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I must be honest: I watched exactly zero innings of last night’s Phillies game. I tend to tune out of the West Coast swings, with the attendant 10pm starts, for the simple reason that I hate watching a few innings and then missing the ending. It’s like watching only the first half hour of “Twilight,” except that “Twilight” sucks and the Phillies are awesome (4 games up on the division! Woooo). So this morning I got up and checked the box score on my phone.

What the heck? Cole Hamels pitched a gem! A diamond, baby! As someone who prefers good pitching and smallball to “let’s all just swing for the fences and see what happens” (and who, while I’d never question a World Fing Champion manager and GM, frequently gets annoyed with the way the Phils play the game), I kinda wish I’d stayed up.

Oh right, my daughter kept me up all night the night before, and didn’t do much better last night. (She ended up sleeping next to us so that we could rub her belly anytime she started screaming with the gas and constipation she’s got going on this week.)

Anyway, what’s keeping Cole from doing this every night, or at least more frequently than once a month? It’s not like he was facing scrubs; the Dodgers have the best record in either league by a large margin. He shut them down. Is he finally in shape for the season? I’m not asking for a shutout every night, but I think we should expect more from our ace than a 4.40 season ERA.

Charles has sort of entered a mildly regressed, whiny, misbehavin’ state since Josephine showed up; a little jealousy, a little boredom, a little attention-seekin’. So I try and make sure he gets to be the center of attention every so often. To this end, he and I went to purchase ice cream at a little place up the road from us. He got a vanilla soft-serve cone covered liberally in sprinkles, 1/3 of which he ate, 1/3 of which he rubbed over every inch of his body, and the remaining third of which I put into the freezer after he left it to melt onto the coffee table. I got a chocolate milkshake the size of Charles’s torso, and picked up a peanut-butter shake for Sarah, who remained home to feed Josephine.

While we were there, I met an aged gentleman who had on, of all things, a Philadelphia Athletics Historical Society tshirt. I was unaware that such a society existed, and asked him about it; apparently they have a little museum somewhere up near Hatboro, PA. After he went on his merry way, I whipped out my phone and did a little googlin’. As you might surmise, they have a website. More importantly, they have a store, filled with stuff like this. Daddy want. Wait, wait, no. Daddy really want, except without Foxx’s name, since players didn’t have their names on their uniforms until 1960. Plus then people would be like, “What the hell is that you’re wearing? Oakland’s colors do not include blue,” and I would say “It’s a replica Jimmie Foxx jersey, man, know your SHIZNIT.”

I have strange conversations.

Crazy day for baseball today. First, Manny Ramirez suspended 50 games for using a banned substance. MLB didn’t specify what was used, but Manny explains:

“Recently I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was OK to give me,” Ramirez said. “Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy. Under the policy that mistake is now my responsibility.”

Tough break for the Dodgers, who are running away with the NL West right now. Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far the other way? I fully support throwing the book at guys who are popping greenies and squirting HGH under their skin, but if a doctor in good standing gives someone a medication for a health issue, perhaps that could be taken into account? Of course, if Manny receives any special treatment (he almost certainly won’t), Phillies fans would rightly be murderously angry over J.C. Romero’s treatment in an almost identical situation.

In sadder news, Danny Ozark, Phillies manager in the 70s when they were pretty darned good, passed away this morning at age 85.

To brighten the mood, here’s a touching piece on Stan Musial. It’s from last summer, but I just found it today and wanted to make sure my homies saw it. I never knew much about Stan, but over the last few months have been learning more, and he’s rapidly becoming my favorite “Non-Philadelphia Ballplayer That I Never Actually Saw Play.” I even selected his batting stance as the one I use for my MLB2008 “The Show” 3rd baseman (who obviously throws right, but bats left, like Jesus Chase Utley).

Stan’s somebody I would have liked to ask my grandfather (a lifelong baseball fan, as well as a darned fine semi-pro player in the 1930s) about before the Alzheimer’s. Too bad.

Even if you don’t care much for basketball, this article by the inimitable Malcolm Gladwell is worth a read. The basic gist of the story is: even if you aren’t particularly good at something, you will be more successful than those who are by simple effort. This is something we tell our kids but tend not to believe ourselves; it’s nice to see it examined and proved.

Great job, “fans.”

Here’s the rule I propose: if you’re at a home game, don’t mess with the opposing fans. They’re the insurgents; you’re the US Army. Screwing with them is just like torture. It just pisses them off.

Let’s face it: Mets fans aren’t that bright. If they were, they wouldn’t be Mets fans. (Ha ha! Just kidding, Mets fan who might be reading this! Please don’t torch my car!) Now we’ll have thousands of them showing up at the Vault all season, rolling 15-20 deep, just itching to beat the crap out of someone. And some poor guy in a Cole Hamels jersey who’s taking his daughter to her first baseball game, and asked an idiot in a cheap David Wright knockoff jersey to stop dropping F-bombs, is gonna end up in the hospital. That’s gonna be so…great.

Some schmuck “fan” just created a baseball environment in which somebody’s going to get maimed. Thanks, douchenozzle.

So the Phils have quietly and sneakily crept back into first place with last night’s win over the Natinals. Well, maybe not sneakily; Monday’s win was effected via two, count ’em, two grand slams, one from Ryan Howard to tie it up early, and then another from Raul “RBI” Ibañez in the bottom of the eighth to take a 13-11 lead. So not sneaky, but quite loud.

