matthearn.com

Dear Chase:

I hope you don’t mind me writing so often! I left some messages on what I think is your number (you wouldn’t BELIEVE what I had to do to get it), but you haven’t called. I know you’re SUPER busy, but I just wanted to hear your voice, you know?

I was so proud to hear you hit your tenth home run yesterday! You’re really having a SUPER AWESOME season. So much better than that Ryan Howard guy who made them give him all that money. Ten million dollars, and his OPS is .652? Ridiculous!

I shouldn’t tell you this, but today at lunch I wrote “Mrs. Matthew Utley” all over the cover of my notebook. It just looks so PERFECT, you know? I mean, it just DOES!!! right?

Anyway, I just wanted to say HI! Write or call back soon! Or, you know, look me up on Facebook, I would TOTALLY friend you but I can’t find you. Not sure if you’re not on there, or what. How could someone not be on Facebook? It’s like 2008 or something! Ha ha!

Love,

Me

Bill Simmons, of whom you may have heard, does a podcast every few days in which he interviews amusing folks on various topics. Sometimes they’re national sports figures (usually media personalities), but often they’re just his old college buddies; for example, every week he calls his buddy JackO for a segment he calls “Johnny, Are You Worried?” in which they establish, on a scale of 1-10, how worried JackO is about his beloved Yankees.

Seeing as how the baseball season has just started, and the Phillies bullpen fell all over themselves to give up 5 late-inning runs to the Nationals and lose 11-6, I figured I’d establish how worried I am about the Phils chances this year. Right now, I’m hovering at about, oh, an 8. The problems are manifold and detailed, but in as few words as possible: inconsistent offense, and horrible, horrible pitching.

In spring training (which of course has as much bearing on the regular season as monsoons in Burma do with rainfall in Kevlavik, but still), the lineup seemed equally likely to get shut out as it did to score eleven runs. They scored nearly as many runs against Toronto on 3/23 (15) as they did in the following 5 games (a total of 17). Hopefully they can smooth things out and score between 4 and 7 runs a game consistently, but until they do, they’re gonna lose a lot of games because the pitching staff isn’t likely to keep many opposing offenses under 5 runs.

The pitching staff consists of: Brett Myers, Cole Hamels, and 8-10 guys who may or may not be able to throw a baseball through a barn door from 60.5 feet on any given day. They keep saying Brad Lidge will be back, and then he kneels to tie his shoe and they have to carve more shrapnel out of his knee. If I see 20 saves out of him this year I’ll consider it a remarkable feat. Gordon, meanwhile, looked shaky in Spring Training and has a 2008 ERA of 135.00 (allowed 5 runs in 1/3 inning on Monday). Myers looked fantastic in preseason action (ERA of 1.13), but only went 5 innings on Monday and allowed three.

Hamels is, well, Hamels. He’ll be fine. People are praising him for being a more vocal leader, but frankly most of the time he sounds to me like he’s whining. Whining about his contract, whining about not having an on-staff chiropractor, etc. Being a leader is about saying positive things to the media, and dealing with the negative stuff behind the scenes. All of this will be forgotten, of course, if he strikes out 240 guys this year with an era of 3.20, wins 18+ games, and gets the team to the playoffs. Then he earns a permanent spot on “Hearn’s List Of Dudes He Would Go Gay For” (which includes Chase Utley and Justin Timberlake, amongst others).

The rest of the rotation? Kyle Kendrick had a spring training ERA of 9.68. The Artist Formerly Known As Adam Eaton posted one of 7.41 and didn’t win a single game. Jamie Moyer is 45 years old and has over 3500 innings in his arm, but he’s failed to start at least 30 games a season only once in the past decade. He’ll win at least 12 games, but he’ll probably also lose at least 12 games.

The best guy in the bullpen? Probably Ryan Madsen, who I once watched give up 10 earned runs in 1+ inning. On the other hand, I’ve also seen him come in in the 7th and get three quick outs, two of them Ks. So his appearances will always be interesting, in that it’s always interesting that my left arm goes numb when he enters the game.

So how do I foresee the season shaping up? I foresee another slow start in April, with the team fighting to play catchup the rest of the year. I foresee Utley, Rollins, and Howard making the all-star team. I foresee Pat Burrell playing reasonably well, but spending time on the DL. I foresee a bullpen ERA in the mid-5s. And worst of all, I see Johan Santana winning the NL Cy Young and the Mets winning 94 games.

