Thanks for Four Years of Awesome
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Blogged Around Philly: Farewell Edition
Photoist
"Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
~A. Bartlett Giamatti
And here we are, facing the coming winter without the throng of jubilant bodies celebrating in a Broad Street parade to keep us warm. Nor do we have the metaphorical, but infinitely warmer, feelings of joy and victory and vindication to help us through the cruelest months. We have another Phillies season ending in loss, as twenty-eight of the last twenty-nine have. We have what-ifs and if-onlys. But, thanks to the owners, coaches and players that are our Philadelphia Phillies, we have a lot more than that.
We have hope, and not the hope-springs-eternal hope that every team's off-season has. We have the hope that this team has given us; the hope created by a team that plays this game we love the right way; the hope that an ownership committed to winning has given us; the hope we share with incredible fans who have crammed Citizen's Bank Park for a season and a half's worth of sell-outs.
We have the memories of another successful season. The Phillies, once again, got to a place that few teams reach and a place that all but two fan bases can be jealous of. The Phillies' unprecedented success gave us memorable and meaningful games over the course of another season and post-season. This year we had a perfect game by one of our pitchers, something most of us will likely never witness again. We saw our team finish the regular season with baseball's best record, a first in franchise history. We saw Roy Halladay become a player we will always love; we saw Placido Polanco return in one way and Cole Hamels return in another; we saw Carlos Ruiz cement himself as a fan-favorite.
Baseball, more than any other sport, evokes an emotional response. Baseball is a game of failure. The best players of this game succeed three in ten times. The best team in the league loses sixty games. We are infinitely more invested in these players and this team than other sports. We see their faces, unlike the heavily armored gladiators we cheer on at the Linc. On those faces we feel the agony of injury and failure; on those faces we see the joy of victory and triumph. We invest three hours a day, six days a week with these men. These intense faces we have come to know so well have found a way to spread those failures thin, to prolong those fleeting victories.
So, as these faces go back to baseball cards and newspaper articles, we miss them. They've become a part of our lives, of our routines. I will miss the hot afternoon games, the late-starting west coast games, the games I listen to on my handheld radio, the games that made my day and the games that ruined my weekend.
This is a team that saved a city from her fate as an also-ran and lovable loser. This is a team that ignited a fan base. I can't begrudge Ryan Madson's pitch to a corpulent infielder, or Ryan Howard's non-swing in a crucial moment. I can't hold anything against the moves Charlie Manuel made or didn't make. I can say with full faith that this team played hard and to the best of their abilities for an entire season, and again delivered us first-rate baseball.
So, as another winter bears down on our city, some of you will put away your hats, jerseys and rally towels; I won't. The hat the keeps my head warm this winter, the hat whose brim will catch snowflakes in January, will bear the Phillies "P."
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit