Halladay lucky and good to get to 20 wins

A couple of years ago, the media grabbed onto the Phillies’ 10,000^th loss as way to prove the futility of a ballclub that had captured just one championship in 124 years to that point. Missing from all the point-and-laughter over the milestone loss, of course, was any semblance of context. Yes, the Phillies were a flat-out dreadful baseball club throughout the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, most of the 1950s, a majority of the 1960s, the first half of the 1970s, the latter part of the 1980s and all but one year of the 1990s.

But really… that’s just nitpicking.

Seriously, if we have said it once we’ve said it a thousand times: stick around long enough and your team will lose some games. And as one of the older clubs in the history of Major League Baseball, the Phillies have lost more games than any other team in professional sports history.

Hey, there always has to be a loser, right?

But during this portion of franchise history, the Phillies are on an unprecedented run. They are about to lock up a playoff appearance for the fourth straight season for the first time in club history, and baring a seismic collapse the Phils should finish the year with a win total that rates in the top three or four in club history.

Indeed, these are heady times for the Phillies. That’s especially the case considering the team has had just one losing season since 2001[1], a streak only surpassed by the run the club had during its first Golden Age during the mid-1970s and early 1980s.Considering the Phillies have an excellent shot to become the first National League team to make it to the World Series in three consecutive years since Stan Musial’s Cardinals did it in 1942, 1943 and 1944 (they made it back in 1946, too), we’re going to be talking about these Phillies for decades.

So why is it that until Roy Halladay finished the deal on Tuesday night that the Phillies had not seen a pitcher win 20 games in a season since 1982? Or, better yet, how come a right-handed pitcher hadn’t come close since Robin Roberts did it in 1955?

Maybe if folks were looking for something to grab onto to personify the amount of difficulty winning games the Phillies have had historically, perhaps the dearth of 20-game winners is the trenchant caveat. After all, since Steve Carlton last did it in ’82, 20 games had been won 98 times in the major leagues. In fact, three men in the Phillies clubhouse—Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Jamie Moyer—did it a combined six times during the Phillies’ drought.

Hell, Joaquin Andujar, the flakey right-hander with the Cardinals, won 20 in consecutive seasons in ’84 and ’85. Other infamous notables to win 20 games between Carlton and Halladay are pitchers like Lamar Hoyt, John Smiley, Jose Lima, Ramon Martinez (Pedro’s brother), Richard Dotson, Esteban Loiaza, Jon Lieber, Mike Hampton, Matt Morris, John Burkett, Rick Helling, Scott Erickson, Bill Gullickson and Danny Jackson.

Meanwhile, the Phillies had one pitcher win 19 games in a season (John Denny in ’83) and another lose 19 games in a season (Omar Daal in 2000). Otherwise, few, if any, Phillies pitchers even flirted with winning 20. Lieber got to 18 in 2005 and Curt Schilling won 17 games once. During the 1987 season, Shane Rawley was 17-6 on Aug. 31 then proceeded to lose his next five decisions while the Phillies went 2-5 in his final seven starts.

Look, we all know that wins is hardly the most important stat to determine the ability of a pitcher. After all, Nolan Ryan went 8-16 with a league-leading 2.76 ERA and 270 strikeouts during that odd 1987 season and finished in the top five in the Cy Young Award balloting.

But as manager Charlie Manuel tried to explain after Tuesday’s game, there’s something magical about a pitcher who wins 20 games.

“To me, 20 wins in the sign of an exceptional season,” Manuel said. “It'’s a prestige thing. People remember when you win 20 games.”

Still, that doesn’t explain why the Phillies have not been able to have a 20-game winner until now. Halladay says typically a 20-game winner pitches for a good team and that it is a “team accomplishment” where the pitcher often doesn’t have much control.

“I think it says more about the team than anything,” Halladay said. “In the past when I had done it, the team played well when I pitched, but not so well the other times.”