The Phillies have turned me into a 13 year old girl. After their big win yesterday, I spent roughly an hour sending text messages to all my friends that said “OMG TEH PHILLIEZ R THA NL EAST CHAMPEENZ!!!1!1!1 WTF LOL” After a while Sarah had to take my phone away and slip me a mickey to get me to chillax.

Nevertheless: The Phillies are the National League East Division Champions, something that hasn’t happened since 1993, which is very nearly half my lifetime ago. Already I’m looking for omens: I realized that the last time the Phillies won a World Series was roughly 2.5 years after my birth, so I started examining statistics to see if the Phillies had out-of-character good years shortly after the birth of new Hearnspawn. Unfortunately the Phillies were the diahrrea of the National League for most of the 20th century, so as far as I could tell, my father’s and grandfather’s births were not harbingers of championships. They weren’t even harbingers of winning seasons, as far as I can tell.

Still. I’ve already ordered my “NL East Champions 2007” tshirt, and not because I’m Happy To Be Here, always the kiss of death for any playoff team, but because I’m hoping they’ll be able to get the bloody thing to me in time to actually wear while watching a game, which seems unlikely because MLB.com is a LIAR! (Their website said they had the shirts already in stock, only to send me an email after I ordered saying that they don’t actually have them, but will TOTALLY ship them when they do, so I sprung for expedited shipping for no bloody reason. Liars.)

I may have to run to Dick’s and load up on Phillies merch, because it is a requirement that I wear something baseball-related on all game days. I feel like a Virginia Tech fan! Except that I don’t have to root for Sean Glennon.

Sshhh….the Phillies have won four in a row and are only 3 games back of the Mets…if they win this afternoon’s game they will be 2 games back, and facing the Marlins over the weekend, while the Mets have to go up against Atlanta…

I’m not saying. I’m just saying.

In other news, I’m in the middle of a 2-week fantasy football draft, and somehow my 2 quarterbacks are Brett Favruh, who is 387 years old, and Tony Romo, who plays for a hated rival. I’m not sure how this happened. I haven’t had a single drink during the draft process, which is normally how I end up with, say, 4 kickers. I do have good running backs (primarily Steven Jackson; thanks Kyle’s dad for picking me #2!), but I’m going to get stuck with something like the Rams defense. Dang.

Not that any of you care, or even should. I’m just saying my odds of winning any “money” are grim.

I, uh, really don’t have much else to say at this point. My life is busy with boring crap. Unless you want to hear details about Disaster Recovery Exercises! (You don’t.)

I know nobody really wants to read about the weather; either you’re local to me, and already aware of it, or you’re not, in which case it’s not a concern for you. Nevertheless, what in the ham-handed hell? There was SNOW this morning in North Wilmington, which is like 10 miles north of me. It was sort of sleeting when I left the house this morning, and the wind about caused me to dent my car with my head. As B pointed out, we basically went through a category 2 hurricane. And Al Gore wasn’t anywhere near us!

Anyway, I’m tired of this weather, and I’m tired of being sick, as both are preventing me from exercising, since there’s nothing worse than riding a bicycle in cold weather, and jogging sucks bad enough when it’s dry. I seriously need to exercise, because I keep doing things like making pans of cinnamon rolls and eating the entire batch in a weekend, despite the fact that they kinda sucked because the dough never rose properly (I blame low-fat buttermilk, which I think was acidic enough to kill the yeast before it could get its rise on). I did get a LITTLE exercise on Saturday, mowing the lawn and putting dirt around my patio and whatnot, but the end result of that mess is that my back hurts and I still weigh 240+ pounds.

I am a large devil, I am.

I’d like to get at least some amount of exercise every day, but my legs just can’t take running every day, based on the ankle pain I suffered through last week. So I’ve decided to hit up the batting cages around the corner from my office a couple days a week. Work the core and arms, develop some hand-eye coordination, learn how to switch-hit; it’s win-win-win-triple-X-throwdown-WIN! Plus it helps improve my odds of being called up to AAA.

Yes, I played something like 15 hours of video game baseball over the weekend. Update: you may recall I made myself a switch-hitting catcher. By “mid-June” I was batting around .320, with 11 home runs and 25 or so RBI, so they called me up to the majors, where they made me play first base. I was like, whaaaaaa? I guess they needed a temporary backup for Ryan Howard. Whatever. After 4 games (I was batting a healthy .300 or so, but only had 6 or 7 ABs) they sent me back down to AAA, where I am continuing to play first base for some reason. Argh. I’m going to try and get them to move me to the outfield, where at least I have a chance of platooning with Burrell.

