Pages

Chachi Checklists

Season Summaries

Virtual Wall Archive

Vintage Phillies Team Sets

Thursday, April 22, 2010

1996 Phillies Team Issue #5 Mike Benjamin

Slowly getting back into the swing of things. It's hard to focus on baseball what with all the overwhelming joy of our new son and all.

Braves 4, Phillies 3
Game 13 – Tuesday Night, April 20th in Atlanta

Jenna went into labor just as this Phillies game was getting underway in Atlanta. We listened to the first inning or so in the car ride on the way to the hospital, but I was too focused on breaking new land-speed records and not hitting pedestrians on the sidewalks to pay much attention to Kyle Kendrick’s pitching performance.

Later, I caught a snippet of the 8th inning play-by-play as I was moving my car from the ER parking lot to the main visitors’ parking lot. Radio broadcaster Larry Andersen was thrilled with Kendrick’s game, noting he was using his fastball early to establish a pitcher’s count and then keeping the hitters off-balance with his off-speed stuff.

Shortly before Ben was born, Jenna requested we turn on the TV in our room – more as a diversion than anything else. The volume on the TV was low, but we caught the highlights of the Flyers’ play-off victory and the lowlights of the Phils’ stunning defeat. With 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th, interim closer Ryan Madson allowed back to back home runs. Jose Contreras allowed a solo, walk-off home run in the 10th. (I still don’t know who actually hit the home runs for the Braves.)

Any other night, I would have been thrown into a funk and become extremely grumpy because of the Phillies’ loss. However, none of that really seemed to matter as I was very close to meeting my second son for the first time.

It's All About the Benjamins: The Phils have had two players with the surname of Benjamin in their history - Stan Benjamin, the team's starting right fielder in 1941 and Mike Benjamin, a middle infielder who played in 35 games with the 1996 squad.

No comments:

Post a Comment