The Sports Informant

Give the Philadelphia Phillies their props. They outlasted the New York Mets in the last week of the MLB season just to squeak into the playoffs, then pull of a miraculous run that no one paid attention to. Why? Because everyone was talking about the Rays’ run.

Well that ended this week. The Rays, as fantastic of a story as they were wearing the glass slipper, were no match for the Phillies, even with the gods giving the Rays an extra two days’ delay to try to figure out a way to beat Philadelphia. In the end, even fairy tales couldn’t stop a city from getting its first major sports championship in 25 years. Destiny, it seems, was in the hands of the team no one was watching.

It wasn’t the Boston-Los Angeles matchup everyone wanted. It wasn’t superstar Manny Ramirez versus the team that traded him during the season, the same team he won a World Series with the year before. It wasn’t east versus west, with two of the game’s most historical franchises battling for supremacy. In the end, it wasn’t much of a storyline at all.

But that’s what made it exciting. The expectations were finally focused on the actual games and not the sideshows leading up to them. While big budget media outlets like ESPN struggled to make an eventual 4-1 series interesting, the games themselves played out much like scenes in the last 20 minutes of fictional sports movies.

Chase Utley faking a throw to first and instead throwing home to get the runner at the plate? Really? I haven’t seen that since my high school days, when coach taught us to pump fake the throw to encourage runners already on base to get greedy to advance. It worked often then, with inexperienced kids thinking they’re faster than my ability to sling the ball across the infield, but in the major leagues, with the World Series on the line? Wow. That play would have given the Rays the tying run!

That was just one of many big plays in a series that saw a battle in nearly every game. Only one game was decided by more than two runs. Three of the games were decided by one run. If it weren’t for such a lopsided 4-games-to-1 overall result, this series could have been legendary.

For fans in our area itching for something interesting to finally pay attention to, the World Series stepped up to the plate and knocked it out of the park. Hopefully the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A’s were watching. They could learn something about what it takes to win, especially when you’re two teams no one expected, or wanted, to be there.