Just in case you do not believe that lightning can strike the same place twice, we are talking about two pitchers here - the eerily parallel universes of 1980 call-up Bob Walk and 2007 call-up Kyle Kendrick.
"Larry Christenson messed up his collarbone on that Tug McGraw charity bikeathon in California before spring training and still wasn't ready," Dallas Green, the 1980 manager, said last night before the Phillies went for their 86th victory. That's one fewer than they had in 1980 with five games to play. "Bobby's nickname was 'Whirlybird' and you didn't always know what you were going to get from him in a given game. We thought Scott Munninghoff would be our No. 5, but that didn't work out, Marty Bystrom was coming off a spring-training injury, and we gambled that Walk's ability would overcome the rough spots."
Green agonized in the dugout during the early innings of Walk's debut. "He was wearing out the grass around the mound," Dallas remembered, "moaning about calls and demonstrating poor mound demeanor." The manager made an early visit. "I told him his demeanor was horse[bleep], to get with it," Green said. "I think it's fair to say that Kyle Kendrick has done for Charlie Manuel this year what Bobby Walk did for us."
Kendrick came in from the cold of a scuffling minor league career that had advanced him only as high after 4 years as Double A Reading. All he was asked to do despite a high ERA and losing record was fill the need for a June 13 starter while general manager Pat Gillick and manager Charlie Manuel bought time to figure out what to do in the wake of Freddy Garcia's "No mas" performance on that bleak afternoon in Kansas City.
Nobody was counting very hard on Kendrick being much more than one-and-done - at least for this season.
