Gameday: Phillies (4-1) at Astros (0-5)
Philadelphia Phillies (4-1) at Houston Astros (0-5)
Roy Halladay, RHP vs. Roy Oswalt, RHP
Weather: Partly Cloudy, 56
TV: WPHL
Twitter: Phillies Nation
As it turns out, two Philadelphia sports teams scored late last night to salvage a win. Sebastien Le Toux scored a hat trick to lead Philadelphia Union past D.C. United 3-2 at an electrified Link. Not to be outdone, Jayson Werth and Ryan Howard each had a hat trick of RBI as the Phils scored five runs in the last third of the game to bail out Jamie Moyer.
The Phillies are sending the Stormin’ Mormon back to the hill as they attempt to apply the broom. While the offense has spent the first week of the season going crazier than Roman Polanski and R. Kelly at a high school hot tub party, they haven’t really faced a quality starting pitcher so far. Roy Oswalt, the second-best right-handed starting pitcher in this game named Roy, has been one of the premier power righties this decade, and while the mite-sized Mississipian is on the downswing of his career, he’s still appreciably better than Jason Marquis, John Lannan, and the parade of no-names Howard, Polanco, and the rest have teed off on so far this year.
With Oswalt and Halladay on the mound, I’d expect this game to start out a little slow, giving you plenty of time to panic about the Flyers game later this afternoon. Polanco and Howard (After 5 years, you’d think I wouldn’t still be surprised when he hits a clutch home run) both have quite good career numbers against Oswalt, so look for one of them to get the ball rolling. We’ll see how the hottest lineup in baseball does against a real quality starting pitcher.
Todays Lineup: Rollins (SS), Polanco (3B), Utley (2B), Howard (1B), Werth (RF), Ibanez (LF), Victorino (CF), Ruiz (C), Halladay (P).
I was going to dip into the wonderful world of French-Canadian high-gravity beers, but with the plane crash in Russia yesterday killing Polish President Lech Kaczynski and most of the Polish military high command, I feel it’s appropriate to honor their memory by going to the only European country that I’m aware of that has been ruled by a pair of identical twins who became famous as child actors. The Kaczynski twins are also notable for being so anti-EU that they forced French President Nicolas Sarkozy to invent the “Don’t be that guy” form of diplomacy in order to get the Treaty of Lisbon passed. All in all, a tragic loss for Poland.
Poland is the 10th-largest beer market in the world, and their flagship brewery, Zywiec, makes a porter that can carry my bags to the train anytime. At 9.5% ABV, it’ll get you drunk, and as a porter with light hints of currant and coffee, it will taste like little bits of heaven while doing so. One piece of advice: drink it at room temperature. Beers like Coors and yesterday’s gameday beer, Colt 45, are served as close to freezing as possible so they paralyze your taste buds and you can’t taste how disgusting they really are. Real high-quality beer is meant to be served around 60 degrees so you can taste it. In fact, high quality Belgian Trappist beers have recommended serving temperatures on the label.
But at this point, I’ve spent almost as much time writing about the beer as I have the game, so pour a little Zywiec out for the gods to honor Lech Kaczynski, and enjoy the game.- By Michael
