The Stadium That May Have Killed Its Players

This is a story and an angle I've never heard.

Growing up, I've been aware of the various baseball stars dying of cancer, but each one is chalked up as "just one of those things." The idea that they may be connected is pretty amazing.

A possible rebuttal to this argument, or at least something that needs to be investigated further, is: they played football there too, do we see the same problems in football players? Going off my own limited memory right now, I don't think we do.

Super Bowl Trivia

A few facts about the game today...

• Quarterbacks who lead the league in passing yardage during the regular season are now 0-6 in the Super Bowl.
• This is a game where the losing team did not punt.
• Coming into the game, Tom Brady's record in the playoffs when playing teams he did not play in the regular season was 15-0. The Eagles and Patriots did not meet in the regular season.
• The Patriots won their first Super Bowl as underdogs in Bill Belichik's second year with a backup quarterback. Doug Pederson has won his first Super Bowl as an underdog in his second year with a backup quarterback.
• The Eagles won more playoff games this season than the Dallas Cowboys have in the past 21 years.
• The Philadelphia Eagles won their first Super Bowl the day after Brian Dawkins and Terrell Owens were selected for Hall of Fame induction.
• The Eagles did not give up a rushing touchdown at home this season.
• Nick Foles has been MVP of the Pro-Bowl and Super Bowl MVP and is currently a back up quarterback.
• The Eagles are the first #1 Seed to be underdogs in all 3 playoff games.
• The Eagles are the only team to defeat Vince Lombardi and Bill Belichik in championship games.
• Nick Foles is the first player to throw and catch a touchdown in the same Super Bowl.
• Foles is the only quarterback in history to earn a 100+ quarterback rating in each of his first 4 career playoff games.
• The last time the Eagles reached the Super Bowl, they played the Vikings, Falcons and Patriots. This time, they played the same teams.
• Doug Pederson is only the 5th coach in history to win the Super Bowl in his second year.
• There was only one sack in the game by either team. The one sack was the Brady forced fumble.
• The NFL Draft this year happens to take place in Dallas. That means that some variant of the phrase "With the 32nd pick, the World Champion Philadelphia Eagles select..." will be said in Dallas stadium.
• The Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl on February 4th - Jerome Brown's birthday.

E:60 - May 1, 2011

The major problem with ESPN's "30 for 30" movies is deciding which one watch. It seems like they're all amazing. Whether you have a passion for the subject or know nothing about it, the documentaries are so well done that they turn out equally as interesting.

Now there's a weekly show called "E:60" which is not really related but I'd call it a spin-off. They recently did an episode called "May 1, 2011".

It's rare that I'll witness a live event on TV, and rarer still that there's a historic event worth watching, but I was watching this one.

At Least They Were Upfront

Sometimes a youtube suggested video can shed light on another youtube suggested video...

Click on the image to view normal size.

So it's not just a clever motto...

Quadrennial Curse: Broken

In the past I've talked about the Quadrennial Curse - the curse where every four years a different Philadelphia team gets to the finals and loses - and this was the Flyers' year. Here's the rundown:


1993: The Phillies make it to the World Series and lose.
1997: The Flyers make it to the Stanley Cup Finals and lose.
2001: The 76ers make it to the NBA Finals and lose.
2005: The Eagles make it to the Super Bowl and lose.
2009: The Phillies make it to the World Series and lose.
2013: The Flyers make it to the Stanley Cup finals and lose. Miss the playoffs.

Given that the Flyers recently failed to make the playoffs, the curse is officially broken. Ain't that a B? Usually, sports curses are broken when something good happens. This one was broken by even greater mediocrity.

Well, it was an awful run while it lasted.

Harry Kalas and 9/11

Philly Phriction: Fey Vs. Quest

I was unaware of a feud but apparently fellow Philadelphians Tina Fey and Questlove of The Roots have developed either a misunderstanding or a feud or both.

In last night's episode of Late Night, it was time to either squash it or settle it behind the Wawa.

On a personal note, I love Tina Fey's Philly. I could listen to that all day. I wish I could do one. I can do about a million different accents (more or less badly) but I've never been able to do a Philly accent. It's weird.

John Kruk on Letterman

These old clips are amazing. In just a few decades the entire nature of being a professional athlete has undergone quite a transformation as these clips will show. John Kruk comes on Letterman and talks about baseball with wit and brutal, brutal honesty. This is an interview where political correctness, pretension and ego do not exist.

It takes Krukker about 2 minutes to get warmed up but once he does, it's comedy gold.

Would it even be possible for an athlete to say these things today? I don't think so. The media would eat them alive and leave nothing but a bloody carcass.

Slightly less funny but even more insanely forthright is this interview. Going in reverse chronological order, this one's from 1992:

There's no one like this any more.

Phour Aces

This blog is hardly sports-related but I'm a good cop and I don't play by the rules.

Earlier, Cliff Lee re-signed with the Phillies, giving them a pitching staff that, if not unparalleled in history, is at least rarely seen in history.

Now the race is on to find a nickname for the group now that the former "H2O" moniker (Halladay, Hamels, Oswalt) is outdated.

"R2C2" (Roy, Roy, Cole, Cliff) seems to be the early favorite though we are early on in the voting (only 5% of districts reporting, this one is a hot potato on a jumping stove during an earthquake). I like "Four Aces". Of course, it will be tweaked to "The Phour Aces", that's a rule.

Click here to view the photoshop/slogan fun (the real point of this post).

My favorite is "The Four Horsemen"

Though I feel if that were actually to take off, by law it must be tweaked to "The Phour Horsemen". That's a rule.

