If you hurry, you can still catch the original article here. Kudos to Nighthawk for pointing it out.
Living under a rock.
Tag Archives: phillies
Deflating Wheels
On Philly Future someone linked to a website pleading the Phillies to fire Chris Wheeler from the Phillies announcing team. Why? Because it’s been leaked that the Phillies are talking about putting Wheels on for all 9 innings of each game, and moving Larry Anderson to strictly radio annoucement.
Now, an argument can be made that in some ways, Chris Wheeler is a better “announcer” than Larry Anderson. He’s got an extensive memory of Phillies history and current events around the league.
But really, his ability to announce isn’t the part that is up for debate in the minds of most Phillies fans I know. The part for debate is whether he’s actually worth listening to. I can’t tell you how many years I’ve spent listening to games and hearing Wheeler complain about a decision the umpires made or a choice the manager made where Wheeler was just plain wrong, and anyone who was capable of seeing the replay on their television was capable of seeing it. Wheeler is too often a complainer and a homer and an idiot.
Larry Anderson, on the other hand, has never pretended to play the role of the full announcer – he’s an excellent color commentator, leaving the announcing of balls and strikes and such to Harry Kalas or Scott Graham. He’s frequently played the same role for nationally-televised games — never asked to be the announcer, but providing color to broadcasts for Fox Sports when the Phillies have played. He’s fun to listen to.
Phillies fans like Anderson. We’re not so hot on Wheeler. For that matter, rumor has it that those preferences follow for the staff in the booth. I’m strongly hoping the Phillies organization thinks hard about the decisions they make for staffing the booth this year — they won’t drive more people to the stadium by annoying the hell out of them at home.
All the crap I forgot to tell you, in one easy location.
- My x-ray is “clear”, meaning no broken foot, but still a big lump, so I’m trying to hunt down an MRI. Whee.
- I received my copy of the Webcomic Telethon Book over the weekend, and it’s really nice. 8.5" x 11 ", not overly thick, but with multiple comics per page so you get a really good review of what was in the telethon. Definitely worth your time, especially since the funds go back to the Red Cross.
- The Philadelphia Phillies did win their last game of the season, but so did Houston, so I’ll be getting a refund for my NLDS tickets sometime in the next few weeks (dammit!!). This year, I think I’ll be rooting for St. Louis through the postseason. And the Yankees, ’cause that’s what I do.
- Redesign of the site is about 2/3 of the way done.
- It’s October! That means we’re less than a month away from National Novel Writing Month . I’d really like to participate this year, so here’s the plan:
- Fill up the comic buffer between now and November so I don’t have to worry about it.
- Get some rough ideas thrown together on what I’m going to write about. (Feel free to throw suggestions in the forum.)
- Subscribe to the NaNoWriMo podcast feed and the feed for their news service (done) to stay psyched
- spend lots of quality time with my husband so he doesn’t disown me for taking on yet another project
That’s all for now, must go comic.
Oh yeah
One other thing. If the Phillies now drop the next 8 and don’t make it into the playoffs at all (they’re currently 2 back from the wildcard and 4 or 5 back from the division), it’s my fault. I bought tickets to go see them in the NLDS and that guarantees that they’ll never get there. It’s just this amazing gift I have.
No, it’s Iowa. Could’ve sworn it was heaven.
It’s been a long, strange week. Most of them are.
I’ve spent a good part of the week angry at the Phillies, as I imagine anyone in my position would be. When they’re winning the wildcard for the first time in a damn long time, I let my hopes grow. And of course, when the Phils drop three to Houston, and are suddenly in third place for both the wildcard and the division, with a two and a half game gap in September, it concerns me. They’re breaking my heart, and I knew they were going to break my heart (they haven’t been in the playoffs since ’93) and I let them in anyway, and now they’re breaking it. So of course I’m going to call them heartless bastards when they give up a two-run single in the seventh. (I’m telling you, they’re playing the bullpen too hard — why the hell can’t we get some starters who can play more than 5 innings in September? And now we’ve lost Padilla for God-knows-how-long…It’s been a long September and there was reason to believe maybe this year would be better than the last.)
I watched them play while cooking dinner tonight, cursed a bit, then we flipped through the channels for a while, and landed on AMC, about a minute and a half in to Field of Dreams. Now I’ve seen The Natural more times than I can count, and though I’ve never seen all of Bull Durham, in order and complete, I know enough to mutter “eight and sixteen… how did we ever win eight?” under my breath when the going gets tough. But somehow I’d never seen Field of Dreams for more than ten minutes even once.
