Apres-mortem

I'm not really big on this kind of thing, but considering the kind of baseball season it's been, I thought I'd toss my impressions into the cap.

My perspective is unusual, I think. I've been to 9 World Series. I may be the only person who was at the Mets improbable win in 1969, the Reggie Jackson game in 1977, the Phillies win in 2008 and Roy's no-no this year.  So I'm at a point where I don't live or die for winning the Series. So here are my impressions of the 2010 Phillies, trying to skip what everyone else is saying (e.g., they underachieved, etc.).

One thing you couldn't possibly get on the full effect of on TV but was amazing at the ballpark was the contrast between 46000 people screaming as Wilson readied to throw the last pitch and the dead silence after strike 3 was called. I've never heard anything like it.

Let's dispense with the Cliff Lee thing. Sure, he's great, I loved him last year and would have loved to keep him. But not having him didn't cost the Phillies anything, given that they got Oswalt instead. In fact, while Oswalt was helping to carry them back into first place, Lee was ineffective and injured. He only got his act together at the very end of the season. Even in the playoffs, it's unlikely he would have helped. Oswalt wasn't good against the Reds, but in the SF series he was their best pitcher.

It's easy to focus our attention on the ultimate failure, but there were many successes along the way.  Just in the last month I've been at the park and seen them win a game on a walkoff homerun after being down 5 through 7 innings, sweep Atlanta to get a stranglehold on the division (which meant going to games 5 straight days, something I'd never done before), Halladay's no-hitter (my only one after attending around 1000 games) and the comeback win the next night versus the Reds, and Oswalt's gem in NLCS game 2. So it's not like it's been bad or anything. Just disappointing because they had good chances to win NLCS games 1, 4 and 6 and didn't take advantage.

Now we get to watch the Jason Werth saga play out. Management doesn't have a perfect track record, but they've earned my trust with their body of work. These have been some of the best years in Phillies history and I feel privileged to have gotten to see so much great baseball in such a terrific ballpark.

What it adds up to for me is how rich baseball is. Nobody would ever say that Texas and San Francisco were the two best teams in baseball but here they are in the World Series. The best team doesn't always win, but the team that plays the best does. And that's okay with me.