I find myself intellectually able to recognize the amazingness of the situation but still emotionally unexcited. Somehow in the city that is specifically designed to be pessimistic about our sports teams, I may be the most pessimistic. I thought last year was their year and the season is so long with so many ups and downs, I was so excited for the beginning of the playoffs and the team just faded away. Then they're one year older and they lose Jayson Werth and I just feel emotionally spent. I just don't want to expect a Championship until the final game is over. I'm looking at a baseball "Dream Team" and not excited. Maybe this is my superpower. Maybe I should wear a cape and a big "thumbs down" picture on my chest. Maybe I'm just in a mood.

Spring and Harry Kalas

"Yet seemed it winter still, and you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play." - Sonnet 98

By calendar, the first day of Spring happens on between March 19th and March 23rd ever year. And yet for me the exact day of Spring has no set appointment. Spring begins on a Saturday afternoon when it's 70 degrees out and sunny. It's warm but not hot and it's the first day you open the windows and let the occasional breeze sift through the house. The best thing on tv is baseball. But not just baseball, pre-season baseball. If one were to take everything boring about the game of baseball and then subtract from that all the excitement, would you would be left with would be pre-season baseball. Calling the game is Harry Kalas. His rich baritone and the humming white noise of the non-crowd suggest that it might feel good to rest your eyes for a bit... Slipping back into consciousness again after an indeterminate amount of time, it's the 6th inning... Harry Kalas: "Walked 'im..." and Dave Hollins strolls lazily to first base. Nothing to see here, eyes closed once again...

And so it was... the exact moment when Spring had begun for the year, every year. And every year, every single detail - aside from Dave Hollins - could be counted on and looked back upon in each of the specific instances from last year, to being a teenager in high school to being 8 years old watching with my dad.

When Harry Kalas passed away last year, people said his voice was the soundtrack to their Summer. These weren't just kind words, they were the literal truth. When people said, "It won't be Summer without Harry" it was just an expression, it is the exact predicament I find myself in. How do I feel that Spring is here?

"Well," I figured, "if I could find a clip on the internet of sufficient mundanity and length, I could watch it as self-therapy and link it for others." But, alas, to the best of my internet searching skills, no such clip exists. There are tons of Harry Kalas tributes, there's Harry calling Mike Schmidt's 500th homerun, there's Harry making the calling 2008 World Series call, etc. Those are not just good, they're great but they're the essence of Fall, not Spring. I need a clip of Harry making calls when nothing is on the line and nothing significant happens. I need the sound of sweet monotony, when everything is completely ordinary in every way, when Harry's voice is the aural equivalent of a hammock with a sinky middle and a glass of lemonade on the ground.

Here's hoping that sometime before next year someone uploads old Phillies game footage which is completely ordinary in every way. Until then it won't be the same. We may spend 99% of our lives avoiding the dull, avoiding the monotonous, alleviating boredom, and yet here I am wishing it back - at least in this small measure. I think it's because it offers some comforting illusions that become increasingly rare as one gets older. Hearing Harry Kalas call baseball on lazy, sunny Saturday afternoons, life isn't hard, life is easy. Things don't change, things basically stay the same. Life isn't short, life is long. Time doesn't move fast, time moves slow... if at all.

The Quadrennial Curse

I realized something Saturday night but I didn't want to bring it up until it was certitude.

Years ago someone realized that Philadelphia's four major sports teams, all in a championship drought, were taking turns getting to the championship in their respective sports in 4 year increments.

1993: The Phillies make it to the World Series and lose.

1997: The Flyers make it to the Stanley Cup Finals and lose.

2001: The 76ers make it to the NBA Finals and lose.

2005: The Eagles make it to the Super Bowl and lose.

And so, when the Philadelphia Phillies made it to the World Series in 2008 (Note: not 2009) I was glad that someone had finally broken the pattern. Far, far more important than that, they actually won. The first championship in this city in any sport in a quarter century and the first of my sports-watching life.

Ghosts exorcised, I put foolish superstitions out of my mind, happy that I had seen at least one championship in my lifetime.

It was Saturday when I remembered the pattern and wondered, where we would be if it were still going. "Well," I thought, "if the curse were to continue it would mean that in the year 2009, the Phillies ... would have to make it into the..... World Series.... and...... lose.

And so here we are 4 days later.

The oddness of the pattern, the fact that I hate it when my team loses and the fact that I hate the Yankees aside, I'm not going to whine about it. Pre-2008 I had always said that any and all teams can lose and suck as much as they want just as long as one team wins just one championship at some point. The Phillies were that team and I'm going to stick to my word. And on some level, just making it to the World Series the year after winning isn't too shabby.

All I'm saying is: all this Mayan calendar 2012 "end of the world" crap is ridiculous. Everybody knows the Philadelphia Flyers have to lose the Stanley Cup Finals in 2013.

The Current Record:

1993: The Phillies make it to the World Series and lose.

1997: The Flyers make it to the Stanley Cup Finals and lose.

2001: The 76ers make it to the NBA Finals and lose.

2005: The Eagles make it to the Super Bowl and lose.

2009: The Phillies make it to the World Series and lose.

FAIR BALL HOME RUN, DICKIE THON!

Best
Phillies
Game
Ever and best
Ending
Ever

You might think that my acronym-making is terrible at this point. I've been watching baseball and I'd say I'm actually about average.

Last night's game was amazing. If you didn't see it, you didn't see it, I'm not going to try to describe it. I had an interesting experience... I don't have cable so I watched it over the internet except the sound wasn't working so I was basically watching the game on 'mute'. A strange way to watch a walk-off double (and post-game interviews for that matter). But I did and it was incredible.