Posted: 24 Oct 2010 02:44 AM PDT

PHILADELPHIA They have two outstanding starting pitchers. They have an All-Star closer. They have a rookie who appears destined to become one of the best catchers in the game and a couple of dependable middle relievers.

That's about it.

But this team of castoffs and kids, this team with virtually no offense, is headed to the World Series.

When the San Francisco Giants made their last World Series appearance eight years ago, they did so with future Hall of Famers like Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent in their lineup. They will return with journeymen like Juan Uribe, Aubrey Huff and Cody Ross.

"Not bad for garbage pickups," Huff said.

The Giants were crowned champions of the National League on Saturday night, when an eighth-inning solo home run by Uribe led them to a 3-2 victory at Citizens Bank Park that clinched the best-of-seven NL Championship Series, four games to two.

Uribe was initially signed by the Giants two years ago - to a minor league contract.

Stories like his are common on this team, which will play host to the Texas Rangers in Game 1 of the World Series on Wednesday.

Ross, the most valuable player of the NLCS, was a waiver acquisition. Pat Burrell was signed after he was released by the Tampa Bay Rays.

"I couldn't be prouder of this group," Manager Bruce Bochy said. "They've been called castoffs and misfits, but I thank management for bringing them in."

The Giants secured their passage to the World Series with their typical high-wire act, as closer Brian Wilson got the Phillies to leave four men on base during his five-out save.

The game ended with Wilson throwing a backdoor slider on a 3-2 count that Ryan Howard took for a called third strike. Men were on first and second.

"Complete chaos," Wilson said of the on-field celebration in front of a crowd stunned into silence.

Wilson faced a similar situation in the eighth inning, when he replaced Tim Lincecum.

Lincecum, who had started two days earlier, was called on to begin the eighth inning. He struck out Jayson Werth, but gave up back-to-back hits to Shane Victorino and Raul Ibanez, prompting Bochy to summon Wilson.

Wilson got Carlos Ruiz to line into a double play.

To win this game, the Giants had to overcome a terrible start by left-hander Jonathan Sanchez, who failed to get an out in the third inning.

As his final act, Sanchez hit Chase Utley in the back with a pitch. On his way to first base, Utley tossed the ball back to the mound, prompting Sanchez to curse at him. Utley cursed back.

The benches cleared. No punches were thrown, no players were ejected. But with no outs and two men on base, Sanchez was done.

Sanchez's mess was cleaned up by Jeremy Affeldt, who retired the next three batters to keep the score tied, 2-2.

Sanchez threw 50 pitches, 24 in the Phillies' two-run first inning.

In that inning, Sanchez issued a one-out walk to Placido Polanco, who scored on a double to right by Utley. A sacrifice fly to the warning track by Werth drove in Utley and made it 2-0.

Sanchez and Andres Torres started the third inning with back-to-back singles. A sacrifice bunt by Freddy Sanchez put them on second and third.

Huff singled to center, scoring Jonathan Sanchez. Third base coach Tim Flannery waved home Torres, who was out at the plate.

Huff, however, reached second base on the throw home, so when third baseman Polanco made an errant throw on a slow roller hit by catcher Buster Posey, Huff was able to score and tie it, 2-2.

Phillies starter Roy Oswalt pitched six innings and was charged with two runs, one of which was unearned, and nine hits. He struck out five.

The Giants received a key relief performance from their Game 4 starter, 21-year-old Madison Bumgarner, who pitched two scoreless innings, though he had to bear down to do so. After loading the bases in the fifth, Bumgarner got Victorino to ground out back to the box to end the inning.

Ibanez led off the sixth inning with a double and reached third with one out, but Bumgarner struck out Ben Francisco and got Jimmy Rollins to fly out to center field.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

Phils go 5 for 5: Five past playoff heroes come up empty - CBS Sports

Posted: 23 Oct 2010 10:19 PM PDT

PHILADELPHIA -- All that experience, and what did it get the Phillies? Nothing. It got them nothing. Unless you buy the rationale that, well, golly the Phillies had the best record in baseball this season, and they made it to the National League Championship Series. So the experience paid off some!

Don't buy it, because all that experience didn't pay off, not even a little bit. This team wasn't put together to win the NL East. This team was put together to win the World Series -- to get there, at least -- and this team failed.

And this team was failed, most gallingly, by the most experienced Phillies of all.

The Phillies have this cool statistic, a stat they're proud of, a stat they trumpet prominently in their pregame media notes. The stat says that no franchise in baseball history has ever had the same five players start the same 39 consecutive postseason games -- until the Phillies did it this year. Who are the five guys? You know their names. Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino and Carlos Ruiz.

