in the Deep South in the early 1960's. "Why do you refuse to serve me?" I remember one young man repeating to a mortified waitress as he was being led away in handcuffs on the TV news when I was a kid.

"They make me sick," I heard a Republican lady say about the Obama supporters at Montgomery County Community College.

We've come a long way in America, but we have miles to go before we sleep.

Continue reading "Johnny, we hardly knew ye." »

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BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS -- or not -- the Phillies will have won an epic game against the Los Angeles Dodgers to go three games up in the race to the World Series preordained to feature teams from Philadelphia and Boston.

God love L.A. and Tampa Bay, but a Red Sox-Phillies World Series is an historic rematch that has waited almost 100 years to arrive. Phillies fans have long memories, long beyond our lifetimes. We remember things we never saw. Like the 1915 World Series -- the Phillies first -- against these same Bosox. The Fightin's won Game One against Boston 3-1 at North Philly's Baker Bowl behind the pitching of 31-game winner Grover Cleveland Alexander, who would become the only baseball player named for a president of the United States who would later be portrayed in a movie by a Hollywood actor (Ronald Reagan) who would become president. Alexander, whose nickname was Ol' Pete, could not repeat that feat, and the Red Sox swept the next four games, putting the Phillies in a hole that it took another 65 years to climb out of.

A Dodgers-Red Sox World Series matchup might satisfy long suffering baseball fans from both leagues, but a Phillies-Rays armageddon would be -- excuse me -- like the Phillies-Royals series. The whole time we were beating this fine American League team from Kansas City in six games in 1980, Phillies fans imagined we were defeating the New York Yankees, which had used the storied Athletics franchise as a virtual farm club when the A's moved to Kansas City from Shibe Park in 1954. As William Faulkner wrote, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." Phillies fans have a genetic memory for ancient losses like some vestigial body part. What's an appendix for? It's the organ where we store all the hurt that won't go away

A Phillies-Red Sox series? Could it be destiny? Let me count the ways. In Ol' Pete's complete game victory in Game One the tying run came to the plate in the 9th inning. A Red Sox rookie, playing in the first of what would become many World Series games in his career, was called to pinch hit for Boston starting pitcher Ernie Shore. The rookie's name was Babe Ruth, the same Babe Ruth who would play his last professional baseball game in the same Baker Bowl 20 years later as a member of the Boston Braves. The Babe lined out to first base for second out of the only Phillies victory in a World Series until 1980. The Curse of the Bambino started in Philadelphia.

Continue reading "The Curse of the Bambino" »

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I THINK IT'S PRETTY CLEAR by now that nobody has a freakin' clue. Nobody. Not Nobel laureates or soccer moms, not chimpanzees or blue-eyed lemurs, and certainly not the president of the United States understands how the stock market works. Yesterday, on the same day that the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged an impossible 678 points, George Bush, the president of the United States, said "The economy is going through a rough stretch."

This is like hearing the mayor of New Orleans describe Katrina as a nasty storm. Bush sounded like he was reading a statement straight out of the lame duck manual. Quack softly and grab all the silverware you can before Inauguration Day.

Not a week has gone by since Congress passed the $700 billion bailout, and the market is acting like an orphanage that hasn't been fed its porridge. I've got news for you, in its values-warped mind Wall Street has already cashed and spent that two-quarter of a trillion dollar bailout check. And believe me the first ones to get paid were the ones closest to the money faucet. What we're seeing now is a black hole of fear, guilt and incompehensible economic practices that has all the inevitable transparancy of a Ponzi scheme. Everyone involved knows that this once high-flying economy was based on wind and mirrors, and now they want to grab the silverware on their way out the door.

Shame on all of them. Shame on all of us. We handed over our money as easily as children visiting The Field of Dreams and only now is it becoming apparent that there are no players on the field. Not even ghosts.

Continue reading "Is this heaven? It ain't even Iowa" »

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I REMEMBER WHEN ELECTION DAYS were decided on Election Day. The image of Harry Truman holding up a copy of the early edition of the Chicago Tribune with the banner headline "Dewey Defeats Truman" both informs and haunts my memory. Rarely in history is a man afforded the opportunity to stick it up the media's ass with a single image. And Harry opened the umbrella.

Whoever wrote the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman" has obviously been hired to write the demise narrative of John McCain. A month before the vote. All the polls suggest encirclment and imprisonment. Not of McCain but of the White House by Democrats. Imagine. And the Republicans still act like we're Communists being commanded by radio transmitters implanted in our brains by foreign powers. I heard Rush Limbaugh today describe Barack Obama as the "front man" controlled by behind-the-scenes manipulators from Socialist Chicago. I swear to God he said it.

What Rush refused to acknowledge was that Barack Obama's election as president of the United States is the biggest thing that will have happenedf to the presidency since the Civil War. Forget about a front man. Barack will be the man. And there are a lot of us who can't wait.

Imagine what it will be like to see a president of the United States open his mouth and not fear that he'll say "Five minutes till Wapner." George Bush, the president who lied to us and got us in to a phony foreign war that drained the ecoomy and served no purpose -- that guy is still the president. And as he considers his legacy, allow me to suggest the title: "Mission Accomplished, Moron." Or "You lying sack of shit." Or any number of terms to describe the preposterous voodoo spun by the Bush Administration to convince us that invading Iraq made any sense at all. Four thousand dead in O-Hi-O. And we just watched it happen.

Now we get down to the dead man walking stage of John McCain, the Candidate. This could get ugly. The twitching corpse attracts zombies. I anticupate bizarre, insane and unprovable accusations to be made. By both sides. Constantly.

I'd say that we're beyond that, but we aren't. Just look at that pirate up there. He's a domestic terrorist.

Continue reading "Dead man walking, my friends. Dead man walking" »

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