Previews are abundant on other blogs, and quite frankly my nerves are too shot to come up with a coherent analysis of my own, so I present to you a series of links to mull over for the next 4 hours...
- Phillies & Eagles PA announcer, Dan Baker, celebrated his 40th year as the voice of the Phillies in 2011. He gets bonus points in my book for sharing a hometown with me, but 40 years announcing some of the game's greats is truly a remarkable feat. It's one thing to stumble into a job like that, but it's a whole other thing to hone your craft to a point where you're probably the 3rd most recognizable voice in town (behind Merrill Reese and Harry, of course.) Here's to 40 more!
- Infographics for the 2011 playoffs? Sure. One of the biggest surprises is the fact that the Phillies have the fewest players that signed as Free Agents as any of the teams in the playoffs with 5. Also worth noting how similar the head to head records are amongst all the teams in the playoffs.
- I wouldn't be doing my job if I let the Braves off the hook so easily for their September collapse... Seamheads does a great job at compiling the dozens of factors that contributed to their late season failure. Maybe they just weren't that good to begin with. A team can only win so many 3-2 or 2-0 games before they run out of steam. I said midseason that Michael Bourn just wouldn't be enough to get them over the hump and in the end, the blame has to lie with GM Frank Wren for not sparking his team with enough offense to support his young pitching staff.
- The Hardball Times put out a couple of comprehensive reports last week on the top 100 prospects at seasons' end. While the Phillies had a couple of young arms on the list with Trevor May at 73 and Jesse Biddle at 87, one of the biggest surprises to me was former Phillies minor leaguer Travis d'Arnaud all the way up at #12. Losing him in the Roy Halladay deal was well worth the price, but offensive catchers who hold their own behind the plate are a pretty rare bird. It might sting a little bit if he's hitting the 25 HRs, THT is predicting once he reaches the bigs.
- I was at the game on Sunday so I didn't catch LaRusa's in game comments until Monday, but it sounds like he's been fined for criticizing umpire Jerry Meals on the TBS cameras. It sounds like he was right in stating that there were 2 different strike zones being employed... only he probably should have kept his mouth shut because the Cardinals were the benefactors of the unbalanced strike calls. According to Phillies Nation and BrooksBaseball.net, the Phillies had 7 pitches thrown for strikes that were called balls and their hitters saw 6 pitches outside the strikezone that were called strikes. I noticed Cliff Lee get himself into a handful of 0-2 counts and follow up with what appeared to be a strike only to see it called a ball. Some of those 0-2 counts came back to hurt him late in the game.
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