Beasts of the East

WASHINGTON - The Phillies and their fans were as ready to burst as the thick black clouds that hovered over Nationals Park on Monday night.

The thousands of Philadelphians, gathered in joyful little red-and-white clusters, got noisier as the game progressed and as the reason they came south drew tantalizingly closer.

The Phillies, meanwhile, with Roy Halladay overwhelming the Nationals, raced through the game at an unusually swift pace, determined, it seemed, to complete their clincher before a predicted storm could rain on its parade.

Finally, 175 days after their season began in this same ballpark, with the same pitching mismatch and the same lofty ambitions that are now so oddly standard in Philadelphia, the Phillies and their fans got to let loose another torrent of emotion.

Their 8-0 victory over the Nationals, the 21st for Roy Halladay, who allowed just two hits, gave Philadelphia a fourth consecutive National League East title.

When it happened, and Danny Espinosa flailed at Halladay's 97th and final pitch, Phillies fans bounced wildly in the stands, waving rally towels they'd brought along, chanting for manager Charlie Manuel.

Phils players - for whom this ritual is becoming wonderfully familiar - leaped and hugged and joyfully piled atop the mound on a damp and muggy Washington night. Subdued at first, perhaps an indication that this was becoming old-hat, the partying picked up steam - and spray - once it shifted into the soon-soaked visitors clubhouse.

There, players wearing the gray NL East champion T-shirts and black hats, unloosed a waterfall of champagne - and later beer - on each other, on club officials who had made the trip, and on reporters.

Halladay, experiencing his first such festivity after 12 postseason-less years in Toronto, looked as if he'd been dunked in a pool. But, much as the ball that struck out Espinosa stayed in his hand until he gave it to a clubhouse worker for safekeeping, his smile lingered long into the night.

"I've seen it too much on TV," Halladay said. "It's everything it's cracked up to be."

The victory celebration - their eighth since their 2007 division title broke a 14-year postseason drought - wasn't as wild as those in 2007 or 2008 but, if nothing else, it injected some life into a ballpark that otherwise was as gloomy as the dark skies overhead.