Phillies Players Quotes

There’s something exquisitely humbling about finding out that your best friend of many years is dating someone, for the first time, and didn’t bother telling you—” “I’m not dating—” “—or that she neglected to mention that she won the Philly Open, that she was selected for the Challengers, that she is now buddies with the best player in the world, that she is going to be his opponent for the World Championship—should I go on?

On April 14 in Boston, Elston’s name went down in Yankee history. He got into his first game when Irv Noren was ejected over a call at home plate. According to the Black Associated Press, Elston made his Yankee debut at 4:32 p.m. “Howard’s appearance at-bat signaled the fall of a dynasty that had been assailed on all sides as being anti-Negro. The fans gave Howard a well-deserved round of applause, making his debut on the heretofore lily-white Bronx Bombers.” Elston played three innings that day. He singled and drove in a run in an 8–4 loss to the Red Sox. Finally, the Yankees had become the thirteenth club in the major leagues to field a black player. The only holdouts were the Philadelphia Phillies, Detroit Tigers, and Boston Red Sox.

BEYOND THE GAME In 2007 some of the Colorado Rockies’ best action took place off the field. The Rocks certainly boasted some game-related highlights in ’07: There was rookie shortstop Troy Tulowitzki turning the major league’s thirteenth unassisted triple play on April 29, and the team as a whole made an amazing late-season push to reach the playoffs. Colorado won 13 of its final 14 games to force a one-game wild card tiebreaker with San Diego, winning that game 9–8 after scoring three runs in the bottom of the thirteenth inning. Marching into the postseason, the Rockies won their first-ever playoff series, steamrolling the Phillies three games to none. But away from the cheering crowds and television cameras, Rockies players turned in a classic performance just ahead of their National League Division Series sweep. They voted to include Amanda Coolbaugh and her two young sons in Colorado’s postseason financial take. Who was Amanda Coolbaugh? She was the widow of former big-leaguer Mike Coolbaugh, a coach in the Rockies’ minor league organization who was killed by a screaming line drive while coaching first base on July 22. Colorado players voted a full playoff share—potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—to the grieving young family. Widows and orphans hold a special place in God’s heart, too. Several times in the Old Testament, God reminded the ancient Jews of His concern for the powerless—and urged His people to follow suit: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). Some things go way beyond the game of baseball. Will you?

This fella can’t hear,” one of the Phillies’ broadcasters said. “He’s a deaf player, that is correct,” another broadcaster, Harry Kalas, confirmed.

The game jostled back and forth, and then came the final inning. Some player named Casey came to bat, like his teammates, looking like a rock. Lightning ripped through the air as rain came down in sheets. The scoreboard said the horses were beating the rocks by two points, but there were two men on base. If Casey hit a homerun, the rocks would beat the horses. If not, too bad for the rocks. This man, Ben, and the two people with him looked horrified as this Casey came to bat. They had red shirts with horses painted on them. They jumped up and down for joy when they saw the final pitch, and Casey sulking back to the dugout. He had struck out. After the game, the four hiked back to a very small car.

His name is C. J. Skender, and he is a living legend. Skender teaches accounting, but to call him an accounting professor doesn’t do him justice. He’s a unique character, known for his trademark bow ties and his ability to recite the words to thousands of songs and movies on command. He may well be the only fifty-eight-year-old man with fair skin and white hair who displays a poster of the rapper 50 Cent in his office. And while he’s a genuine numbers whiz, his impact in the classroom is impossible to quantify. Skender is one of a few professors for whom Duke University and the University of North Carolina look past their rivalry to cooperate: he is in such high demand that he has permission to teach simultaneously at both schools. He has earned more than two dozen major teaching awards, including fourteen at UNC, six at Duke, and five at North Carolina State. Across his career, he has now taught close to six hundred classes and evaluated more than thirty-five thousand students. Because of the time that he invests in his students, he has developed what may be his single most impressive skill: a remarkable eye for talent. In 2004, Reggie Love enrolled in C. J. Skender’s accounting class at Duke. It was a summer course that Love needed to graduate, and while many professors would have written him off as a jock, Skender recognized Love’s potential beyond athletics. “For some reason, Duke football players have never flocked to my class,” Skender explains, “but I knew Reggie had what it took to succeed.” Skender went out of his way to engage Love in class, and his intuition was right that it would pay dividends. “I knew nothing about accounting before I took C. J.’s class,” Love says, “and the fundamental base of knowledge from that course helped guide me down the road to the White House.” In Obama’s mailroom, Love used the knowledge of inventory that he learned in Skender’s class to develop a more efficient process for organizing and digitizing a huge backlog of mail. “It was the number-one thing I implemented,” Love says, and it impressed Obama’s chief of staff, putting Love on the radar. In 2011, Love left the White House to study at Wharton. He sent a note to Skender: “I’m on the train to Philly to start the executive MBA program and one of the first classes is financial accounting—and I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with me when I was in your class.

