Game 156 - Thursday Night, September 27th in Philadelphia
Record - 78-78, 3rd Place, 17 games behind the Nationals
One Sentence Summary: The Phillies dropped their last home game of the year as the offense (except Darin Ruf) just couldn't get going against Gio Gonzalez and the Nationals.
What It Means: The Phillies are back at .500 with six games to play. If you do the math here, they need to go 4-2 over the final six games to finish the season with a winning record. They closed out the home portion of their 2012 schedule with a 40-41 record, becoming the first Phillies team since 2000 and the first Phillies team ever at Citizens Bank Park, to finish with a losing home record.
The next Phillies loss or Cardinals win will officially eliminate the team from postseason play for the first time since 2006.
What Went Wrong: Tyler Cloyd's audition for 2013 isn't going so well. Cloyd allowed six runs on six hits in his five innings of work. He was victimized by three home runs and his ERA is now a lofty 4.91.
Ruf had a bases-clearing, three-run double in the first and Kevin Frandsen added two hits to raise his average to .335. Everyone not named Ruf or Frandsen went a combined 3 for 26 at the plate.
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| 2006 Topps Phillies Fan Appreciation Day #5 |
Back in 2006, the Phillies partnered with Topps to produce a special 27-card Fan Appreciation Day giveaway set, which featured several cards of players not found within any of Topps' other releases from the year. I wish Phillies and Topps would do this again. I'm sure it's cheaper for the team to produce 50,000 9-card postcard sets, but I love the idea of having a Phillies/Topps complete team set available only as a stadium give-away.
I know there's only a handful of us out there pining away for the first Phillies cards of Frandsen and Nate Schierholtz, so maybe there's just not that great a demand for a full Phillies/Topps SGA set. If and when I'm ever running the Phillies, I'll be sure to bring back this set as one of my first orders of business.
5 comments:
I know it's not the same as a card, but the Phillies did issue a photo insert of Frandsen for their newstand magazine. I was up in Philly two weeks ago, and when I visited the team store at CBP, that was the available photo.
Those photo inserts have intrigued me for a long time. Are they "cards"? Should I collect them?
Towards the end of the season and at the beginning of each season, you can usually buy a full set of the inserts from the Newstands. But the price (I think $50?) is usually too much for me to justifying picking up a set.
A have a couple of the full sets from the early 2000s, and I got them in exactly the manner you described. For my collection purposes, I count them as cards. However, I can see how some would not view them that way -- especially since they are something of a pain to store (I use 8"x10" sheets, but those fill up binders rather quickly.)
This year the full set of inserts is (was?) down to $30. I've been buying them since I moved back into the area in 2005--and somehow I have a 2000 set, but I have no memory of how or where I bought that. If anyone has any spares of 1998, 1999, or 2001-04, I'd love to make a trade.
The 2000 set is just loose; the 2005-present sets are in ordinary Staples-type binders with a laser-printed insert in the spine listing the "cards" and the series during which each was issued. Each series sold together like that is numbered the same, usually some low number. Most of my sets are in the 100s to 500s, but somehow I came across set #10 this year. And then I saw #32 (Lefty!) later and bought a second one. I guess that'll be my son's some day....
Anyway, they seem to be not in high demand as the Phils have them in stock all of September, and even in the Golden Era (which may have ended in 2011), they were available through the postseason.
I'm surprised how few people apparently buy programs. Some of them are numbered as low as xx of 1500 or 1750. Assuming they make sets out of at least 300, that means that in a three-game series, they may sell no more than 1200 programs, or 400 a game--which means that fewer than 1 in 100 fans buys a program for any given game. I guess I always thought that it would be a higher number.
You both have now convinced me that I should be collecting these.
Thanks for giving me something else to chase! ; )
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