Shallow | Center

Met Their Match

THOSE OF us worried that we'd have to invest precious time in following the Phillies over the season's second half owe a debt of gratitude to the Mets. The flawed New Yorkers have come into Philadelphia and easily taken the first three games of the teams' four-game set, ensuring that the best the Phils can do after all is said and done is lose two games in the standings. Dropping tomorrow's finale, of course, would result in a four-game plunge and allow the Mets a large measure of retribution for the sweep Philadelphia improbably pulled off a few weeks back at Shea.

The Phillies have been exposed as the pretenders they've been all along. They'll blame it on injuries, as they always have, but the truth is that too much of it is their own damn fault. Without the ruinous free-agent signings and dreadful trades of seasons past, there might have been some minor-league depth capable of holdings things over until good health returned. And along those lines, I can't help but wonder why the Phillies suffer a more onerous string of debilitating injuries than their opponents do, year in and year out. Is it a failure to do due diligence on the physical status of incoming players? Or is the training staff as incompetent as the squad's senior and field management? Regardless, the last 36 hours have made clear that the playoffs are the ultimate pipe dream for Phils fans, and for that we are forced to swallow what little pride we have left and thank the Mets, of all teams, for demonstrating that so vividly.

Welcome to the Party, Pal

WRITING IN Slate earlier this week, Eric Lichtenfeld deconstructed the classic "Yippee-kai-yay, motherfucker" line from the original Die Hard and noted that part of its appeal is due to both its homage to action heroes of yore and its in-your-face, throwdown attitude of today. He went on to praise Bruce Willis's absolutely spot-on recitation of the zinger as a reason it's so damn effective:

On either side of the comma, past and present each get four syllables. This balance is manifested in the evenness of Willis' first—and best—delivery of the line. Subtly, he eases off "fucker," the word that, by virtue of its syntactical position, and its very nature, we might expect to land hardest on our ears. That Willis does not employ the same deftness in the sequels is a pity. The phrase is most effective not as a buildup to some hammer punch, but as one seamless unit of defiance.

And there's your explanation for why the film's two previous sequels -- and, from the looks of the commercials the reviews, the just-released sequel -- are so woefully inadequate. Willis plays John McClane in the original as an unsure hero beset by self-doubt and filled with humanity. He beats himself up for not intervening in Takagi's murder, he absentmindedly taps a nudie poster for good luck while skidding through the under-construction top floors at Nakatomi Plaza, he's pissed at his wife over her decision to forge her own path -- all traits that are atypical of action-movie cops. Willis's portrayal lifted Die Hard into a rarefied air of the genre, but by the time the sequels rolled around, McClane's normalcy, at least by film standards, had been replaced by the same tired, cliched cartoon of wisecracking bravado and superhuman feats that make one shoot-'em-up no different than any other. Partly as a result, the movies were nondescript bores, and No. 4 doesn't look a whole lot better. Yippee-kai-yay, indeed.

Shameless Self-Promotion

THIS WEEK'S issue of Philadelphia Weekly includes a piece by staffer and Philadelphia Will Do blogger Dan McQuade on the Phillies' pending 10,000th loss. To accompany his story, he asked some Phillies bloggers to contribute their favorite bad Phils moment, and you can find those musings, including mine, at the bottom of the page. Happy reading.

Red Hot ... or Not

THE LAST two nights at Citizens Bank Park have been those kinds of nights -- Philadelphia summer nights, the air hot and still and drenched with humidity. I was at Tuesday's opener against the Reds, and after Kyle Kendrick walked the first batter and then loaded the bases with no outs, I feared a long, unhappy night stewing in my own sweat would follow. But Cincinnati is a bad baseball team, and Kendrick escaped having allowed just a run. The Phillies' offense then picked things up and cruised to an easy win. Last night was a different story, with the O shut down until it was too late. Jamie Moyer pitched six sparkling innings before running out of gas, and his stumbles in the seventh allowed the Reds to get going on their way to a rain-delayed, 9-6 victory.

Piffle or Not Piffle?

BACK IN the early '90s, Saturday Night Live ran a skit, "George F. Will's Sports Machine," mocking his and others' near-pornographic rhapsodizing about baseball. Pressed by Jon Lovitz's Tommy Lasorda on whether he ever plays ball, Dana Carvey's Will responds, for example, "If, by play, you mean drink deep the aura of the game ... " (The transcript and some photos, including one depicting Corbin Bernsen's spot-on Mike Schmidt, are here.)

It's easy to catch a game in the Cape Cod Summer League, as I did last week, and find yourself digging up SAT words in an effort to do justice to the throwback era the league seems to represent. Most of the players are college kids, and they are not paid. They are put up by residents of the Cape. The PA announcer reads sponsors' messages between innings, and you can catch a player or two carrying a helmet with raffle tickets being sold by the intern he's accompanying through the crowd. The game I saw -- Yarmouth-Dennis hosting Cotuit -- was played at a  high school. Granted, it was the nicest high school field I had ever seen, but it was still a high school. And when one of the Y-D Red Sox went yard, all of his teammates were waiting at home plate to high-five him.

Did I Miss Much?

THE SHALLOW Center household decamped for vacation on Cape Cod last week, and perusing wire copy in the Boston Globe allowed me to keep half an eye on the Phillies. From afar things looked typical -- a nice win here, an ugly loss there, lather, rinse, repeat. While I was away, from Friday the 15th through Saturday the 23rd, the Phils went 3-5, with yesterday's win at St. Louis making it 4-5 since my departure. They remain stuck at three games over .500 and three behind the Mets. And, of course, they lost a starting pitcher to injury, with Jon Lieber sacrificing his body in a heroic attempt to, uh, back up home plate. Business as usual, in other words. Would it kill the Phillies to surprise a guy once in a while?

Table Scraps

IT WOULD be unseemly to say, "I told you so," but what other words so well describe the daily clown show that is Phillies baseball? After sweeping the Mets at Shea last week, the Phils went to Kansas City licking their chops at the prospect of facing the sucktacular Royals. As feared, though, the bone of success got caught in their throat, and they gagged their way to two losses -- both of them ass-kickings -- in three games. As if the team's coyote-ugly performance weren't hideous enough, the full, injury-shrouded truth behind Freddy Garcia's ineptitude emerged over the weekend. All of the off-season, "We're the team to beat" hoopla evoked by the trade that brought him here has been swallowed up by the endless, dull ache of his bum shoulder. And is if that weren't bad enough, Jose Mesa is back in red pinstripes. Provide your own snarky punchline here; I'm too shellshocked to do it.

Not Again

They're trying like hell to draw me back in, but I'll have none of it. The Phillies can finish off a sweep of the Mets tonight, which would bring them to within five games of the division leaders. There's still plenty of baseball to be played, and the Phils could make a case that their early-season fumbles were finally behind them and that good, meaningful baseball lay ahead. Except that they can't. The past five years have featured way too many such "Hmmm" moments, where you think they might have figured things out, only to watch in horror as they then lose three of four at home to some completely awful team from the dregs of the N.L. Central. Rich Hofmann said it well today:

[T]he town is beyond teasing at this point. Philadelphians will believe it when they see it from this team and not a nanosecond before. There is no changing that, and there really shouldn't be. The S.S. Benefit of the Doubt sailed a long time ago.

Precisely.

A Philosophical Question

IF A blog fell in the forest and stayed fallen for a few weeks because the guy who wrote it was completely disenchanted with the way his favorite baseball team -- the inspiration for the majority of his posts -- was playing, would anyone hear it?