So who failed the Phillies the most on Saturday in their season-ending, 3-2 loss in Game 6 against San Francisco?

You know their names. Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino and Carlos Ruiz.

"Sometimes the way the game goes and the way you play, things happen," Phillies manager Charlie Manuel said.

Or, in the case of the Phillies' most experienced players, things don't happen. Not good things, anyway.

Howard, the biggest star of the group, was the biggest postseason flop. And here, probably, the law of averages caught up to him. Before this season, Howard had been a postseason superstar, driving in 27 runs over the past four postseasons, including a club-record 15 RBI in the 2009 playoffs and an MLB-record eight consecutive games with at least one RBI.

That's a lot of success. Baseball being baseball, Howard was due a lot of failure -- and it happened over the past week. You know that stat I just told you, that Howard has had 27 RBI in the past four postseasons? More impressive, that ranks second in all of baseball over the same time frame. And even more impressive, in a bizarre way, Howard didn't have a single RBI this postseason. None.

To cap that doughnut, Howard sprinkled this icing: He struck out to end the season, with the potential tying run at second base and the potential winning run at first. He struck out to the end game, and the season, and he struck out looking.

And then Howard sat in the clubhouse and stared needles through anyone who approached to talk to him. After a few minutes of that nonsense, Howard stopped pouting in public and disappeared to pout somewhere in private. Hey, I don't blame him. Pretty sure I'd be pouting too if I'd struck out 12 times in 22 at-bats in the NLCS. And that was another record for Howard, his 12 strikeouts tying the NLCS mark shared by Darryl Strawberry (1986) and John Shelby (1988).

The next-biggest Phillies star? Chase Utley, probably. And he was their next-biggest postseason flop, though he provided one of the most entertaining moments of the NLCS in the third inning Saturday after being hit by a pitch from Giants starter Jonathan Sanchez. The ball hit Utley high on the back, a pitch that would have looked intentional had it happened in June and not late October, and Utley's response was to jog serenely to first.

On his way, the ball bounced up into his path -- and Utley palmed it and tossed it toward the mound. Sanchez watched the ball land, then watched Utley take first, then said something stupid to Utley. Utley took one step toward the mound, seeking clarification on Sanchez's grievance, then dismissively waved him off and stepped back onto first.

Too late. Both dugouts emptied. Both bullpens emptied, too. Much milling ensued, but nothing of note happened, and the game continued. For Utley, it was another brutal game in the field. He had two more non-errors, plays that a better fielder would have made, but plays that weren't ruled errors -- giving him four such non-errors in the six-game NLCS. That's a staggering number.

The latest examples of non-errors, on top of Utley's two misplays during the San Francisco swing of the NLCS, came in the third when he couldn't stop Sanchez' leadoff single -- the Giants scored two runs that inning -- and the ninth when he came up empty trying to use his glove to scoop up, and throw out, Andres Torres on a bunt single.

On top of all those non-errors in the NLCS, Utley hit .182 with one RBI in six games.

Rollins? He was moved to the leadoff spot for Game 6, and he got on base twice, but he was unable to score what would have been an enormous run in the fifth when Howard, finally, managed a two-out hit. It was a double into the gap in left-center, and it rolled to the wall, but Rollins was held at third -- and like a good soldier, he stopped. The Phillies didn't score that inning. Rollins? He didn't score the entire NLCS. But he did strand Raul Ibanez at third to end the sixth inning.

Victorino? He hit .208 in the NLCS, stranded five runners in Game 6 and then made the most painful mental gaffe of the series -- getting doubled off second base when Carlos Ruiz hit a liner at Giants first baseman Aubrey Huff. It wasn't an example of a great defensive play by Huff, either. It was an example of a mental boner. Victorino was so far from second that Huff could have run the ball there. Instead he lobbed it, gently, for the out.

And poor Ruiz. He's the one who hit the line drive that became a double play, notching two outs with his final swing of a series in which he went 3 for 18 (.167). Sometimes the breaks are with you, and sometimes -- or every time, for the Phillies' five most experienced playoff vets during the 2010 NLCS -- they're not.

Giants ride special brand of 'torture' to Series - Major League Baseball

Posted: 24 Oct 2010 01:18 AM PDT

PHILADELPHIA -- The San Francisco Giants knew the script before the rest of us watched it play out.

