***The Official Philadelphia Phillies 2013 Thread***

Jearlpam0925

And that's also why Utley is Utley and Howard is Howard: Brains/No Brains.

Empty Glass

Two hours into the season and Howard shows why despise him

Jearlpam0925

Empty Glass wrote:

Two hours into the season and Howard shows why despise him

That's all it takes.

Jearlpam0925

And still doesn't know how to throw a baseball.

Jearlpam0925

Even though they lost, I like what I saw by the end of the night - started out not taking pitches, but then started working counts, etc. And, of course, sans Hamels' location but that's alright. Overall, it's all a matter of health. And my prediction is Durbin is released by June.

eeriepadave

they played ok, Cole looked shaky. I remember a few years ago he pitched horrible his first outing then pitched real well afterwards.

JK_Livin

Cole shouldn't have shaved his stache. The plate umpire blew last night. There were the obvious ones to Revere in the 8th and Rollins in the 9th but also on Utley's at-bat before he got the 2 run single. All 3 weren't even close to strikes. But you're generally not going to win giving up 7 runs.

I liked Revere last night. Someone take Mayberry away please.

pjhawks

Empty Glass wrote:

Two hours into the season and Howard shows why despise him

ah god i love philly fans. our stud pitcher puts us in a 4-0 hole by the 2nd inning and it's ryan howard's fault. i guess ryan should have caught those 900 foot home runs by the braves :fp:

the one bad thing about opening day is the compete overreaction's good and bad to things that happen in that one game.

Jearlpam0925

pjhawks wrote:

Empty Glass wrote:

Two hours into the season and Howard shows why despise him

ah god i love philly fans. our stud pitcher puts us in a 4-0 hole by the 2nd inning and it's ryan howard's fault. i guess ryan should have caught those 900 foot home runs by the braves :fp:

the one bad thing about opening day is the compete overreaction's good and bad to things that happen in that one game.

The irony of this is just magical.

Empty Glass

pjhawks wrote:

Empty Glass wrote:

Two hours into the season and Howard shows why despise him

ah god i love philly fans. our stud pitcher puts us in a 4-0 hole by the 2nd inning and it's ryan howard's fault. i guess ryan should have caught those 900 foot home runs by the braves :fp:

the one bad thing about opening day is the compete overreaction's good and bad to things that happen in that one game.

No, but for 25 mil a year you should be able to hit opposite field. No need for "Philly fan" type comments or "opening day overreaction" comments. I don't like Howard and most likely never will. Not a big deal. I don't like any big league player that the D plays a shift on. The player should learn to hit.

pjhawks

Jearlpam0925 wrote:

pjhawks wrote:

Empty Glass wrote:

Two hours into the season and Howard shows why despise him

ah god i love philly fans. our stud pitcher puts us in a 4-0 hole by the 2nd inning and it's ryan howard's fault. i guess ryan should have caught those 900 foot home runs by the braves :fp:

the one bad thing about opening day is the compete overreaction's good and bad to things that happen in that one game.

The irony of this is just magical.

thanks for noticing

pjhawks

Empty Glass wrote:

pjhawks wrote:

Empty Glass wrote:

Two hours into the season and Howard shows why despise him

ah god i love philly fans. our stud pitcher puts us in a 4-0 hole by the 2nd inning and it's ryan howard's fault. i guess ryan should have caught those 900 foot home runs by the braves :fp:

the one bad thing about opening day is the compete overreaction's good and bad to things that happen in that one game.

No, but for 25 mil a year you should be able to hit opposite field. No need for "Philly fan" type comments or "opening day overreaction" comments. I don't like Howard and most likely never will. Not a big deal. I don't like any big league player that the D plays a shift on. The player should learn to hit.

umm utley?

Empty Glass

pjhawks wrote:

umm utley?

touché

When Utley strikes out 32% of his ABs, I'll add him to my list.

But honestly, you can't compare Utley with Howard and the type off ball players they are. Not even on the same level

pjhawks

Empty Glass wrote:

pjhawks wrote:

umm utley?

touché

When Utley strikes out 32% of his ABs, I'll add him to my list.

But honestly, you can't compare Utley with Howard and the type off ball players they are. Not even on the same level

i don't. they are different players asked to do different things. love chase but he has never been asked to hit 40 home runs and to drive in 140 runs in a season. not every player, like employees in succesfful companies, has the same job to do. ryan is asked to do things differently than chase and i think they both do them extremely well. thus why they are the greatest 3-4 combo the franchise has every had and the 2 key offensive cogs in the greatest era the franchise has ever had.

