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Friday, August 04, 2006

PHILLIES NEWS

Leave it to Chase Utley to steal the show, on an otherwise good night for the Phillies. Despite the fact that his team had won, giving them 7 wins in their last 8, all the media wanted to talk about after the game, was that his hitting streak at 35 games, had ended, even though he was given an ample 5 at-bats to extend it. Now it's true that his streak was fun to watch, and it was a bit of a momentous achievement, but for me the only significant news on this night was that Phillies won. Of course the cool thing is that if you were to ask Utley he would probably say the same and so in light of that, let me digress for a moment and say Here's to you Joltin Chase, 35 straight, and hopefully more streaks to come. Anyway getting back to the game, as you might expect in game between bitter rivals, such as the Phils and Mets, it was tight battle throughout the night. In fact, through 6 innings both the Mets and the Phillies had identical stats with 3 runs on 7 hits, off Randy Wolf who went 4 innings, and Orlando Hernandez who went 6 innings, respectively. Thus with the game tied at 3 after 6 innings it came down to a battle of bullpens and needless to say the Phils bullpen came out on top, with 4 scoreless innings, while the Mets bullpen even though they only had to go 3 innings, gave up 2 runs, both on homers. David Dellucci led off the 7th inning with the 1st of the 2 for a 4-3 phils lead. Then Ryan Howard (37 homers now) finished the Phils 5-3 win with the 2nd of the 2 in the top of the 9th inning, following Chase Utley's streak-ending strikeout to start the inning. Tom Gordon then closed out the Mets in the bottom of the inning for his 27th save. All in all tonight's game was pretty exciting as the lead changed hands 3 times in the 1st 4 innings, with the Phils up 1-0 after 2, down 2-1 after 3, tied at 2 after 3 and 1/2 and down 3-2 after 4 before scoring the last 3 runs of the night for the win. Of course, even with tonight's win the Phillies are still 11 games behind the Mets so don't hold your breath for a division title, but hey they are still just 2.5 games back in the wild card, so there is plenty of hope left for the playoffs. Well, happy trails everyone.

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