Phillies 7, Cubs 2
Game 4 - Friday Afternoon, April 4th in Chicago
Record - 2-2, 4th Place, 1 1/2 games behind the Marlins
One Sentence Summary: Chase Utley and Domonic Brown paced the offense as the Phillies took the series opener from the Cubs, 7-2.
What It Means: The Phillies ruined the Cubs home opener, and the kick-off of their celebration of Wrigley Field's 100th birthday. Phillies manager Ryne Sandberg joined Ernie Banks, Ferguson Jenkins and Billy Williams in throwing out the first pitches prior to the game.
What Happened: Utley hit his first home run of the season with a two-run shot in the fifth and he'd later add an RBI-single in the seventh. Brown went 3 for 5 with two RBIs and John Mayberry, Jr. hit a pinch-hit two-run home run in the eighth.
Roberto Hernandez made his Phillies debut, pitching 5 1/3 innings while allowing a pair of runs on three hits.
Featured Card: The Utley card featured here isn't from my collection . . . it's actually from my seven-year-old son Doug's collection. It was the "First Phillie" encountered in the initial packs of Topps Opening Day he opened a week or so ago. I borrowed the card for this post, and I'll dutifully return it to its owner once I'm done with it. I'm entering an interesting place in terms of my Phillies collecting habits. Normally by now, I would have purchased a Topps Opening Day team set on eBay, added it to my checklist and then slipped the cards into 9-pocket pages in my 2014 Phillies binder.
The fact that Doug is now semi-collecting, and enjoying getting packs of cards from Target, leads me to wonder if there will come a day, perhaps soon, when I'm just supporting his collection and not really focusing on mine. I still have time to figure this all out and perhaps his sudden interest in baseball cards will wane in time. Nevertheless, it's not the worse problem a father could have if he's buying more baseball cards for his son than he is for himself.
When my boys were 5 and 4, I financed their entry into baseball card collecting. We carpeted the house with 1990 and 1991 Donruss (from rack packs), along with the yellow Fleer cards and to a lesser extent, the 40-year anniversary Topps cards. Oh, and GI Joe cards too.
ReplyDeleteAll this while I was in one of my non-collecting periods.
Congrats on getting to this point! Hopefully I am there by next year with my little man.
ReplyDeleteHe opened a pack of Topps Heritage for me a couple weeks ago, saw there were no Phillies and no Buster Posey (inexplicably his favorite player--I think he likes the name Buster!), and handed them back to me. I should have done what you did with the secretly-seeded Phillie....
Have Target, Wal-Mart or Toys R Us gotten in Heritage yet? I noticed that Modell's hasn't as of this weekend. If not, maybe there won't be a "retail" version of the cards this year? I bought my two packs at a local card shop and then put together the set via some strategic lot purchases on eBay.
Our local Target finally has packs of Heritage, but they Opening Day first.
ReplyDeleteI think Doug is more into the Opening Day cards than Heritage so maybe Topps actually knows what it's doing with the marketing of that set to younger collectors.