Johnny Abruzzo

R6 argument. Well that didn't take long.

Wobbie

Johnny Abruzzo wrote:

R6 argument. Well that didn't take long.

I was casually watching last night. when howard went down on 3 pitches and basically killed a rally, I thought "here we go again"

pjhawks

imalive wrote:

Johnny Abruzzo wrote:

R6 argument. Well that didn't take long.

I was casually watching last night. when howard went down on 3 pitches and basically killed a rally, I thought "here we go again"

do you usually come into this thread for the fruity beers and restaurant talks?

The Juggler

jp, i'd assume we're within 5-10 years of this movie happening. i'm getting this book asap:

http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/phi ... slide.html

Book on Dykstra exposes tragic slide

Frank Fitzpatrick

At 1 a.m. on May 7, 1991, a drunken Lenny Dykstra sped along winding Darby-Paoli Road in Radnor Township and slammed his red Mercedes sports car into a tree. The Phillies centerfielder escaped with fractured ribs, a broken collarbone and cheekbone, and second-degree burns.

Twenty-two years later, that car crash remains an apt metaphor for Dykstra's life.

Laws and limits aren't made for him. Dykstra is a self-powered machine bound for self-destruction. He races through life headfirst, heedless of others, an irresistible force in search of immovable objects.

Since the mercurial ballplayer's retirement in 1996, the pace of those collisions has accelerated, the carnage has grown more severe. And the wreckage? Well, all these years later we still can't take our eyes off it.

Dykstra, 50 now and imprisoned in California, has lost his family, his money, and, as a fascinating new book on his equally fascinating unraveling makes clear, maybe his mind.

Christopher Frankie, a former business associate and a victim of Dykstra's most recent pileup, has written a richly detailed but disturbing book on the enigmatic man-child, Nailed! The Improbable Rise and Spectacular Fall of Lenny Dykstra.

Sadly but not surprisingly, it shows how an ex-ballplayer who always lived on the edge plunged into the abyss.

Like so many before, Frankie was charmed at first. Dykstra hired the journalist to work for his failed Players Club magazine (full disclosure: Dykstra contracted me to write a pair of stories for the short-lived publication), but soon he became his boss' caretaker, fixer, confidant, and ultimately target for abuse.

"The redeeming qualities that first made me trust him," Frankie writes, "were buried beneath severe, toxic paranoia, apparent substance abuse, reckless abandon, and a complete detachment from reality. It was only a matter of time, I suspected, before he would end up in jail . . . or worse."

Broke and severely broken by then, Dykstra did, of course, wind up in jail, sentenced to three years in December 2012 on a variety of charges that included grand theft auto and financial fraud. The winding road that led him to this latest smashup is this book's focus - and it's not a story for the fainthearted.

Crude Dude

As Dykstra's life and post-baseball enterprises unwound late in the first decade of the millennium, he doubled down on the unspeakably crude behavior that once, when he was leading the Mets and Phillies to World Series, was laughed off as Lenny being Lenny:

Obscene advances to women. Threatening phone calls and e-mails to employees. Estrangement from family and friends. Drug and alcohol abuse. Reckless spending and borrowing. Illegal business practices.

Frankie notes that Dykstra's downfall likely had its roots in his childhood, when the mischievous Southern California youngster was abandoned by his natural father. But the episode that triggered the downfall's denouement began when, after losing millions in the stock market, he connected with Jim Cramer, the Wall Street investment guru and die-hard Philadelphia sports fan.

Dykstra studied the market. Cramer gave him advice and, eventually, a column on his influential website, TheStreet.com. The ex-ballplayer revived his bank account and his reputation. In a burst of arrogant bravado, he bought Wayne Gretzky's California mansion, a fleet of expensive cars, and whatever else he wanted. More important, despite not having played baseball for years, he became a media curiosity again.

That led to an HBO Real Sports report that was essentially a puff piece on Dykstra as a stock-market savant, which in turn resulted in even more media coverage for the fly catcher turned stock picker.

"If there was one guy we thought was going to be successful in the stock market, it would not have been Lenny," Gary Carter, his late teammate, told the author.

