Pedro's Last Stand

You know the drill. Running journal time...

[Editor's Note: This is not one of FC's more gleeful blog posts. If you want happiness and sunshine, go somewhere else. It was not a pleasant evening in Couzens 5506.]

8:05 – I rush in just in time, returning from a lecture by Cape Town philosophy professor David Benetar. The lecture, entitled “Why Your Life Is So Much Worse Than You Think,” stressed the ultimate failure, disappointment, and suffering in human…hey, the bottom of the inning’s starting, let’s just shut up and watch the game.

8:07 – Pedro gets Jeter, the Old Enemy, to line out hard to left. Bronx fans try to start up three different chants to psyche him out, and end up incoherently shouting mixed obscenities. Pedro smirks and stalls to keep them interested.

8:09 – Johnny Damon, who’s been ‘so hot this World Series’ whiffs on a 2-2 changeup. Tim McCarver’s unfailing predictive analysis does the trick again.

8:11 – Teixeira gets a hold of one and the prospect of hearing Yankee fans erupt in malicious celebration nearly ends this column in the first inning. Thankfully, everybody forgets about the warning track and the inning ends quietly.

8:19 – McCarver notes that the Phillies lefthanded bats “have been neutralized this series”, before recognizing the Chase-Utley shaped elephant in the room and correcting himself. Buck takes care of the awkward silence by shifting the conversation away from anything requiring brain-wracking analysis.

8:21 – Admittedly somewhat worrying fact (ASWF, or ‘The Lefty Keyboard Slammer”): Pedro hasn’t thrown a pitch over 85. Not sure if that just means he’s pacing himself or he’s a sitting duck – I guess we’ll find out.

8:27 – Pedro walks A-Rod on four pitches and gives Matsui a fat pitch on the inside to pull (read: clobber), fortunately foul.

8:34 – ....yep, there it goes.

8:39 – Well, getting out of the inning after that wasn’t so tough, but then again, it’s pretty much just the walk up to the guillotine after the death sentence. Yep, this is what happens to you after a lecture on Schopenhauer.

8:46 – The Phillies get one back on a sacrifice fly. The run support has been pretty pitiful for Pedro in the postseason – almost 2000-era-Red-Sox-esque. This is the stuff six losses with an era under two is made of!

8:51 – Strikeout after the commercial break. Fucking unflappable.

8:53 – Shane Victorino gets lazy and decides not to break his wrist to catch another Jeter frozen rope.

8:59 – Pedro’s pitch count is definitely stacking up. Umpires are merciless. It’s looking like a short evening…or a long one, depending on whether I stick around after the gruesome part.

9:00 – Teixeira gets beaned in the knee for no apparent reason. The wheels are coming off…

9:01 – It’s not really useful to keep statistics for “most X in a postseason” when there are far more games in the postseason. It’s one thing to give Maris the extra eight games over Ruth, it’s another to give a modern player three times as many chances to hit a home run.

9:04 – A-Rod watches a beautiful strike three go by. Two outs.

9:05 – According to Buck, Charlie Manual was looking to replace Pedro with a lefty to face Matsui. Does nobody else in the booth realize that it’s the third inning and that the Phillies don’t have a bullpen that can get three outs, much less nineteen?

9:07 – Nevermind.

9:08 – Well, that’s human endeavor for you. Pitch for a decade and a half in half a dozen cities, put together the best two seasons in baseball history, start writing your Hall of Fame speech…and it still ends in the dugout, getting pulled after three miserable innings with an eighty-mile-an-hour fastball in your personal Ninth Circle of Hell.

9:12 – The Men Who Stare at Goats trailer comes on and provides a brief moment of relief in an existence of pain. Guess a hedonism-based framework for existential happiness works for the moment.

9:15 – Chase Utley strikes out…and the specter of the Will to Live rears its ugly head.

9:19 – In a somewhat bizarre occurrence, the ball gets by Posada, who casually jogs to the backstop to retrieve it. Werth, almost surprised at Posada’s ineptitude, also declines to hustle and only takes second. Not sure who got the raw deal there.

9:24 – In a spectacular show of impotence, the Phillies fail to take advantage of Pettite’s sudden loss of control and ground out weakly to third with two on and two out.

9:27 – Pedro emerges from the dugout for another stretch of what can only be described as peril.

9:32 – Pedro returns to the dugout for a showe – wait, it’s the end of the inning?

9:33 – A 1-2-3 inning of vicious line drives right at fielders never felt so good…at least not since the first inning an hour or so ago.

9:42 – The Phillies ground into another pathetic double play.

9:47 – Pedro doesn’t come out for another inning this time. Well, my comments at 9:08 still stand. Four innings without distinction, no standing ovation, just a gleeful New York Post and a vindictive crowd...

Well, there’s always next year.

--kd