Not that you care about ANY of that. Ha ha! That’s the joy of talking about fantasy and video game sports: nobody cares. It’s just like the weather.

Lots o’ little thangs:

• Some new photos over at CharlesHearn.com, check them out with great gusto.
• This Don Imus thing has gotten out of hand, for reals. At this point, listening to the racial opinions of a nearly 70-year-old white guy in a ridiculous hat makes about as much sense as listening to my great-grandfather expound upon the “Slavering Huns” (he was in The Great War, you see). Who cares? So an old man made a racist joke on the radio. There are worse things going on in our culture, trust me.
• Don’t tell my wife, but I have secretly acquired a copy of “MBL 2007: The Show,” on a recommendation from my buddy Kyle. I plan a full review next week, but here are a few thoughts:
  • I haven’t even tried anything but “Road To The Show” mode, in which you start as a young player in the minor leagues and work your way up to the bigs and see if you can make the Hall of Fame, and which may be the most addictive thing I’ve used since I got out of the methadone clinic. Apparently there are a variety of ways in this game to play it like a regular video baseball game, but I don’t have time for that because I’m living and dying with a 19 year old switch-hitting catcher who’s batting .265 for the Ottawa Lynx, a triple-A Phillies affiliate. I’ll give all the details of this mode in next week’s review, but I’d just like to leave you with my most recent game’s effort: 6/6, with 2 doubles, a home run, and 4 RBI, and would have gotten “Player of the Game” honors if the bullpen could have held an 8-3 lead.
  • I did play a game with Kyle over the weekend (before I bought my own copy) and I can report that the graphics are a little irksome; Chase Utley, for example, is so dark that Kyle and I referred to him by his full name, “Black Chase Utley,” every time he came to bet or fielded a grounder.

  So far the game gets a 10/10 out of ten for gameplay and a 100/10 for “unintentional hilarity.”

• Speaking of Kyle, he also lent me three books, which I may or may not also get around to reviewing:
  • Why My Wife Thinks I’m An Idiot, by Mike Greenberg. I never really listened to Mike and Mike on the radio, because sports radio is about as interesting to me as The World Beard Championships, so I didn’t know much about Greeny going in. The book was good, and hilarious, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he seemed like a bit of a dick. And I can’t explain why, exactly. He describes himself as a “metrosexual” and tends to go into great detail about the expensive clothes he wears; I also like expensive clothes, but every time he said something like “my Prada backpack,” I kept envisioning an overtanned 19 year old brunette sitting in the college cafeteria showing off her new Uggs to her Long Island hookers friends.
  • Fantasyland, by Sam Walton, which details his season playing in the toughest fantasy baseball league in the country. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far it’s been equal parts interesting, revealing, and hilarious.
  • Moneyball, by whoever it is that wrote Moneyball who I don’t feel like looking up. Okay fine, it’s Michael Lewis, you guilted me into it. I haven’t gotten to this one yet, so I’ll just relate a couple of other people’s blurbs:
    • Weekly Standard – May be the best book ever written on business.
    • Wall Street Journal – Another journalistic tour de force.
    • Hearnwife – Stop sitting on the toilet reading those $%#&ing books and come to bed.
• I may be setting a pointless record for “unordered list depth” for blog posts.
• And speaking of sports, just check this out; scroll down to the line for Robert Horry in the San Antonio box score.
• Everybody at Team Hearn is sick again. Charles is pretty good at bringing home germs; he, of course, is over them in all of a day, and we suffer for 2 weeks. I’m going to go to bed. Have a nice weekend, and avoid the clap.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for baseball. Teams in the Midwest are losing entire series because of SNOW. (Even here in the East temps are topping out at a balmy 50 most days. And tonight there’s supposed to be rain! Argh.) The Indians are playing their Seattle series in Milwaukee, which is a bit counter-intuitive (isn’t Milwaukee NORTH of Cleveland? And thusly colder?) until you remember that Milwaukee has a dome. The media of course has been freaking out, but remember that a couple quick doubleheaders and the Indians and Pilots Mariners will be all caught up. What’s more annoying is that anyone with those players on their fantasy teams has been kinda screwed (I’ve been starting CC Sabathia every bloody day in hopes that he might actually throw the ball; no dice).

