Game 161 - Tuesday Night, October 2nd in Washington
Record - 81-80, 3rd Place, 16 games behind the Nationals
One Sentence Summary: The Phillies couldn't muster much offense against the N.L. East Champion Nationals, dropping the penultimate game of the season, 4-2.
What It Means: The Phils will have one more chance tomorrow afternoon to end this disappointing season with a winning record.
What Went Wrong: B.J. Rosenberg got the start and pitched a decent four innings, allowing a run on three hits. Two of the most frustrating relievers this season - Josh Lindblom and Antonio Bastardo - allowed three Nationals runs in their combined two innings of work.
Ruf accounted for all the offense, hitting two solo home runs. In his eight starts, Ruf is now hitting .407 (11 for 27) with three home runs and eight RBIs.
Featured Card: It's turning into Ruf Appreciation Week in The Phillies Room. To date, Ruf has appeared on only two 2012 baseball cards* and both were in Reading Phillies team sets. (I'm not counting his Chachi card in the tally, which exists only virtually within the confines of this blog.) The club's Double-A affiliate released two sets during the season. The first set came out earlier this year and was produced by Multi-Ad. The second set came out recently and was produced by Grandstand. This is Ruf's card from the latter and I featured his card from the Multi-Ad set here. Unfortunately, both sets chose to use the same photo.
*Ruf was also featured in the 2012 Eastern League All-Star set.
I believe Ruf is also pictured on a kids' giveaway baseball card sheet from early this season. Technically it's a blank back poster, but (a) it's on baseball card stock, and (b) if you cut it up (which I haven't yet) you will have about 30 R-Phils cards. They did the same thing last year. Both times they used a completely different design and different photos than those in the regular sets.
ReplyDelete(Now here's a valuable tip for next spring--both sets/sheets were available as prizes at the ring toss in the plaza area behind first base, and there seemed to be a good number left in late August. So you don't need to take a kid to the stadium on that specific giveaway day; you just have to get lucky on the ring toss.)
And if you want to get technical about it, Ruf was also featured in the giveaway version of the second set, which has a logo on the front for the sponsor, some candy or chocolate company whose name escapes me now. But it's the exact same card otherwise as the second series card.
A couple years ago they had some extra/different players in the giveaway set, and I think about 3 or 4 years ago they used some different poses. But that, like the variations in the Topps retail team set, seems to have gone the way of the dodo, dedicated Pong game consoles and the Princess phone.