… he intended to exploit as best he could the traditional rivalries, for that was one of the best things the league had going for it, genuine rivalries in which the players themselves participated. Those rivalries, Boston-Philly, New York–Baltimore, needed no ballyhoo; the athletes themselves were self-evidently proud and they liked nothing better than to beat their opponents,

April 4, 1982 - Joel Youngblood hits a single for the Expos in a game against the Phillies. A few hours earlier he got a hit for the New York Mets in Chicago before being traded. He is the only player to collect a base hit for two different teams in one day.

In the fifteen years before Marvin Miller came to the players union in 1966, the average big-league salary had crept from $12,000 to $19,000. Fifteen years later it was $325,000. The game’s economic transformation changed everything, just as the Phillies were finally figuring out how to win.

They sat quietly for a few minutes. Finally, Alex said, “So Ben, right now I like baseball because I just caught one. Why do you like baseball so much?” “I don’t like baseball. I love baseball.” “That’s pretty obvious, but why?” Ben looked at his brother and shook his head thoughtfully. “It’s different than any other sport. It’s like life. The only way you can appreciate it is slowly. The drama of the game builds as each inning goes by. Sure, it’s great seeing your team hit a home run in the first inning, but it’s even better to see one in the ninth inning, especially when your team is down and you win because of it. The entire season is like that too, the same kind of pace from game one until the World Series. It’s not about any individual play, although that’s important. It’s not the home run itself. It’s the drama that precedes the home run, maybe a whole game that’s turned around and changed by it. You can’t appreciate baseball if all you watch are the highlight reels or all you see is one inning or one play. I’m not the first to say this, but baseball is life.” Alex smiled at his brother. “Look, I play basketball and I’ve played it my whole life, but frankly, when you watch a professional game, in my opinion the defense is almost nonexistent and the only thing good about it is the last couple of minutes,” Ben said. “You don’t get that in baseball. The drama of baseball is in every moment of the game, it builds until the last out. Baseball is all about the whole game.” “What about football?” asked Alex. “That has drama. The game is played over sixty minutes. I find it a whole lot more exciting than baseball.” “It’s not the same thing. It has many of the same elements when you look at the basics of it. They both have athleticism, strategy, and tactics, but it’s different. I’ll bet you find it exciting because of its ferocity. The violence is what turns me off about football. Don’t get me wrong, you still have to be able to think to play the game, but at the end of the day football is about violence—linemen trying to kill each other, the defensive guys trying to kill the quarterback, the receiver. The violence overshadows the thinking. I’ve seen games where the fans actually cheered when a visiting player was injured.” “Yeah, welcome to Philly.” Alex smiled. “Fair enough, but I bet it’s the same in any city,” Ben said. “Baseball isn’t about violence. Look, I know it has violence. God must love the catchers. I don’t know how they survive a two-hundred-pound base runner sliding into home, cleats first, and many second basemen have been hurt trying to put a man out at second. But that’s not what the game is about. It’s just a part of it, like life. “If I had to summarize the difference between baseball and football, football is about war; baseball is about life. In football you have two armies clashing, over and over again. They keep at it until one side overwhelms the other. Baseball is different. It’s about going out and working hard and having little victories and defeats along the way and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Hopefully you win, but even if you don’t you keep coming back every day. It’s like when you drive a truck, cut hair, sell buttons and zippers, or do advertising. It’s the same thing for all of us. It’s day-in and day-out work, and you hope at the end of the year you’ve won more than you’ve lost. If I want violence all I have to do is open the paper and read about Korea, or close my eyes and think about Okinawa. I get inspired by baseball to come back every day and try harder and if I work as hard as I can, and have a little luck, I get rewarded for it.

The Phillies came back on the field, but Ben kept talking. “There’s another thing, too. It has to do with the history, the statistics. The fact that you can compare a player from 1950 to another in 1935 and have a pretty fair idea of how they match up. And don’t forget nostalgia. Every kid who ever threw a baseball with his dad thinks about that every time he picks up a glove and plays catch with his kid or watches the players warming up.