No Box Score is an Island

Being a Philly fan outside of Philly is hard.

Over the weekend, I spent some time back in the Delaware Valley at the Jersey Shore. For the most part, vacation havens like Ocean City, Wildwood, Avalon, Sea Isle, and others serves as a convenient place for those in the tri-state area to take a break without having to book an airline to get there. The premise of shore life is rather simple – it’s the only place you can look forward to sitting in an uncomfortable chair to just read a book. But the Shore is more than that – there’s a culture aspect to it.

And that culture loves Philadelphia sports.

As you drive the long North-South avenues of any of the isles, you’ll see that this area, some hour and a half from the City of Brotherly Love, live and die by the teams they so desperately support. Eagles flags billow in the breeze off the deck railing of rental duplexes. People spend their evenings not watching the crap on network summer television, but watching the Phillies play a moderately important series against the Braves. The basketball courts no longer have players with the Iverson shoes – they’ve moved on to Andre Iguodala jerseys and Kyle Korver haircuts. The vacation getaway is alive with Philly sports talk, without the help of Angelo Cataldi et al.

Back to the real world…

The omnipresence of Philadelphia sports disappears as you go over that picturesque bridge near Havre de Grace on I-95 in Maryland. The Flyers bumper stickers are harder to come by, and the Eagles preseason WYSP radio broadcast crackles into silent airwaves. If you want to be an out-of-town sports fan, it’s all on you to maintain the fervor and interest that you receive automatically by breathing the hometown air. You have to make the best of it with what you’ve got.

Fortunately for me, both the Phils and the Birds play in the same division as their Washington D.C. counterparts. That means even if everything else goes wrong, I’m guaranteed 2 NFL and 18 MLB games with full media coverage here in the Nation’s Capital. So there I was, listening to the Washington Post talk radio station for the last few innings of the series opener between Philadelphia and your Washington Nationals.

Not mine, mind you.

Without TV coverage, I keep track of a lot of the Fightins’ efforts via GameTracker on MLB.com. It updates pitch-by-pitch, and keeps way closer to real time compared to whatever hamster-powered engine the NHL uses. As I was busy lowering Clara’s crib down to the second notch last night, I watched as the Nationals went up 2-0 on a pinch hit double over the head of Pat Burrell. Dejected, I minimized GameTracker and set out to do some errands.

Following a brief trip to Wegman’s, I spent the trip over to Target in the Top of the 8th with Philly down 2-0. After a non-surprising pop out from Jason Werth (he’s your Victorino pro tempore), Greg Dobbs ended up on second after a Ryan Zimmerman throwing error. Rookie phenom catcher Carlos Ruiz singled him home to make the score 2-1 with one out.

At this point, I had been sitting in the Target parking lot for five minutes. With newly acquired Russell Branyan coming up (batting average: .197), I figured I wouldn’t get too excited about this mini-rally.

25 minutes and 36 packages of gooified baby veggies later (bought, not eaten), I returned to my car to check the score. All of a sudden, we’re bottom nine. Bottom nine!

(If the bottom of the ninth is being played, that means that the home team (in this case, Washington) is either tied or trailing. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even bat. Translation: WooHoo!)

So Branyan decked a 3-2 Jon Rauch pitch into the right field, uh, “Washington Wall of Fame,” Tom Gordon held them scoreless in the eighth, the heart of the Phillies lineup fanned in the ninth, and now Brett Myers stands on the mound while I sit in my car.

Batter #1: Ryan Langerhans. Result: Struck out, swinging.
Batter #2: Brian Schneider. Result: Struck out, swinging.
Batter #3: Nook Logan. Result: Struck out, swinging.

No one in the DC area was cheering louder.

Or in my car, for that matter.