Memos & Laments

Memo to the Phillies and Flyers:

As far as I know, there is no reward for being the local team which sustains the most injuries in a given season. at least not yet.

I take no reverse curse responsibility for Chooch's injury yesterday. (See post below.) To me it looked as if he first tweaked the knee on the play at the plate and aggravated it later in the game running to first. Not the kind of injury a guy who squats for a living needs. Not the kind of injury the Phils need having just put their backup catcher on the DL. Not the kind of injury the pitching staff needs either.

Roy Halladay struggled with his command all game but he still might have held on had he received better support in the field and at the plate with runners in scoring position. It wasn't an ugly loss, merely one that could have been avoided. The Phils didn't mail in the game like they did last Saturday but they sure looked like they weren't happy to be playing.

Speaking of ice hockey (see above in case you weren't paying attention), what a magnificent game it is when the play sweeps back and forth, up and down the ice. What a terrible game it is when players deliberately try to render the opposition senseless by allegedly "finishing checks", which is really hockey parlance for "he was going to crush the guy no matter what, so he just went through with it."

Any game where people carry sticks and shoot a hard rubber object is going to be risky but you'll notice lacrosse players don't beat the shit out of each other every chance they get. Hockey has the fighting tradition and management that tolerates it, so it's here to stay. When Claude Giroux was boarded in game five the whole purpose of the play was to injure him and get him out. The penalty? Two minutes for boarding. Not assault and battery with intention to maim. Boarding. It stinks. Worse, when playoff games are in the waning moments, Refs won't make a potentially game-altering call even if a guy goes out there with a Magnum and shoots an opposing player. Very manly to run a guy from behind into the boards.