Halladay's Historic Hitless Hullabaloo

What can I say? The man hurls history into the softened leather memories of a zillion fans and I'm supposed to put it into words? All I can tell you is that being part of a moment like that - a moment that is bigger than this team, bigger than this city, bigger than the postseason itself - it's impossible to comprehend, even more impossible to describe. But I'm gonna have to try, because I was there to see it.

By the time it got down to the last three innings, no one really cared what the Phils did on offense, everyone just wanted to see Roy pitch. In fact, when Ibanez hit into the final out in the eighth there was really no reaction until the crowd roared once again in anticipation of the top of the ninth - I've never heard a crowd cheer after their offense was retired because they wanted to see their pitcher come out.

The playoff atmosphere in that stadium is overwhelming to begin with, but when you have an accomplishment like that building up throughout the game, it only gets louder as each moment gets bigger. There's not many ways to describe the feeling in that stadium - it was intense, it was thrilling, it was mind-blowing, and after you're done losing your voice and high-fiving 46,000 of your closest friends, your hands are still shaking with the eight dollars that you so desperately want to buy that game's program with, because you know you need proof that you saw it first-hand. You know you just witnessed something great.

It takes a long time for it to fully sink in how amazing that was, and I don't think it's been completely grasped, but eventually you'll realize that you saw something that will live on in Cooperstown. I know I'm gonna remember this for the rest of my life, but regardless of whether or not you're a Phils fan (i.e. whether or not you're getting into heaven), I think you gotta appreciate the significance of the event. This might not happen again in the next 50 years; hell, it might not happen again in our lifetime. Then again, the way Halladay plays, maybe it could happen again in Game 4*


*if necessary

The Decorators

On Disney property in Orlando, there rests a campground that is the epitome of quiet country living. Themed to the wild frontiers of the once growing United States, this resort/campground is aptly named Fort Wilderness. The simplicity of the life offers a serene backdrop upon which many imaginations come alive - maybe a little too much for some. See, there's a strange tribe of people that live in Fort Wilderness. They call themselves The Decorators.

Now, I've been staying at Fort Wilderness my entire life and never even knew that this was something people did. I've seen campsites with extra large Christmas lights, motor homes with mickey-shaped umbrellas, and golf carts painted to look like Tigger, but I never gave it a second thought. Why would I expect that there was a band of Disney nuts so profoundly fanatical that they would warrant a special on Bravo? Maybe I should have?

Maybe not. Maybe gawking at the motor home with the oversized porcelain Cinderella Castle and the overpriced Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto could've been enough, but I had to actually meet one of the Decorators to fully convince myself. Convince myself that these people indeed were insane.

She asked us if we had heard of "The Decorators" in a way that disregarded any opportunity to answer "no" - of course we had, and if we hadn't, we should've. She proceeded to tell us about her big flub-up, accidentally sending an email to Meg Crofton that she had been working on for a week while we proceeded to gawk at her arrangement.

It's The Decorators, her email asserted, that are a huge reason that people stay in Fort Wilderness during all the major holidays, and doggone it! They should get something in return, shouldn't they? After all, who would come to stay at Fort Wilderness if it weren't for this small clan of light-hanging, figurine-placing Disney zealots. The tourists come to see them she told us. Of course they do.

I mean, after all, who would go to Disney without taking into consideration what The Decorators have in store for that time of the year? They are indeed, a key feature of the Disney organization; and for all of the selfless service they have given the Disney resort, isn't about time they were compensated? Right? Guys?

Pet-sitting

So I was talking to my older brother. Living the working life in Manhattan with his veterinarian wife, his days can be both wacky and mundane. This story, however, stretches the limits of both. As it turns out, one of his wife's clients asked them to dog-sit her two Yorkshire Terriers. The client, a budding producer and seasoned socialite, needed to fly out to L.A. for a month for a new film she's producing and simply didn't have the time to take care of her dogs. She said she'd pay them $2,500. Just to feed the dogs and take them for a walk every day? Wow! What a steal! But wait, there's more!

The dogs drink nothing but Acqua Panna, bottled at the source in Tuscany; it must be served in a glass bowl. The owner has provided them with two cases (she will send them more as needed). I joked with my brother, "the dogs are drinking better than you!" "Not anymore," he replied (looks like they'll need extras sooner than later). Oh and on top of that, they need to scoop the dog food out of the can - only the food that doesn't touch the metal will be fed to the dogs; it must be served in a glass bowl. I didn't ask him about walking the dogs, but frankly, I don't want to know. You don't walk dogs like that, they walk you. Hearing about people like this make me happy I don't live in that world, but it also makes me want to write a screenplay. You can't come up with anything better than this.

You win this one, Beantown

Here’s to Fenway Park, one of the last standing cathedrals in sports. The green-shrouded monument that bravely shirks modernity in favor of preserving the taste of baseball’s leather-stained roots. The ballpark that stands above the vast majority in its tribute to the past and does so with dignity and passion. The ballpark that is everything the sport wanted it to be.

(I know that’s an overly gushing description but cut me a break, I was raised at The Vet.)