And speaking of fantasy baseball, our season is basically straight jacked at this point because ESPN’s IT department appears to be staffed with chimps. The statistics are all wrong, and entire rosters keep disappearing and reappearing randomly. ESPN’s solution to this is to WIPE OUT EVERYONE’S RESULTS and start over, by simply resetting our teams to our opening day rosters and calculating the last 11 days of results based on that opening roster. They’re simply discarding any roster moves we’ve made. Which is totally great because

• I’ve placed one guy on the DL and replaced another guy because I needed more pitching; all of that is gone and will have to be redone.
• In our league you can change your rosters every day, so most of us have been swapping starting pitchers in and out of the rotation in order to maximize wins and strikeouts; none of that will be happening.

This is the second time we’ve ventured from Yahoo for a fantasy league, and we won’t be doing it again.

And best of all, the Phillies are 1-6. ::openly weeping::

So, baseball’s in the dumps for me right now. But things are looking up! I ordered a copy of MLB 2007 “The Show,” a highly recommended video game which features the ability to create a player from scratch and move him through the minor leagues into the majors and hit baseballs with him! With his bat, I mean, not with, like, his head.

Woooooooooooooooo baseball! Spring training is winding down, and we are rapidly nearing opening day, which is Sunday, or Saturday, or something. I can’t keep track any more. Time was, I could just check the Reds schedule, but then the Yankees started having opening day games in Japan in like mid-March and then playing some more spring training afterwards, and I think the Red Sox and Phils are playing one last grapefruit league game at CB Park on Saturday, and God knows what else.

Anyway, I feel good about this season, despite the fact that the Phillies webpage currently features a story entitled “Phillies’ bullpen issues are top concern,” which is doubly frustrating ’cause it seems like bullpen issues have been the top concern for, oh, 10 seasons running. So far the most notable thing to happen to the Phils pitching situation is that the guy who was their #1 starter (but who is now in the bullpen?!?) bought a truck that cost more than my effing house.

Why do I feel good? Let’s go over the short list:

• Ryan Howard, the reigning NL MVP. He reminds me of me, if I was 2 inches taller, 20 pounds heavier, 5 times stronger, and, uh, black. And if we’re super lucky, pitchers might actually throw him strikes! This all depends on how Pat Burrell does, of course, since if he keeps pulling his “completely unable to hit the ball with anybody on base” routine, Ryan’s OPS will be .900, .700 of which will be OBP. (That’s lamer-baseball-speak for “he’s going to get walked a ridiculous amount.”)
• Chase Utley, who is entering the season hoping to three-peat as “Phillie For Whom Matt Hearn Would Be Most Likely To Go Gay,” and who has a good chance to get stranded at 2nd base 120+ times this year when Howard gets walked and Burrell strikes out. Plus he’s got killer hustle playing 2nd, so undoubtedly he’ll get taken out by Barry Bonds on a routine double play, tear 74 knee ligaments, and cause me to emit “The Scream Of Having 666 Ravenous Demons Eat My Wang.” But I’m gonna stay positive!!!
• Shane Victorino, who is the fastest Hawaiian I’ve ever seen. He needs a little more experience on the basepaths (he gets thrown out stealing FAR too much for somebody who can outrun my car), but I still giggle when he takes off. I NEED MORE GIGGLING.
• Cole Hamels, who gives me a terrifying Mark Prior vibe (unbelievable talent derailed for months at a time by being depressingly flimsy), but who has basically cornered the market on Upside. The boy can throw, really really really hard. I love him a little bit.

Now, the things that scare me:

• Pat Burrell, who needs to be traded to a team he can periodically DH for so he doesn’t have to play left field, since he runs like Billy Martin after a bender. It’d also be nice if he could bat, say, 6th, and take some of the pressure off, since right now he’s not exactly protecting Ryan Howard as much as inviting other teams to throw directly at his eyeballs.
• The entire pitching staff aside from Cole Hamels, which is about as reliable as Billy Martin’s wang after a bender. I’m predicting the Phils will need to average about 9 runs a game to get enough wins to take the East. That would be a rather staggering offensive display.
• Manager Charlie Manuel, who seems about as effective sober as Billy Martin dead. I think his flaws will be exposed even more as we get to the end of the season and find the Phils in a situation where they need to win 4 of the last 6 to clinch the wildcard and the bullpen is BEYOND wiped out.

Nevertheless, I am stoked for opening day on Sunday and wish I could go to the game to throw batteries at Chipper Jones. And if that seems like a crappy way to end a post, remember that it’s 6pm on the Friday before the start of the season and I need to get this posted with a quickness.