2009 MLB Playoffs

As I watch the New York Yankees fight the Los Angeles Angels and Mother Nature for the chance to win the American League pennant and advance to the World Series, I realize something, albeit elementary.

This Phillies team knows how to win. More succinctly, the find another gear when playing in postseason baseball.

During the past two years, the Phillies have gone 18-5 in postseason play.

Carlos Ruiz, a .255 regular season eight-hole hitter for the Phillies, is batting .385 in the postseason with one home run and 4 RBI.

They don’t win championships in Philadelphia. If they do, it’s a fluke—something that someone pulled over on God.

Every three decades or so, one of the teams will screw up the ecosystem and snatch a title out from under fate’s nose.

What’s happening now is a travesty. The Phillies are in the World Series for the second year in a row. What’s worse, they actually won it last year.

This is all wrong. Philadelphia is a city full of miscreants and crabapples, with a fan base so jaded and tormented that it makes John McEnroe look like Dale Carnegie.

The Los Angeles Angels had a huge night on Thursday.

First and foremost the Halos got to watch John Lackey—in potentially his last game with the club—pitch at his best and hold the Yankees in check for 6 2/3 innings.

Secondly, the club managed to pull off a huge comeback against the vaunted bullpen of the New York Yankees and force a game six in New York on Saturday night.

Lastly—and most importantly—the Angels finally found a new good luck charm.

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, the days of the Rally Monkey and Thunder Sticks has come and gone.

Game five of last night’s ALCS game between the Yankees and Angels was fascinating not just because Los Angeles staved off elimination, doing it in comeback fashion late.

Last week the lady behind the counter at Wawa told me people are always nice when the sun shines and the Phillies win.

Well, it’s a great time to work at Wawa.

What happens to a team when its strongest attribute goes south? Although the Dodgers' hitting was nothing to write home about, what really ruined them was their pitching.

A 5.30 ERA in the postseason. A 7.30 ERA in the NLCS.  Starters like Kershaw, Wolf, and Kuroda fell apart against the Phillies.

Who would have thought it? Would the Dodgers have won their division if their pitchers had pitched like this in the regular season? Probably not.

By contrast, the Phillies had ERAs of 3.04 in the postseason, and 3.07 in the NLCS, basically Dodgers type numbers.

There were four references to the 2004 ALCS in one hour of SportsCenter this morning. Your friends who are Red Sox fans have joked about the series on Facebook and Twitter since Tuesday. If you step outside your home or office, there's probably a single-engine plane flying overhead with a "2004 ALCS: You Blew It" message tailing behind.

You had to expect this. This is the Yankees' first opportunity to clinch an American League pennant since the team's infamous collapse against the Red Sox five Octobers ago. It would be weird if it didn't come up.