and perhaps exhibit b on why the phillies are going to get a steady diet of price throughout this series in the late innings. they can't hit left-handed hitting! this includes exhibit a, ryan howard, who briefly revived against the righty shields but seems to have disappeared again vs. price.

yes, i turned the game off after the phillies stranded their 500th runner of the evening.

and what was with the home plate umpire? in addition to missing the rollins hpb, what about the phantom ring-up of baldelli? i've worked as a LL umpire and i have to say i've never, ever seen an umpire do that. you don't have to ask for help to find out if a hitter swung and he clearly went around.

i have all the hope of drew and the caveats of iconoclast, though with the mccain campaign looking increasings splintered and in disarray (see the "going rogue" story), it simply looks like the deal is all but sealed.

my worry is not for the 2012 election -- though i see that as being a difficult test, as i believe that the huffing and puffing straight talk express will be replaced by a sleek new sarah palin super-bullet train -- but the midterm elections just two years away.

it's not that i think obama will make the kind of mistakes clinton made in over-reaching and galvanizing the right; i just think there's too big a mess to clean up and too many voices ready to scream "socialism!" and "defeat in iraq!" between now and 2010.

you can bet they're already licking their wounds and drawing up plans for another "republican revolution" a la gingrich in 94. so i worry that an obama administration will have a very short window indeed to address a wide range of difficult problems.

all right -- it was the phillies' night. it may indeed be their series. if howard is actually waking from his month-long slumber and even pitchers are getting in on the fun -- look out.

on the rollins play in the first, i was glad to see buck n mccarver at least acknowledge that the umps have made some pretty terrible calls this postseason. usually announcers toe the party line and refuse to say anything negative, but it's really gotten ridiculous.

the rays may be the tigers of 08 -- much as it pains me to remember my own team's meltdown. granted, the phillies are a much better team than the cards were that year, but let's face it: by any objective measure, top to bottom, the rays should be winning this series. they won the best division in baseball and beat two of the best teams in baseball to get here, while the phils beat... the brewers and dodgers.

the real story for the rays is finding out who stole pena and longoria and replaced them with robots stuck in "strike out" mode. their bullpen and bottom of rotation got badly exposed last night as well.

BUT... their road back into this series is not as arduous as it was for the sox against the rays. all the rays have to do is figure out a way to beat hamels, then they can go back home and not have to face him again. not an easy task, but not impossible.

i realize i just sort of did the same thing king did -- backhanded compliments for the phillies and diagnosing what the rays did wrong. my bad. the phillies are playing great right now and deserve all the credit in the world for doing what nobody else has been able to do: putting the rays on the brink of elimination.

All right, so you're jumping on me for writing the rays are "objectively better" than the phils. in one sense, i agree -- whoever wins the series, and the phils are winning convincingly right now, is the better team. but in the sense that the 06 cards were clearly inferior to the 06 tigres, the rays, yes, are the better team. and i don't even have to point to stats to back this up. the rays won the toughest division in baseball. with the sox breathing down their necks, and pretty good yankees and blue jays teams coming at them, they held their own and won the a.l. east.

the phils, meanwhile, emerged from a division the mets would have won going away if they hadn't gone into another late-season swoon.

i'm willing to be convinced the rays are not as good as we thought they were, and the phils are much better -- and hey, i'm rooting for the phillies -- but that's the way it looks from here.

thanks, king -- despite your ongoing refusal to quote me in your actual column -- this is basically all i was saying. and to "gogorilla" in the other thread: i did not say that stats are "irrelevant," i said i didn't need to point to them; more because i'm too lazy to look them up than anything else.

to repeat: i agree; in a sense, whoever wins the world series is the better team. but looking at the whole season, what the rays accomplished vs. what the phils did, and in the league and division they played in, i believe the rays are better -- or at least you could convincingly make that argument.