DS: "You guys are better than this."
No one is calling the Phillies a pack of frauds, not even after falling, 6-5, in a disappointing, seesaw Game 4 on Wednesday night. They are the two-time defending National League champs, and they've treated Philadelphians to some awfully good times. But the rest of the parallel seems appropriate - particularly the embarrassing part and the line about being better than this.
How is it possible that Cody Ross and the rest of San Francisco's rodeo clowns are in command? How is it possible that the Giants are one win away from representing the National League in the 2010 World Series? No one has had troops that weak and won anything significant since Iraq took over Kuwait for a while back in the early '90s.
Before this series began, you would have had a difficult time finding anyone outside Haight-Ashbury's smoke-filled medical marijuana dispensaries who believed the upstart Giants would actually get past the Phils. But somehow, the not-quite Fightin's are down three games to one. If they're going to stage a mini-Red Sox rally and reach the World Series, if they're going to silence the media and the fans and the rest of the doubters, they might want to hurry up and get started.
"You lose four games, and you're going home," Charlie Manuel said. "In order to survive we better start playing, if that's the case."
It didn't help matters that the umpires had a rough Game 4, particularly at home plate. But before you start blaming the team's grim situation on balk talk and bad calls, don't forget that the Phils - with the exception of the fifth-inning outburst and the extra run they tacked on in the eighth - haven't looked great during this series. Umpire ugliness or not, for much of the playoffs the Phillies' bats have been in the kind of deep slumber that would otherwise require a few dozen bottles of Ambien to achieve.
