Phillies in the World Series

It's been pretty much a year since I posted some stuff here. It's not that nothing has happened but more of too much happening and never having the time to sit down and write about it. Okay, I admit, there's the motivational factor as well. In short, we've been busy. So what's happened now? Well, the Phillies (remember the 10.000 losses post a while back?) have made it to the World Series. Of course there's nothing that helps you bond more with a sports team then them actually achieving something. I now have a Phillies t-shirt (Chase Utley's name on the back) and I check their website several times a week.
The second good news is that they're facing the Tampa Bay Rays in the finals. The alternative was the Boston Red Sox but almost everybody here in the US will agree that the Boston sports teams have had entirely too much success of late. The Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 and 2007. The New England Patriots (american football) won the SuperBowl in 2001, 2003 and 2004 and what's more, they almost won every game last season. Only the last one in the SuperBowl prevented them from achieving a so called perfect season. And finally, the Boston Celtics (basketball) won the NBA championship this year.
It's not that I begrudge those teams their success but it makes dealing with people from Boston a bit harder in every day live. Whenever sports get mentioned they put on this air of false modesty.
To get back to the topic of baseball. I'm sure some of you are wondering whether I have something to say about the name World Series. Well, to be honest I used to think it was funny, but if you get into baseball a bit more you find that it's not half as funny as most of the other stuff. Teams that just pick up their stuff and move to other cities like the Brooklyn Dodgers who decided in 1957 that they could do with a vacation and became the LA Dodgers. The number of statistics that are being gathered in one baseball game. The seventh inning stretch. The Philly Phanatic shooting hotdogs into audience over loooooong distances. Oh, I almost forgot the guy who caught a ball in a Chicago Cubs game a couple of years ago. He was fan in the bleachers who reached down and caught the ball just above the glove of a player. He had to be escorted out of the stadium because some other fans took this the wrong way. Then the media posted his name and address and the poor guy couldn't even go outside anymore. Did I mention that the Cubs lost that game? Not because they played badly of course.....