Game 47 - Friday Night, May 25th in St. Louis
Record - 24-23, 5th Place, 4 games behind the Nationals
One Sentence Summary: The Phils won in extras behind Hunter Pence's two-run home run as Cliff Lee remains winless on the season.
What It Means: The Phillies are proving to be a streaky team. They've now won three in a row and they'll go for the series win tonight.
What Went Right: Pence's blast broke the slugger out of his recent funk. He's been just awful recently with runners in scoring position, so hopefully his big hit is the start of something good.
Lee had another fine outing, striking out seven in his seven innings of work. He could have earned the win if not for a few balls Shane Victorino probably should have caught in the fourth inning. There was a little tension in the dugout after the inning as cameras caught the two in a heated exchange.
There was also a fantastic defensive play in the eighth that prevented the Cardinals from taking the lead. Victorino tracked down a double and relayed it to Freddy Galvis who made a perfect throw home to Carlos Ruiz to nail Yadier Molina in a collision at the plate.
Raul Valdes picked up his second win in as many nights after working out of a ninth inning jam.
Featured Card: My wife rocks. She picked up a couple of packs of Topps Archives from Target this afternoon and three of the sixteen cards I received were Phillies. I've read a lot of collectors' complaints about the card stock used for the set, but it doesn't really bother me. These are fun cards, and if I were to collect one set this year, this would probably be it. However, the pesky short prints that Topps insists on including within its base sets will most likely once again scare me off.
For what it's worth, the SPs are only for the retired players other than Schmidt: Kruk, Hayes, Williams and McBride. Furthermore, the SPs seem to be relatively easy to track down.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, of the SPs, the McBride is probably the coolest, in my opinion. There's no way he would've appeared on a 1975 Topps card as a Phillie, and the photo they used of him is one I haven't seen before.
I could go on, but I really am planning on saying quite a bit about the cards when I start posting the checklists for the set.
Looking forward to your post. I really like the concept of this set and I'm going to have fun tracking down all the various Phillies inserts and autograph cards. But I just don't feel the need to put together any complete set that includes 40 short-prints and one super short-print. Even if more they're readily available than in other sets, I get a bad feeling when I hear "short-print."
ReplyDeleteI totally blame the 2004-2008 Topps Heritage sets for burning me out in terms of complete set collecting.