Gradually, Dykstra's mask melted away. In one ridiculous interview on Fox and Friends, the out-of-shape former athlete, reenacting his brawl with Dodgers catcher Rick Dempsey, wrestled with cohost Brian Kilmeade, pulling a hamstring in the process.

Dykstra parlayed the media attention into what would be his fatal venture. The Players Club was the name of what was supposed to be both an entity that could provide an array of financial and personal services to millionaire athletes and a glossy magazine that would showcase those same superstars.

It was an interesting concept. Frankie and others were lured to the enterprise that was launched with the kind of no-limit glitz Dykstra admired. But soon the house of cards began to collapse. Rents and salaries weren't paid. Commitments evaporated. As the money disappeared, so did the always paper-thin veneer of respectability Dykstra had typically managed to summon when necessary.
Paranoia strikes

Spiraling out of control, he borrowed and stole money, begged his mother for her credit card, lost his wife, his home, his cars. If anyone dared challenge him, he exploded, often irrationally and obscenely. When his book agent asked that he repay the $250,000 he'd lent him, Dykstra fired back. It's one of the few e-mails in the book fit for a family newspaper.

"Hey, tough guy, it will be fun to see how you hold after you are $1.0 [million] dollars in after paying legal bills?" he wrote. "But if this is the way you want to play it - then let's get it on! BY THE WAY, YOU ARE FIRED! BY THE WAY, I do need you to reimburse me for the two private jet rides AND HOTELS."

Mind and body gave way. Paranoia gripped him. He told friends that a fortune-teller had foreseen his doom and "Someone's going to get me."

"Just listening to Lenny speak - he was practically incoherent," said Wally Backman, who'd played with him in Philadelphia and New York. "He was whispering, mumbling. . . . It was sad to see what'd happened to him. It broke my heart."

One of the countless examples of bizarre behavior involved Dwight Gooden. The pitcher, who had long struggled with drugs and alcohol, was part of a reality TV show in which he'd checked himself into a celebrity rehab facility. Dykstra, believing his former Mets teammate was being held against his will, "showed up unprompted, unannounced, and attempted to break Gooden out of the facility," Frankie writes.

"He thought I'd been hypnotized [and was being held] hostage," Gooden told a radio station.

For Phillies fans who recall Dykstra in slightly more coherent days, Frankie's book provides some interesting revelations. Among them:

After Dykstra parted ways with friend and former business partner Lindsay Jones, Jones' subsequent lawsuit claimed that Dykstra had indeed abused steroids while with the Phillies and that he also gambled on the team's games in 1993.

The dislike between Dykstra and Phils closer Mitch Williams went deeper than what had been revealed. Dykstra blamed Williams - "he's a barrel-finder" - for the '93 World Series loss. Williams said his former teammate was "the most common sense-void person I've ever met in my life. . . . You could have a better conversation with a tree."

Teammates often had concerns about Dykstra's health. "There was one night before a game, Dykstra had blood coming out of both his ears. . . . Obviously, you knew it wasn't going to end well," one said.

Minutes after telling HBO's Bernard Goldberg on camera that he hadn't abused steroids in Philadelphia, he told the reporter, off the record, that he had. Then he denied it again in a later phone call with Goldberg.

For all its painstaking detail and firsthand insights, Frankie's recounting overdoses. The litany of truly awful behavior becomes redundant, almost too difficult to bear.

But as always seems to be the case with this tragically flawed but oddly compelling character, we can't look away. All that remains for voyeurs like us, it seems, is Dykstra's final car wreck.

The Juggler

positives from monday: revere's 12 pitch walk...dom brown's encouraging approach at the plate...and, of course, 26. score 5 runs, you should win most nights. there's no defending the r6 though. that 5th inning at bat was hard to watch. also---the ump changing his strike zone in the 8th inning did us no favors.

2nd game of the season...but a pretty big one tonight. come on doc...

pjhawks

The Juggler wrote:

positives from monday: revere's 12 pitch walk...dom brown's encouraging approach at the plate...and, of course, 26. score 5 runs, you should win most nights. there's no defending the r6 though. that 5th inning at bat was hard to watch. also---the ump changing his strike zone in the 8th inning did us no favors.

2nd game of the season...but a pretty big one tonight. come on doc...

2nd game of the season and the media and fan base is already in panic mode. love this town sometimes :roll:

and that dykstra book has to be a must read. gotta be some insane stories.