The ghosts of the Phillies are supposed to be helping and maybe they will yet, another hurdle for the Rockies to overcome, meaning not their manager but all that seems stacked against them.
The Rockies' playoff inexperience tops the list, this bunch of afterthoughts with no history, a vague identity and small fan base. For all anyone knows around here, the team that won the opening game of the National League division series plays before mountain goats and rodeo clowns.
This town was ready to roar, ready to send back this bunch of strangers from the west, looking hard to find some baseball cred on the Rockies and settling on relief pitcher Taylor Buchholz, who is from here, where Phillies baseball is known and lived and suffered for.
"Are you still a Phillies fan?" a breathless interviewer asked Buchholz, a graduate of Springfield High in Delaware County and a former Phillies farmhand. He said he was not, that he was a Rockie, bringing a sigh and an eye roll from his interviewer. Poor Buchholz was clearly corrupted and the worse for it, as if the Phillie roots cross time zones.
And so they do in many ways, for the Phillies have been around and aground for a very long time. When last they won, the only time they won, relief pitcher Tug McGraw was the inspiration, though his "You Gotta Believe" applied to the Mets.
"Tug Still Believes" a banner assured in the crowd at Citizens Bank Park, a dandy little place with a short power alley that has become what Coors Field used to be, a homer launch pad.
The poignancy of Tug believing is coupled with another reminder that "Vuk Is Watching," that being John Vukovich, a longtime Phils player and coach who died of a brain tumor last spring, the same illness that took McGraw three years earlier. The Phils wear Vukovich's No. 18 on their jerseys.
These are the ghosts who are guiding the Phillies, these and all those others over all those years when the Phillies have come up short, as if some celestial inspiration must be given credit for the late run that stunned the Mets and made possible the T-shirts that proclaim the Phightin' Phils are division champs.
No such blessing can be assigned to the Rockies, not even a division designation, whose finish was grander and harder to do, climbing past a fistful of teams and surviving an extra playoff game.
