The kid has it all, just like Bogie and Bacall. Aquiline SoCal good looks. Trophy wife. Enough herbals, lotions, potions, notions and holistic exotica to make Hugh Hefner envious. A grand plan where he and Heidi will rebuild a school in disease- and poverty-ravished Malawi.
And a changeup so good it should have a name. How about "Dow Jones?"
The last Phillies player to have this kind of "it" factor was Darren Daulton before he ran across that Mayan calendar, which ends in 2012. Us, too, Daulton says. The original "Dutch" was a Hollywood-handsome Kansan with a persona so magnetic manager Jim Fregosi pretty much turned over the 1993 Phillies clubhouse to his sculpted catcher.
Mike Schmidt had that more-than-just-a-superstar aura - in a way fans of the great Greta Garbo would understand. He wanted to be the star, but not the center of attention.
Central Casting did no favors for Cole Hamels in his first big national moment.
He was handed a lousy script, a "B" movie with a working title, "Night of The Living Wormballer."
But the great actors make the best of bad scripts and are the ones you will remember long after they break down the set.
Hamels survived early wildness in the strike zone, a puzzling first-inning challenge of Manny Ramirez that put the Phillies in a 1-0 hole, and a sinker-slider show by Dodgers righthander Derek Lowe that had the infield worm population begging for mercy. When Pedro Feliz bounced out to short for the second out of the fifth inning with the Phils trailing 2-0, Charlie Manuel's offense had hit into 11 groundball outs, including a second-inning doubleplay after Pat Burrell's leadoff single.
But the worms turned in the sixth inning, so to speak. The only thing missing in a rally that was
eerily similar to the third-inning
