Thursday, July 16, 2015

Introducing the Virtual Phillies Wall


Back in September 2009, I wrote about my personal Phillies Wall and explained its genesis as follows: 
Since the early '80s, I had maintained a Phillies Wall.  Either on a bulletin board in my 12th Street bedroom, on the back of a closet door or now in the first incarnation of The Phillies Room - otherwise known as the first floor of The Crick.  The Phillies Wall faithfully and accurately reported the current Phillies roster seven days a week, twelve months a year using baseball cards of the current roster.  If a roster move was made, the Wall was updated with the appropriate player's baseball card. The Wall never failed.  The Wall was a constant.  Even during the Dark Times of the early '00s, the Wall was updated.
The Phillies Wall exists today in the actual Phillies Room, but a lack of production time (and printer ink) means that I'm no longer taking the time to print and update the physical wall.  The picture above was taken yesterday and it shows the Phillies roster at some point last season.  (I'm not sure what happened to the fifth starter's card.)  Before updating for the 2014 roster, the last time I had actually printed and updated the Phillies Wall was for the 2011 postseason roster.

The outdated-ness of the actual Phillies Wall was pointed out to me recently by my oldest son Doug who couldn't believe Kyle Kendrick was still being displayed.  He was alarmed and a little dismayed.

I think I've come up with a solution and we'll see how this goes.  During the All-Star break, I came up with the idea for a Virtual Phillies Wall which you can see by clicking here.  I've also linked to Virtual Phillies Wall on the left sidebar.  I'm going to attempt to update this for every Phillies transaction, trade, promotion or demotion and we'll see if I can keep up with it.  I'll need to re-format a little when rosters expand to 40 players and new players who arrive in the offseason will have their 2016 Chachi New Additions or Departures cards included.

This should be fun and I'm looking forward to giving it a test drive during what should surely be a busy time for the Phillies roster over the next few weeks.

5 comments:

Tony L. said...

Both the real wall and the virtual wall are pretty cool. With space not being an issue, have you thought about including the DL and the Manager and coaches on the Virtual Wall?

Unknown said...

Borrowing from Ronald Reagen: Mr. McPhail Tear down that wall

Steve F. said...

A great idea! Like Rick, I too am looking forward to that particular wall being torn down though. If a picture is worth 1000 words, that picture is worth 1000 losses!

Fuji said...

Super cool. I don't have nearly the time... but if I did, I'd love to do something like this for the A's and maybe the Padres.

Jim said...

Thanks everyone.

Rick - Perfect comment. This is the Wall that needs to come down, card by card and be rebuilt. I'm looking forward to adding the Nola card on Tuesday.

Tony - I may see what it looks like with the manager and coaches added. Looking at Cliff Lee's card all year on the DL portion of the wall seems like it would be depressing.