Nevertheless, how does a team like the Phillies go 28 years without a 20-game winner? Better yet, how does a team go 55 years without a right-handed pitcher getting 20 wins in a season? It has to be some sort of a freak thing, right…

“I would think so,” Halladay said. “Based on the teams they’ve had here it’s just a matter of time before Cole [Hamels] does it. I think that with a little bit of luck he probably could have done it this year. There’s definitely a lot that goes into it, but there are a lot of guys here who are capable of doing it.”

Halladay explained it perfectly. To win 20 games in a season a pitcher has to be both lucky and good with an extra serving of lucky. Think about it… Halladay has 20 wins this season, but he also has 10 losses. In those 10 losses Halladay’s strikeouts-to-walks ratio is actually better than it is in his wins. Plus, six of his losses have come in games where he received two runs or less in support. Strangely, Halladay has a losing record (8-9) when the Phillies score up to five runs for him.

Along those lines, Hamels has suffered eight of his 10 losses in games where the Phillies scored two runs or less and he’s 9-2 when he gets at least three runs.

So let’s chalk it up to 28 years of weird luck as the reason no Phillies’ pitcher has broken through the 20-win barrier. It’s just one of those baseball things that can be explained to a point and then everything just falls apart.

Kind of like a calculus class.

As for the 10,000-plus losses since 1883, talent, more than luck, ruled there.

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1 The Phillies went 80-81in 2002, a fact that drove then manager Larry Bowa insane. The record was one thing, but the reason why the Phillies lost the last game of the season to the Marlins might be something that ends up causing the stress that finally kills the man. Locked in a tie game with one out in the 10^th inning and the speedy Luis Castillo on third base, Juan Encarnacion lifted a pop up in foul territory that first baseman Travis Lee would have been wise to let drop. But Lee had a plane to catch in order to get home for the off-season. If the game lasted too much longer, he would miss that flight. So he caught the ball with his back to the infield and his momentum carrying him away from the action. Castillo easily scored on the sac fly, the season ended and Lee caught his flight.

There is no way to forget Robin Roberts

Robin Roberts was one of those guys your grandfather always talked about. But rather in hushed tones and clinical recitation of the finer points of his Hall-of-Fame baseball career, your grandfather and the other old timers talked about Robin Roberts with excited exuberance.

See, Robbie, who died this morning at his home in Florida of natural causes at age 83, was a horse. He was the guy who started both ends of a doubleheader, or threw until there was no one else to pitch to. If he didn’t finish the first game and take the hill for the night cap, chances are he’d get into the game as a pinch hitter. Robin Roberts was a baseball player. Baseball players play every day.

Oh, but Roberts was a pitcher, too. He had to be. For a guy to rack up 305 complete games in 609 career starts over 19 Major League seasons, yeah, he absolutely had to know something about how to pitch. It was more than simply blowing the ball past a hitter or leaning back on one unhittable pitch in order to rack up all those innings for so many years without breaking down.

“I liked him when I was a kid,” Charlie Manuel said, noting that the high heat that Roberts was known for overshadowed a pretty nice curveball, too.

There was an art to his craft. Sure, there was brawn and strength, but there was guile, too. How else does a pitcher pile on seven straight seasons of 300 innings?

Yeah, imagine that… 300 innings. Do you know when the last time was when a pitcher got 300 innings in a season? Try 1980 when Steve Carlton got 304. Indeed, baseball has traversed through three decades since a pitcher accomplished what Roberts did as a routine part of the job.

There was more to it than that, though.

“The kind of person he was will stand out more than the numbers on the back of a baseball card,” Roy Halladay said, adding that he was overwhelmed to learn that Roberts wanted to meet him and sought him out during spring training.

“Everyone aspires to be that good.”

Halladay has been labeled as the modern-day version of Roberts, only he has only completed as many as nine games in a single season and topped out at 266 innings. However, like Roberts, Halladay rarely played for good teams (until now). The Phillies won the pennant in 1950 and were swept out of the World Series by the Yankees. So when one looks at the career stats there is just that one trip to the postseason. That’s it. Moreover, Roberts’ teams finished as high as third place just twice in 19 seasons. So beyond 1950 and two other seasons, Roberts’ teams were pretty much out of it by September. There really wasn’t all that much to pitch for since the season could easily be charted out on the calendar with no hope for a trip to the World Series.

