So without further adieu the Las Vegas Desert Ducks would like to take you on a trip down memory lane but beware.... it won't be an enjoyable trip.
We go back to October 7th in the year of our lord and savior, 2011 to South Philadelphia where the Philadelphia Phillies were playing the St. Louis Cardinals in Game Five of the National League Division Series.
Now this is a Phillies team that in the last couple years won a World Series, lost a World Series, and lost in the NLCS but this team was the best of them all and it wasn't really close. This was THE team. The best team that I have seen in this city in my lifetime in all of the four major sports. This team was absolutely special and appointment television. They won a team record 102 games that season.
What wasn't to love when every night you could see one of the best pitchers in baseball perform? Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, and Roy Oswalt. That wasn't it however, even when those perennial All-Stars weren't pitching they had a player like Vance Worley (11-3 3.01 ERA) that dazzled. This was a team that every single night you knew they could go out there and win.
Prior to the series Roy Halladay said “I didn’t come here to praise Caesar (The Cardinals), I came here to bury him.” That’s a quote that stuck with me for years. It was also in my signature for years on this site.
This series had went back and forth with the Phillies winning game one, the Cardinals took game two after Desert Ducks
Team Rental Pickup Cliff Lee blew a four run lead, and the next two games were split but not without a few incidences with the Rally Squirrel. Yes, the Rally Squirrel. This squirrel first made it's appearance during game three in St. Louis but didn't really make it's presence known until the following game where it ran onto the field and across the plate as Roy Oswalt was throwing his pitch. The pitch was called a ball and the Phillies argued that it should not have been counted due to the distraction. That argument fell on deaf ears. That brought us to Game Five in Philadelphia where a squirrel bothered Oswalt in the outfield prior to the game. Spooky stuff going on here, right?
Now with this category we were giving the edict to pick one moment so that's what i'm officially going to do but i'm going to continue to tell the story beyond that as others have done up to this point.
So Game Five. The night where it all ended. The end of a Dynasty before it's time. The end of fun at Citizens Bank Park and really, the end of the Phillies. This game saw two long time friends and greats face off in what was going to be the pitching duel to end all pitching duels, Roy Halladay against Chris Carpenter.
So with that said my
Team Crushing Sports Moment occurred when
Rafael Furcal hit a lead off triple to open the game. It was at that moment that I knew it was all over. The Cardinals were going to knock that runner in whether it be a sac fly or whatever and the game would end 1-0 and there was nothing that any of us could do about it. While it wasn't a sac-fly Furcal was knocked home the next at bat by Skip Schumaker on a double making the score 1-0.
Halladay went on to scatter four hits over the next seven innings and he did not allow another run. He even was able to get out of a bases loaded jam in the Top of the 8th to allow the Phillies to still have a reasonable chance to win this game. He did his job like the horse that he was. The offense couldn't muster much of anything either. It was a slow painful death that I knew was coming. Chase Utley lead off the 9th. He swings at the first pitch and hits one deep to the warning track that still to this day if it was any other night I believe that was going to be a homer. It just wasn't meant to be. Hunter Pence grounded out next and that brought us to the final out.
Ryan Howard. The Big Piece. He would fight a few pitches off before inevitably grounding out to first base and yet as the camera panned to the 2nd basemen fielding the ball and throwing to first Howard was no where to be seen. We soon see Howard writhing in pain in foul territory from which we would soon find out was a torn achilles tendon.
We didn't know it yet but it was all over. That would be the last winning season and last playoff berth for the Phillies for now over a decade and it's still going.
The saddest part of all with this game was what we learned years later with Halladay. Roy had felt a pop in his back early in the game (1st or 2nd inning) and fought through the pain and pitched his gem but it would come at the ultimate cost. Halladay's wife, Brandy said this about him returning home that night
“When he came home, he was just in so much pain, and I remember watching him get up out of bed and…he sneezed. He fell onto the ground and was sitting on all fours, and he was in so much pain, he couldn’t get back up and he laid there for probably 10 to 15 minutes,”
This constant pain that would not go away lead Roy to begin taking opioids to lessen the pain that he was experiencing even doing the simplest things let alone doing such a violent act as pitching as a major league level. However, Roy continued to push and try to pitch the use of opioids turned into an addiction. He would go on to enter rehab a couple times and seemingly kicked the habit but once you're an addict you're an addict for life. As many of you know, Halladay would go on to die in a plane crash in November of 2017 with a cocktail of drugs in his system.
So in the end this game of games had a massive reach that was far further than what happened on the field itself. It was the definition of a Crushing Sports Moment. That shit sucked to type out.
@Chuck Downie hit us with a twofer.