The offense has been en fuego for the last week or so, getting on base, hitting huge bombs. They’re getting on base 35% of the time, 5th best in the league, and slugging .472, topping the league. Most importantly, they have 118 runs, third in the league but only one behind the tied leaders. Woo!

On the mound, however, we have a different story. In 19 games, starters have gone 7 innings only twice. The bullpen is performing admirably (aside from Lidge blowing his first save as a Phillie last week), but they’re getting worn out. Hamels is off to a disastrous start, with an ERA over 7, and while he allowed no runs last night, he only faced 18 batters over 4 1/3 innings before spraining his ankle while fielding a bunt. He says he’ll be okay to pitch again next Monday, his next scheduled start, but frankly I’d rather they 15-day DL him so he can make sure he’s back to full health. The team is good again this year, and has a strong chance of defending last year’s title; I think it behooves them to make sure their ace starter is healthy, rather than risk injury on a game in May.

On a positive note, Raul “RBI” Ibañez is close to joining Chase “Sloppy Splinter” Utley on the official “Matt Hearn Would Go Gay For These Men” list. They’re neck-and-neck in the stats: Utley’s batting .357, with an OPS of 1.142, and Ibañez is batting .355, and his OPS 1.143. Utley started hot like this last year but was slowed by his hip injury, but whichever of them can maintain a pace like this is your NL MVP, and I guar-on-tee it.

Here’s a snap from Tuesday’s ball game, described here.

I’ve been trying to find fun stuff to do with Charles before The Baby comes and takes us out of the power play and into man-to-man coverage. Earlier in the month we went to the zoo (always a favorite for me; I love a good capybara). Yesterday, I discovered that as a result of Monday evening’s rainout, the Wilmington Blue Rocks were going to play a twi-night doubleheader, with the first game starting at 5:05. I figured we’d get there late, stay to the end of the first game, and then sneak out before the rains started.

I picked up Charles at the usual time and asked him if he wanted to go to a baseball game, and he was SUPER-excited. (One great thing about children is that they cannot hide enthusiasm: they actually say things like “Yay!” and “Wow!” completely unironically.) So we got in the car and headed down to Frawley Stadium. Charles, being under the age of 4, required no ticket, so I bought a general admission ticket for $6. We went inside and were each given a free Rocky Bluewinkle hat, after which Charles got to meet the moose himself and shake hands. Then we went and found a little bench just outside the reserved seating area to watch a few at-bats.

Next to us, a stadium usher was chatting with an EMT (of which there were several around; I wasn’t sure if the Blue Rocks’ fans had a particular problem with coronary thromboses, or what; I can report that most of the fans, myself included, are well into the “obese” area of BMI measurement), discussing what idiots the fans were for thinking that they could move out of the General Admission seating into the almost utterly empty “Reserved” area. Anyone that tried was summarily dismissed to the bleacher seats. By the end of the game, there were hundreds of people crowded into “GA,” and literally tens of fans in reserved seating. Supposedly they would be permitted to upgrade their seating for the second game, but c’mon, Blue Rocks management. That’s kind of a silly policy on a Tuesday evening with threatening skies.

We watched a few at-bats, and I tried to explain to Charles what the fielding positions were; he grasped “pitcher” and “catcher” because, well, they pitch and catch, respectively. We got to see one Salem player knock one out of the yard, and I thought of Harry Kalas. Charles’s attention span being what it is, we had to find something to do after a bit, and got some chicken fingers and fries. Again, his attention span failed us as I got him to eat approximately 6 fries and no chicken before he spotted what he called a “trampoline,” but was in fact a small moon bounce. I insisted we eat some dinner, but he was too amp’d up. I finished off the chicken and threw most of the fries away (in our defense, the fries appeared to have been cooked during the last Democratic presidential administration) and wandered over to the moon bounce, where I was charged $2 for the privilege of watching my son bound around with wild abandon.

Once I finally convinced him to take a break, we headed up into the General Admission area, to the top row, where he watched baseball for about 30 seconds and then spent 10 minutes watching trucks go by on I-95. After a time, he decided he needed some popcorn, so we went off to retrieve that, and then returned to the bleachers to watch some more. By then it was close to 7pm, and Charles was entering a loopy state wherein he would say deliberately unintelligible things and then giggle uncontrollably, so I realized it was getting to be time to go. We shuffled out of there back to the car and were home and watching Thomas do his Tank Engine Thang by 7:30.

The Blue Rocks won, 8-3.

I’m pretty frustrated with the rainouts affecting the Phils. They seem to get to play 2 games, then they have rain or a day off and their momentum is gone. Super frustrating, and as an added bonus I’m sure they’ll be playing a bunch of doubleheaders and 8-game weeks, burning out the bullpen. Please hold me, as I am scared.

On the other hand: that Raul “RBI” Ibanez sure can hit, caint he? The jury is still out, but I’m willing to consider eating a lot of crow on the subject. (I believe my take on his signing was expressing great dismay that we gave up Pat Burrell and replaced him with an older, pricier guy who’s slightly better defensively and bats left-handed when we already have two powerful lefties and a panload of switch hitters but not one reliable righty starter. Not only is that sentence horribly constructed and painful to read, I might be, horror of horrors, wrong.)

Here’s hoping a series against the 4-8 Brewers can help get the good guys back to .500 and salvage April.