http://phollowingthephillies.blogspot.com/danh35 wrote:I think the Phillies will try to spoil the Braves chances for the Wild Card. The Brewers are only a game up on Arizona for the second best record in the league, and if I remember correctly, Arizona won the season series between the two, so if they tie, Arizona gets the second seed. If that happens and the Braves win the Wild Card, the Phillies get the Brewers in the first round. If the Cards get the Wild Card, they would play the Phillies. I would think the Phillies would rather not play the Brewers in the first round, so they go hard against the Braves to avoid that scenario.
With that, here is Charlie Manuel, unedited, following back-to-back losses to the Mets.
"I’m sitting there watching it. I don’t know what I can do about it. I’d say our team is out of sync. We’re definitely out of focus. You guys see how we’re playing. The teams we’re losing to, if you look at our record against them this year – there ain’t too much going our way right now.”
“I don’t know what to say. I sit there and watch and I put the lineup in. We’ve had – actually when you start messing with your lineup – I’ve said this over and over and you guys have heard me for five years – always talking about rest players, do this, do that – all of a sudden we want to get our guys who are hurting well, stuff like that. All of a sudden we start giving them two and three days off, on one, off one, start deciding when to play them. Look around, and pretty soon you lose your mojo. You lose your time and you lose your rhythm. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been in the damn game for 50 years. I know exactly what I’m talking about. I preach about it every day. People hear it but they look at me like I’m stupid or crazy. Maybe I am.
But that’s what’s happening. That’s what you’re seeing. We’re out of sync. We’re out of focus. We’re searching and nothing’s going right. We jump out there tonight and get six guys on base the first two innings and we score two runs. The other night we got five straight hits and we scored two runs. What the heck? We’re supposed to be scoring three or four runs in a situation like that, but we make mistakes. When we do score two or three runs, then our pitching falls apart. We’re way better than that. Really. We’ve showed we’re better than that. We’ve got 98 wins. We were set to have the biggest year of any Philly team and we got out of sync.
If you want to know the truth with our lineup? It’s like you’ve got seven relievers down there and you keep changing relievers and everything, they’ll find somebody to beat. Does that make sense? That’s kind of like our lineup is. We keep bouncing around, we keep doing things, we keep getting well and all of that – we’ve played all year with people hurting. Every day you play the game of baseball, you hurt. Somehow, you hurt. You have aches and pains – ankle, knee, elbow, whatever. Headaches. Believe me. You can ask anybody who ever played this game. I played this game for 20 years, I can tell you. When you lose focus and you get out of sync, you’ve got to get it back.
Do we have time? I don’t know. We’ll see. But also, too, it’ll be a test of how good we are. How about that? This will be a good test. This is the first time this year that we’ve actually gone bad. And it’s not a real good time to go bad. But at the same time – we’ll see. This is a good measuring stick for us. You might not like it, but it is. We created that ourselves, so we’ll see. That’s all I’ve got to say."
Wheeww. Take a breath.
