Philadelphia Baseball History

This week, Joel Sherman of the New York Post reported that MLB was considering a proposal for a new playoff format .  Pursuant to the proposal, each league would send seven teams to the playoffs, as opposed to the current five.  The three division winners would be joined by four wild card teams.  The team with the best record in each league would earn a first round bye.  The division leaders, as well as the wild card team with the best record, would host a first round play-off series, which would be a best-of-three series.  That's right.  They would host all three games, not merely two out of the three. But so far, we have not reached the most unusual part of the proposal.  Two of the three teams hosting the first round of playoffs would get to choose their opponent from the bottom three wild card teams.  The division winner in this first round with the best record would have first choice.  The final division winner would get the second c...

It was five o'clock in the morning, and my roommate, Jim, was waking me up so we could hop in his brown, sporty but beat-up Nissan to travel across Alligator Alley and up the Gulf Coast to Clearwater. In my junior year at the University of Miami, this was the first time I had ventured to see the Phillies in Spring Training. Just the day before, Jim made the suggestion. I packed my books so I could get some studying in during the five hour drive, and off we went. Jim was something of a odd bird. Unlike me, who was raised in Fishtown and spent much of my childhood at Veterans Stadium, Jim was from North Carolina. He rooted for the Phillies because he loved Mike Schmidt. Although we were two years removed from Schmidt's retirement, he continued to be a Phillies fan. This created a strange combination for him, as he was a Cowboys fan in football; something I always teased him about. At the time, baseball card collecting was in its hay day. In Miami, a Jose Canseco rookie card cou...