I won’t tell you about the movie. You’ve either seen it, and know how it makes you feel the grass between your toes, or you haven’t and there’s no way I could describe it any more than I could describe how ghosts in a corn field turn into a baseball movie. Watching it is playing wiffle ball in every yard we’ve ever owned. It’s learning how to score at my brother’s little league games. It’s standing on the mound – any mound – and listening to the air crackle around you. The smell of the leather, the rough feel of the bat, the sound of the dirt and the taste of the air. Doesn’t matter who’s playing, or at what level, or what time. The choice between a fastball and a curve, between a pitch and a throw to first, between an all-out run and a head-first slide. I breathe baseball.
And it took a movie about a corn field in Iowa to remind me of that feeling you get when the sting of the Eagles’ season end is still fading, and the grass is green for the first time. The sky is so blue that sometimes, it doesn’t have to be about the pennant. Sometimes, it’s about the curve of the blue plastic seats at the park, and the hot smell of suntan lotion on my husband’s neck, and the sound of Harry Kalas calling a long fly ball.
Boys, I forgive you. Even if you manage to come back this season and make it to the playoffs only to break my heart again… I’ll still forgive you.
Try to win a few more next year, huh?
On miracles and mental breakdowns.
Yeah, so last night at about 11:30, I was working on some code for a little side-project while watching the Phillies game and generally trying to spin down from a crazy day. I got about 2/3 of what I needed done, and I tried to push a new stylesheet up to the system, when suddenly everything choked. Dreamweaver, which is prone to the occasional odd error message, informed me that it couldn’t upload the file in question because, well, the file didn’t exist, or maybe I didn’t have permission to use it.
And, well, that’s bunk, because I’m the ONLY one with permission to use these files, and this particular one had been uploaded mere minutes before. So I logged on to my web host and decided to manually upload the file instead…. only to discover that Dreamweaver wasn’t lying; the directory I was working in was empty. So were most of the others. Most of the pages here woudn’t load, and a good chunk of my other work was just plain gone.
Panic ensued.
I sent a note to the support team, waited a few minutes, and watched as one by one entire directories just poofed. No backup files, no forum, no wordpress… Another panicked note to the support team. This time, a response: they’re aware of it and working on it and it’ll be up within the hour. But that was at 1 AM and I have to be to work early today for a meeting. (yay meeting.)
Did you ever go to bed at night and wonder if everything you’d done was going to be there in the morning? Not a comfy feeling. I think I “get” Neverending Story in a whole new way now.
After a fitful night sleep, I’m back, and so is everything else. The support team was, as always, good to their word. And I am immediately applying what I learned. First, a backup was done. (I do these regularly, but not regularly enough.) And second, I’ve added a link to my Xanga blog in the links section. Strangely, when everything else was disappearing rapidly last night, the homepage was still there, so the links section was still functional. If all else has failed, I’m relatively sure Xanga will still be standing, and since it doesn’t live on the same server as everything else, it’s a decent place to post updates when I can’t post updates. Of course, in case of catastrophe, homepage mileage may vary, so you may want to make note of that one somewhere if you haven’t already.
So anyway, mental breakdown over, and I have to get my butt to work. Here’s hoping the next 24 hours contains fewer heart-attack inducing elements for all of us.
Baseball!
Today my family and I sat in the hot July sun just up the third base line (100-level seats! whoo!) and watched the Phillies beat the Washington Nationals 5-4 in 12 hot innings.
It. Was. Awesome.
Don’t get me wrong – the Phillies stil haven’t convinced me that they’ve even got a shot at climbing out of the basement and finishing even in a respectable 2nd place for the division. Despite their 12-of-13 winning streak earlier this season (a streak that made them the leaders of the wildcard all-too-temporarily) they’ve wrested defeat out of the jaws of victory enough times this season that today’s win was wholly unexpected.
In fact, I’ve already reached a point where I call my cousin just to rant about “those bums” (as generations of my family have done before), and a good portion of last week was spent muttering “Eight and sixteen… how did we ever win eight?”
Maybe that’s why today’s win was so sweet. It was messy – they stranded too many runners – and it was hot, and we ran out of lines on the scorecard and had to start writing the score information in the “at bats” and “runs” columns, but when it was all said and done it was a mark in the win column.