I still have the playoff tickets and the invoice from the
one game playoff that never was in 2005. September 7th,2005 may seem insignificant to you, but for me it
really wasn’t. For reasons that are quite personal and close to my heart it was
a special day. I was less than 24 hours from being a Dad for the first time. A
beautiful and healthy 7 pound 12 ounce (big baby, small turkey though) little
girl was born the day before. I was on a high and can remember thinking that
9/7/05 was the last night of quiet sleep that I would have for quite some time.
That is the perfect and sweet part of this story, it all went wrong with 2 on
and 2 out in the 9th inning that night.
The Phillies had a new manager, a newer ballpark, and seemed primed to enter
the post-season for the first time in 12 years. Now no one can definitively
say, but I truly believe that with one swing of the bat, Craig Biggio ruined
the Phillies chances at the playoffs. His former teammate, Billy Wagner, put
one right in Biggio’s wheelhouse for a 3 run homer and an 8-6 lead. Brad Lidge
came in for the save that nailed down the sweep of the Phils. That year the
Phillies finished one game behind the Astros and consequently, one game out of
the playoffs.
I can remember sitting out back my house in my Boozebo,
listening to the game on the radio, cooler by my side. Scared. Happy. In less
than 24 hours, I was going to have to be a Dad…of a daughter…WTF was I going to
do? My Dad told me that being a parent is a lot of common sense (of
fuddddddddddddgggge). This was good advice, but it was also from the man who “made
me and my brother dinner” when my Mom was down the shore with my Aunt. Making
dinner consisted of opening a can of Beef-a-roni and putting it in the
microwave, but I digress. Now, I wasn’t my usual drinking self that night, for
chrissakes I had a new baby coming home the next day or two. It all went out
the window after that devastating home run. I have NEVER heard Harry Kalas more
downtrodden. When asked about his most crushing loss, Harry said “Probably the most downer call I ever made is
Billy Wagner’s last year with the Phillies when Biggio hit a home run off him
and we were on our way to perhaps post-season, and when Biggio hit that home
run — I was devastated…” You and me both Harry…you and me both. I
like to think that we both unwound in the same way, with booze.
I was so angry at Wagner. I never forgave him. He is a prick
anyway, so I find it hard that I cheered for him. I polished off the rest of my
Sierra Nevada’s from the cooler and went back into the house for more “medicine”.
No beer? Shit. It’s 10 pm and this is PA, so all the beer spots were closed, I
was already tuned up, so driving was not an option anyway. So I delved into the
wine. I had two bottles left, but one was only half full. I took both bottles
back to the Boozebo and just Gagootzed (my lingo for drinking what is left in a
bottle) the half full bottle and then fired onto my backyard lawn. That felt
good, so I did it with the 8-12 empty Sierra Nevada bottles too. It was around
this time that I got a text from a friend who liked the Sox or Yankees and was
talking shit about the loss. I was in no mood for this, so I smashed my cell phone.
That felt good too, so I went in the shed and got a sledgehammer and busted it
up more. I then was a drunken Gallagher and used the sledge on the bottles
strewn about my lawn. Then I went back to the Boozebo and drank the rest of the
other bottle of wine while listening to sad Irish music. I woke up at around
7:30 am in the Boozebo and for that one moment I felt like God. I looked around
at what I created in my yard and it was good. So I rested.
Now I am no Aesop, but there is a moral to the first part of
this story. Every game counts. Every moment counts. That I why I kept those ‘almost’
playoff tickets. I see them every day and they are like a Carpe Diem to me.
While that sweep took the wind out of the Phillies sails, they were 10-14 in
April. Abysmal. They didn’t seize shit. Maybe that lackluster performance
haunted this team and then came back to bite them when they got their asses
handed to them by the Astros 5 months later. Milli and Vanilli can blame it on the rain,
but I blame it on Wagner and Abreu. “If you live each day as if it was your
last, someday you'll most certainly be right.” You have to look in the mirror
every morning and ask yourself whether or not you would do the same thing that
day if it were his last day alive. Whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too
many days in a row, you know you need to change something. Ok, maybe I am
Aesop/Jobsian a bit.
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