Actually, after going to the World Series in 1950, the Phillies finished better than fourth place just one time in Roberts’ tenure with the team. Somehow, the great righty figured out how to win at least 20 games in six straight years.

Yet Roberts completed all those games anyway. He won 286 despite pitching almost exclusively for second-division teams.

With that in mind, imagine how your grandfather would talk about Roberts if he had pitched for the Yankees, Dodgers or Cardinals. Think about that for a second... You would probably be told that Roberts was the greatest pitcher of all time, only without all that exuberance. Had Roberts been lucky enough to pitch for a team in the pennant chase every season, you’d hear his name whispered in those tones reserved for Cy Young or Christy Matthewson. He would be seen as otherworldly and his stat sheet would be difficult to look at without breaking into historonics.

He could have gotten 400 wins with the Yankees.

But Roberts was of this world. He wouldn’t have been Robbie had he been the star of New York. You see him in those grainy old photos smiling and striking a pitching pose, hardly broken by all those losing seasons. Better yet, when he career had ended after hanging on for a few extra seasons with Baltimore, Houston and Chicago, Roberts was more than the Phillies greatest Hall-of-Famer and greatest ambassador…

He was the game’s greatest gentleman.

I’d like to think Roberts’ gentlemanly ways are what drew in my grandfather. Sure, those stats are amazing, and the kind of stuff to dig into like an old box in the attic filled with photos never seen before. Roberts was retired long before I was born and, ridiculously, needed 10 years for enshrinement into the Hall of Fame. But when he was in the room, flashing that great smile of his that shined from his eyes as if it were a floodlight filling every corner, you were sucked in.

He didn’t even have to say a word and everyone was charmed by his charisma.

I first met Roberts in 1984 just as I was heading into junior high.

Back in 1984 in the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C., I stepped onto an elevator with Roberts and he was kind enough to indulge me and my questions about the Olympics. I had seen where Roberts was a consultant for Team USA and with the L.A. Games quickly approaching, I saw it as my in.

So when I had the chance to shoot the breeze with Roberts again, 24 years after that first meeting, I brought up that ’84 Olympics team again.

They sure did. Mark McGwire, Will Clark, Barry Larkin, B.J. Surhoff and a catcher from Philadelphia named John Marzano took the silver in the first year baseball was re-introduced to the Olympics.
Strangely, the next time I talked to Roberts about Olympic baseball was before the last time the sport was part of the Olympic program.

Good memories. That was the charm about Roberts… he loved the game and he loved talking to people about it. He loved his memories and seemed to be part of a time when stories were passed down from one generation to another. Better yet, he wasn’t so self-absorbed that he looked down on modern players for not playing the way they did back in his day. He also showed no bitterness about the amount of money they make these days, either. He was wise enough to know that the game and times had changed and accepted his era for what it was.

The bottom line was that he loved baseball and life. To create an unforgettable legacy playing a game was a charmed fate for a person, and Roberts knew it.

The last time I saw Roberts was shortly before the 2009 World Series was to begin. Once again the Phillies were playing the Yankees, and Robbie riveted us with stories about closer Jim Konstanty taking the ball as a starter in Game 1.

“The Konstanty thing was a miracle,” Roberts said last October about the league’s top reliever starting in Game 1 of the 1950 World Series. “(Manager) Eddie Sawyer gave him the ball and he went out there like he was doing it his whole life. … That really was a miracle. If he would have won that would have been something they talked about forever, but because he lost people kind of forgot about it.”

No one will ever forget about Robin Roberts, though. Your grandfather was rarely wrong, and when he told you all about Robin Roberts, he was totally correct…

He was as great as they came—off the field more than on it.

Why the Wall not?

The Phillies just wrapped up the online fan portion of the voting for the team’s Wall of Fame, which is almost like instituting a voting with applause system. With that in mind, it’s too late for anyone to cast a vote for the Phillies Wall of Fame, but not for me to explain why most of you probably voted poorly.

