Sitting at a laptop keyboard around April Fools' Day to predict what the baseball standings will look like 6 months down a long and winding road is a fool's errand. It's not even an educated guess. It's shooting darts blindfolded.
So you never assume everything will go right, as in "Assuming the Phillies suffer no major injuries and the nucleus of the 2008 World Series team produces similar numbers, it is not unreasonable to project another parade down Brad Street." Sorry, I meant Broad Street.
Nor do you envision a roster meltdown like the one that turned the Mets into a pillar of sulk and pitched them into a 92-loss firepit.
So, knowing now what we had no way of knowing back when Brad Lidge was still on a 48-0 roll, when Brett Myers was the No. 2 starter, when Harry The K was singing "High Hopes'' in person, this question must be asked:
How the hell did this Phillies team - the team that Charlie Manuel salvaged from a rubble of fallen dominoes - manage to win 93 games? How did a movie that could have been titled, "The Lidge on the River Cry" result in a bigger lead at the head of the stretch - 8 1/2 games on Sept. 3 - than any but the 9 1/2-game lead enjoyed by 1993's magnificent mongrels. The biggest lead by the 1980 world champions was two games after Game 161.
Ask yourself:
* How many more W's in the bank had Lidge blown just a six-pack of saves instead of 11?
* How many more W's had Brett Myers not joined the growing frayed hip-labrum club?
* How many more W's had Raul Ibanez come close to replicating his MVP-candidate first half?
* How many more W's if Jimmy Rollins, who had half an MVP-level season, had not been among the game's least productive shortstops at bat before the All-Star break?