They've seen enough of themselves to know that the National League Championship Series title they claimed with a 3-2 win in Saturday night's Game 6 would have to culminate on the road, in a one-run game, with one of the game's more dangerous hitters at the plate and two men on base. It couldn't be a breathe-easy blowout, because that's simply not how these Giants operate. "We talked about it for the last week," said closer Brian Wilson, whose slider low in the zone froze Ryan Howard for strike three and put the Giants in their first World Series in eight years. "We knew when we finally do this, we're going to look at each other and say, 'This was well-earned. It was exhausting, it feels good and it's going to be that much better of a celebration.'" Sure, they would have liked to celebrate after Game 5, with an amped-up crowd packed into AT&T Park. But it took one more cross-country flight, one more comeback, one more tortuous ninth to vault them into the Fall Classic against the Rangers. And it all felt apropos. "You get a lot of people, family and friends, telling us we give them a heart attack with these games," second baseman Freddy Sanchez said. "But we've been prepared for these games. We've had them all year, we had them against the Padres to clinch our division, we had them in the Division Series and we have them now." The byproduct of all these close calls is the dismissive nature of the national audience. Everybody outside the Bay Area keeps waiting for the magic to run dry for these Giants. But it's late October, and that wait continues. "They're hot right now, and they're doing all the little things right," Phillies closer Brad Lidge said. "Sometimes, that's even more important than how good you are." The Giants clinched on the final day of the season, sent Bobby Cox into retirement in the NLDS and knocked off Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels to steal the Phillies' chalice. They've been counted out all year, and they'll likely be counted out again when the World Series begins Wednesday. But maybe it's time to believe. Maybe it's time to accept that Aubrey Huff, Buster Posey and Cody Ross can do what Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, Will Clark, Matt Williams, Kevin Mitchell, Jeff Kent, J.T. Snow and Barry Bonds never did: Win a World Series title in San Francisco. It might have seemed unfathomable a few months, a few weeks or even a few days ago. Heck, it even felt a bit unfathomable early in a dramatic Game 6.

Most World Series appearances by a National League club

Rank	Team	WS wins	WS trips
1.	Giants	5	18
	Dodgers	6	18
3.	Cardinals	10	17
4.	Cubs	2	10
5.	Reds	5	9
	Braves	3	9
7.	Phillies	2	7
	Pirates	5	7

Yet the Giants are here because they persevere. They win with dominant starting pitching from Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and Jonathan Sanchez and a ragtag lineup that seems to change by the day. Only two members of the Opening Day lineup, Huff and Juan Uribe, remain regulars today. "This," general manager Brian Sabean said, "was a work in progress." And the work made the reward all the more fulfilling. Sabean will get the credit for piecing the current construction of this club together when injuries and ineffectiveness dictated adjustments on the fly. But to hear him tell it, Sabean made the process sound rather simple. "When you have the kind of pitching staff we have," Sabean said, "you can mix and match, you can experiment, you can decide how and when you're going to bring people up from the Minor Leagues, you can bring people in from the outside that are a waiver claim or have been released, because you really have nothing to lose. You know that the pitching's going to be there on most days, and why not try to do something, either with somebody's past experience or just the opportune moment to get somebody on the ballclub?" The swell that propelled the Giants to the postseason, and ultimately the World Series, came in September, when the starting staff rattled off a streak of 18 consecutive games in which they allowed three earned runs or less. "That just galvanized everything," Sabean said, "and loosened everything up." The Giants have played loose throughout this postseason because so little was expected of them. Their lack of starpower, outside of Lincecum, is probably the key to their coexistence. This is a team that doesn't get ahead of itself, rarely beats itself, and most of all, believes in itself. "You've got every single guy contributing," Wilson said. "You don't have one guy you're going to look at and say, 'Oh, yeah, that was the guy. He hit 75 home runs, or he didn't have an ERA and won 25 games.' You're going to look at the guy that stole second base or got called up and scored against Colorado on an errant throw, you're going to look at Cody Ross coming over and hitting three jacks in the LCS and winning MVP. You're going to look at every single guy, and his role was a key component in why we're here. It's a team effort. It really is." If they were overlooked before, they won't be after taking down the Phillies. The Giants won this series because manager Bruce Bochy always had a feel for the right lineup to use on a particular day, because they had the weapons in the rotation to counter the Phils' Big Three, because Ross always had the clutch hit and because Wilson is a master of the multi-inning save. And those are merely the obvious reasons. After all, this is a team of moving parts and rotating heroes, so it's hard to pin down one positive. But the steely resolve the Giants showed in Game 6 probably says it all. "The whole nation," Huff said, "just saw how we played baseball all year." It is torture at its finest.

Anthony Castrovince is a reporter for MLB.com. Read his blog, CastroTurf, and follow him on Twitter at @Castrovince. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.

Heroes Series

Sunday, October 24, 2010

“Unlikely heroes lift Giants into Series - Bellingham Herald” plus 2 more

“Unlikely heroes lift Giants into Series - Bellingham Herald” plus 2 more

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Feedjit

Popular Posts