That is if you didn’t vote for Jim Konstanty.

Look, when one thinks of the greatest players in franchise history Konstanty’s name isn’t too high on the list. In fact, Konstanty doesn’t show up on too many of the team’s all-time leaders lists and after seven largely mediocre seasons, he was released by the Phillies and signed by the Yankees and only saved more than nine games in a season twice.

But I have this foolish notion that players should be rewarded for historically great seasons. For instance, the 1961 season should be enough to send Roger Maris to Cooperstown. It’s probably not a popular sentiment, but at the very least they ought to come up with a special wing of the Hall of Fame for anomalies like Maris in ’61 or Don Mattingly from 1984 to 1986.

Dialing that down, Jim Konstanty very well might have been the most important player on the 1950 National League champions and he gets a vote simply for that one year. During that year, as a relief pitcher, Konstanty appeared in a then Major League-record 74 games and was National League's MVP. When the Phillies got to their first World Series since 1915, Konstanty took the ball and started Game 1for his first start in approximately four seasons.

Ultimately Konstanty only won 51 games and saved 54 in 6½ seasons for the Phillies, but he was one of the pioneers in the game as a true relief specialist, yet was also versatile and strong enough to pile up more than a 100 innings.

Don't tell me the Phillies wouldn't like to have a relief pitcher to toss 70 or so innings this season.

Oh, but that wasn’t the best part about Konstanty in 1950. With pitching ace Robin Roberts spent from pitching 10 innings in the National League clincher in Brooklyn on the final day of the season, the Phillies needed a pitcher to step up in Game 1 of the World Series at Shibe Park.

You know, why not throw a guy out there who hadn’t started a game in nearly five years out there in the biggest game of the year? And why not expect him to allow just one run and four hits through eight innings?

Imagine if Charlie Manuel sent Brad Lidge to the mound for Game 1 of the World Series. All we see is the box score and the stats from the 1950 season without the context. At least that’s the way I always looked at it until Robin Roberts talked about the 1950 World Series before the start of the 2009 series. Of all the Phillies’ legends and Hall of Famers, Roberts is the least crazy. He also has a sharp memory and tells fantastic stories along with the uncanny ability to throw 300 innings for six seasons in a row while getting complete games in more than half of his starts for 19 seasons.

So when Robin Roberts talks about pitching, it’s a good idea to shut up and listen.

 “The Konstanty thing was a miracle,” Roberts said about the league’s top reliever making his starting debut in Game 1 of the 1950 World Series. “(Manager) Eddie Sawyer gave him the ball and he went out there like he was doing it his whole life. … That really was a miracle. If he would have won that would have been something they talked about forever, but because he lost people kind of forgot about it.”

It’s funny how that works, huh? Maybe if Konstanty had won that Game 1 he very well might have been enshrined on that brick wall in Ashburn Alley already.

So, yes, Konstanty would get a vote from me. So too would Darren Daulton and Gene Mauch.

I don't think I have to get too into why Daulton should be enshrined. Simply, he may have been one of the most important players—for his time—the franchise ever had. Importance of a player, of course, belies simple things such as numbers on a stat page and in that regard Daulton is both simple and complex. He led the league in both RBIs and knee operations... then moved to the outfield after two decades of squatting.

Better yet, he was the straw that stirred the drink in '93. Go ahead... ask anybody.

Mauch, on the other hand, was regarded as one of the best baseball minds as well as the most star-crossed, perhaps ever. He has managed more seasons without reaching the World Series than anyone else in the history of the game. Worse, Mauch had come so excruciatingly close to getting there so many times only to fall through a trap door.

There was 1964, which people around here remember, but then in 1982 he guided the California Angels to 2-0 lead in the best-of-five series only to drop the final three games to the Milwaukee Brewers. That was the first time such a dubious feat  had ever happened.

In 1986, Mauch's Angels were one pitch away from beating the Boston Red Sox in five games of the best-of-seven ALCS and marching on to face the Mets in the World Series before Donnie Moore served up the famous home run to Dave Henderson. The Red Sox went on to win Game 5 and then games 6 and 7 to further extend Mauch's curse.

