Philadelphia Phillies

It's been 66 years since the National League has seen a three time National League champion.

The year was 1944 when the mighty St. Louis Cardinals won their third straight pennant after finishing first in the NL with a 105 win season.

This year has been a crazy year for the Phillies.  There have been many ups and downs, and there may be many more to come.  The team has had some injuries, they have had some slumps, they have had some winning streaks, etc.  To sum it all up, they've basically had everything.  And for the most part, they have still done good throughout it all.  Here are some of their main strengths and main weaknesses.

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Only July 21st of this year, the Philadelphia Phillies lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in St. Louis. The loss was the sixth in seven games for the Phils, and dropped the team to just two games over .500 and 7.0 games behind the Braves in the NL East.

The season looked to be all but over for the Phils, who weren't playing particularly well in any facet of the game.

Now, on September 9th, less than two months later, the Phillies have the best record in the National League.

81-60. That is the best record in the National League to date and it is currently boasted by the 2008 and 2009 National League Champions and 2008 World Series Champion Philadelphia Phillies.

What is it that led the Phillies to back-to-back NL championships and has now led them to the National League's best overall record with only 21 games left in the season? The answer is sheer toughness.

One of the reasons, if not the reason, I got into baseball writing was to challenge conventional wisdom. Challenging conventional wisdom is what we learned from Bill James and from Billy Beane, and it is the reason we tend to speak unfavorably of Joe Morgan.

Jimmy Rollins is either the most unlucky guy on the planet, or he doesn't do nearly enough work during the offseason and throughout the regular season. Muscle pulls can, of course, be freak things, but three times in one year leads me to believe he simply doesn't train hard enough.

How do the Phillies follow up their reclaiming of first place in the NL East? With a game that was almost too much fun to watch. The first inning brought two quick scores by the Phillies, as the Phils jumped out to a 2-0 lead.

The party came to a halt however, when Jimmy Rollins left the game with a, then, undisclosed injury in the third inning. The Phillies are now calling it "tightness in the hamstring."

Legend has it that Billy Martin, the oft-hired and fired coach of the New York Yankees, would occasionally arrange batting orders by picking names out of a hat in an effort to break out of hitting slumps.

We all knew it would come. Now it's that time.

Like a man on death row, you just sit and wait—you wait on your sentence and hope, something, somehow, could change your fate.

Then the inevitable day comes, and all of a sudden...you've lost first place.

Those Phightin's, I don't know how they do it, but, they live up to that name of theirs year after year.

Jason Werth, reportedly, may have dropped his agent, Jeff Boris, and is on the hunt for a new one. In Craig Calcaterra's article he expressed some suspicions that Werth may sign with, Scott Boras.

With clients and former clients with names like Alex Rodrigez and Manny Ramirez, you probably wouldn't get an argument from most if you were to say Boras is MLB's version of Drew Rosenhaus.