How 'Bout Them Phillies

As it happened, our vacation to Denver coincided with the Phillies road trip there.

Darling Spouse messed up our plans a little by inadvertently purchasing tickets to the Saturday game instead of the Friday one. (Getting up at 5:30 on Sunday to fly back was hard enough without getting in at 11:30 the night before.)

When they dropped the Friday game 7-6 in 11 innings -- after Alfonseca let the Rockies tie it up on a 2-out, 2-strike homer (d'oh!) I figured oh well, maybe we'd see them win on lucky 7/7/07. No such luck. But we did get an hour of rain delay, which included the (at the time) hugely entertaining sight of watching the ground crew struggle with the tarp as the wind flung it up into huge billowing silver waves that pulled one guy about ten feet along the ground at one point.

But it wasn't until after we got back and watched the end of the game on TV Sunday afternoon that we found out just how classy our Fightin' Phils (though I've been frequently known to call them the F***in' Phils) really are.

Sure as shooting, Denver got rain again. But this time the winds threw the tarp around even more violently, at one point hurling a member of the ground crew ten feet into the air and then smothering him under it.

That's when the Phillies -- my Phillies -- showed their class: the entire team emerged from the dugout to help:

Check out the whole article here.

What about the Rockies?

Only LaTroy Hawkins came out to help for the Rockies.

"You never know what can happen," Rockies infielder Jamey Carroll said. "I've been on tarp duty in college and it can whip around, yank you around your shoulders and stuff. After the fact you think what could have happened to one of the guys, they would have got thrown around or something like some of the guys did, you're risking a lot.

Damn right you're taking a risk. But that's what the Phillies did, because it was necessary:

"The guy might have died," Greg Dobbs said. "He was trapped under there. We were watching and once it got to a point, we were all like, 'We gotta do something.'"...

...Aaron Rowand and Chase Utley clung to a section in left field. Michael Bourn, Jimmy Rollins and Cole Hamels grabbed a large piece along the third-base line. Shane Victorino waged his own personal war near third base -- tightly gripping his section and not letting go. He won.

"You see something like that, you get worried that somebody is going to get hurt," Victorino said. "It was funny to see us out there trying to pull the tarp and act like we know what we're doing."

They knew enough. The extra player and coach power provided serious help to the roughly 20 grounds crew members in a 10-minute fight with the elements.

"It was incredible," said Mark Razum, Colorado's head groundskeeper. "They literally grabbed it and took over. It changes your outlook on a baseball player. It was overwhelming to see the guys who were actually playing in the game help out. Maybe a bench guy, but it was the starting pitcher, the starting lineup."

Razum doesn't want to think about what would've happened had the Phillies, umpires John Hirshbeck and Bill Welke and the Rockies' LaTroy Hawkins and Ryan Spilborghs not rushed in. The situation would've gotten much uglier because the material was getting bunched up and incredibly heavy.

"It saved us, really," Razum said. "It was huge for them to do that."

How 'bout them Phillies.

They even came back and won the game.