Yet for the Phillies, Mauch turned a laughingstock into a contender by winning 646 games in a little more than eight seasons. From 1962 to 1967, Mauch's Phillies finished .500 or better in every season, which was a rarity for the franchise.

After 26 seasons as a big-league manager and 1,902 wins, Mauch’s longest tenure was spent in Philadelphia. No one managed more games or won more games for the Phillies than Mauch and, bygolly, that ought to count for a plaque on a wall at Citizens Bank Park.

Revenge for 1950? Really?

The Phillies brought out Robin Roberts, the Hall-of-Fame pitcher and one of the all-time great guys in the history of the game, so he could talk about his one and only World Series appearance on Monday afternoon. The significance, of course, was that Roberts and the Phillies were swept by Joe DiMaggio’s Yankees in the series that took place 59 years ago.

Some folks around these parts haven’t forgotten about the 1950 World Series mostly because it used to be that the Phillies didn’t play for the championship all that much. After all, before 1950 the Phillies had been to the World Series just once—in 1915—and never again until 1980.

With that kind of track record, it’s obvious to see why the Phillies in the World Series is such a big deal to the old-timers. It’s easier to see why it’s a big deal when they are faced up against the Yankees. They beat them in four straight in 1950, for gosh sakes!

But the world changes, time marches on and all that kind of stuff. The A’s don’t play in Philadelphia or Kansas City anymore. Yankee Stadium has been replaced by a newer Yankee Stadium and Connie Mack Stadium (or Shibe Park depending on your preference or demographic) was like two stadiums ago.

Check this out: my five-year old was born into a world where the Red Sox have won it twice, the White Sox once and where the Phillies are going to the World Series in back-to-back years. It’s crazy. Crazier still, the Yankees haven’t won it since 2000. Think of it… he has never been alive long enough to see the Yankees win the World Series.

Yet 1950 is a big enough deal that they have to push Robin Roberts in front of the microphone so he could talk about Bubba Church, Curt Simmons and, of course, Jim Konstanty.

“The Konstanty thing was a miracle,” Roberts said about the league’s top reliever making his starting debut in Game 1 of the 1950 World Series. “(Manager) Eddie Sawyer gave him the ball and he went out there like he was doing it his whole life. … That really was a miracle. If he would have won that would have been something they talked about forever, but because he lost people kind of forgot about it.”

Yeah, it’s funny how that works.

Then ol’ Robin had to talk about pitch counts and things like that.

“If you ever saw Stanky play…”

Sorry, let’s just cut him off there. If you ever saw Stanky play? Robin, good sir, we never saw you play. No one from the regular group of scribes and definitely not the players knew anything about Roberts or the 1950 Whiz Kids. In fact, on the Phillies coaching staff only two guys were old enough to have vague memories of Roberts’ Phillies. Charlie Manuel was six and Davey Lopes was five when the Phillies last played the Yankees.

They are much older now.

No, the 1950 World Series is about as meaningful as those three games the Phillies and Yankees played back in May. I watched ESPN trot out stats from the series played in May when the Phillies won two of three even though Brad Lidge got two blown saves.

Really? May?

“We’ve played about 200 games since then,” Jayson Werth said, exaggerating slightly. “It doesn’t matter.”

Live in the now, that’s what Robin Roberts does. He says he has the MLB Extra Innings package so he can watch all the games and follows the Phillies just like any die hard baseball fan.

So yeah, Roberts wants the Phillies to get “revenge” for the 1950 World Series. You know, not that he thinks of it that way.

“I really enjoy watching the games,” Roberts said. “It would be awful nice to see them win it again, not just because it’s the Yankees but because they are bordering on something really extraordinary.”

***
Since we’re on the subject of Philadelphia vs. New York in the World Series, how come no one is talking about those A’s and Giants matchups? In three different World Series, Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s beat John McGraw’s New York Giants in two out of three.

The Giants took the 1905 World Series in five games, but Philadelphia bounced back in 1911 in six games and then again in 1913 in five games.

So there’s that, too.