I got to experience Fenway firsthand this summer on an impromptu pilgrimage to follow the Phils to Beantown. Aside from the surprise win (Hamels managed to salvage the dismal series), the real memory from the trip will resonate deep in my baseball archives long after the paint has chipped and the iron rusted.

After navigating the sea of Ortiz and Beckett down a street that surely would have been closed to traffic in most other towns, we found ourselves parked some thirty feet from the gate (an amazing feat in itself). We soon joined the cloud of red and white and shuffled wide-eyed through the turnstyles, unable to focus on the beep of the ticket reader as we scanned the hand-painted signs.

And as I looked down at my ticket I noticed my hand was in sepia tone. This whole freaking ballpark was stuck in 1924 and it was like these fans barely noticed. They carried beers as if prohibition had been repealed, watched the TV as if it had been invented already, and nothing seemed out of place. The convenience of Now sat comfortably in the wrinkled palm of Then and I couldn’t discern where one ended and the other began.

We found our old wooden seats in right field and invented new sequences of bent limbs and limp muscles that allowed us to fit into that tiny space. Leaning forward and backward to find the batter somewhere on the other side of a girder-beam, we sat with all the fans for the past 90-some years and enjoyed the game with a side of “fresh hat chowdah.”

That’s what was so amazing about this park, it was like your favorite shirt from middle school that seems like it grows with you as you get older. It was as if the unstoppable flood of Progress somehow left this tiny section of the city—of baseball—bone dry. And they’d have it no other way. The seats were still losing paint the way they had been for eighty years and the overhang hid most of the sky. And these people loved it that way. They had their Green Monstah, and their manual scoreboard – but mostly, they had their history. It was right there, in that living museum, each and every day through the rain and extra innings. It had been there with America, wedged in between each page of history with the fresh scent of infield dirt. When the country couldn’t afford a bus fare, when the bombs fell and families crowded around the static of the radio to hear the news, baseball always lived on in this park.

When you watch a game in that park you’re not just sharing it with some 37,000 other fans, you’re sharing it with every single hard-nosed, jeffcap-wearin’, knickerbockin’, poodle skirtin’, hair gel combin’, leather-jacketed, bell-bottomed, leg-warming, Reebok Pumpin’, Walkman totin’ fan there is. You share that experience with millions of people who sat in those very same seats and complained about the very same calls. They may not have been playing Neil Diamond forever, but that seventh inning stretch? You share that with everyone. So go on, Boston fans, root root root for your team, because there may be no better place to do it than somewhere that has changed as little as this old ball game itself.

Thank you, Flyers

The past few weeks of playoff hockey have been absolutely incredible. From one Flyers fan to countless others (many fresh off the playoff bandwagon), I'm sure we share the same woes about the season ending in overtime the other night; but when you look back on it, this is a team we'll remember for the rest of our Philly Phan careers.

This isn't a faceless pile of talent that we have trouble forming a connection to; those teams fizzle in history, they fade into the background with the "almost wins" and the "near goals." This is a team of character, like the '93 Phillies, a kind of team that's all-too-rare these days. A collection of personalities that may not have won the trophy but have easily won over the town. Bearded Bullies with their own style of scrappy play, their league-leading penalty minutes and their nationally-instigating behavior.

This is a team we'll remember regardless of whether or not they won, because of the story they created while stumbling, bounding, bending over backwards to make it through the playoffs. From overtime to shootout, penalty kill to power play, blowout to comeback, this team has turned the heads of everyone who has any idea of what the NHL is (about 17% of the US, 42% of Russia, and 114% of Canada). And I want to thank them.

I want to thank them for the feeling you get walking down the street, seeing strangers you know and friends you've never met before and it all takes an orangy glow; you jab a triumphant fist in the air to say "we did it" (or "we're gonna do it") and they light up like a Flyer-o-Lantern, smile and give you a high five. Most of the time you wouldn't even have to say anything, it's just a connection you feel that is like nothing else.

For me, the most electrical feeling was after that overtime win in Game 3 to keep the series alive; or maybe the clerk at Wawa Thursday morning who lost her voice the night before; or maybe watching the somewhat-unorthodox recorded version of Kate Smith's God Bless America; or maybe the deafening Let's Go Flyers chant in the subway on the way to south Philly for Game 4. We banged as hard as we could on the ceilings and the walls of that train and there wasn't a goddamn thing the Septa police could do to stop us. Hell, they were probably singing too.

We were amped up, Flyered up. Standing there with a few thousand of our closest friends. It's the unity of this city that is so strong you can't ignore it. It's using the words "Go Flyers" as both a greeting and a farewell. It's something so distinct to Philly Champs, so distinct to this team, its city and its fans that nobody can ignore it - not even Devils fans. So I say thanks. To the Flyers and the Fans, because this has been an incredible ride, regardless of whose names are etched into that Cup.

You always remember the teams that win the championship, history makes a point of that, but you rarely remember the teams that fall just short in the way we will recall the '09-'10 Flyers. The team that made grown men cry.

I just want to say thanks.