Blog naming is not easy

It seems kind of strange, writing a blog that no one will read for weeks or months -- if ever -- but that is precisely what I'm doing. I hope someday someone will find these postings and appreciate them, but that's not the blog's raison d'être. I guess as my first entry, I will try to explain why, then, I am doing this. And I'll do it with a lot of commas.

I like the Phillies. Like most sports-related opinions, I can't explain it; in fact, it defies logic. I don't live in or immediately near Philadelphia. I never stepped foot in the Vet. As a result, I can't adopt the Philadelphia-sports-inferiority complex as my own and claim years of suffering season after season of heartbreaking defeats. I don't really follow the Sixers or Flyers, and -- wait for it -- I strongly dislike the Eagles. Let me try to explain.

I grew up a football fan. My first sports-related memory is of me watching Lawrence Taylor sacking Joe Montana in the January 1991 NFC Championship Game. Maybe this actually happened, maybe it didn't, but that's how I remember it -- and isn't that the nature of childhood memories? Haven't there been things that you "remembered" for years and years, only to discover that they didn't actually happen? But I digress.

As a result of LT's sack and the subsequent Super Bowl XXV victory of the New York Giants, I became a Giants fan (explains my Eagles feelings). Yeah, I know, front-runner. But, in my defense, I was seven, and I've stuck with the Giants for the 17 miserable years since (so I guess I am a long-suffering fan... just not of the Philadelphia variety).

I played soccer in second and third grades and moved on to football in fourth. I played pigskin in fifth, sixth, and eighth grade (a story for another time). And I quit on day one of high school practice.

My dad wasn't really a sports fan -- and especially not baseball -- so I never got into America's Pastime. And that's despite attending my first (and only, for 12 years) Major League game in 1992 -- an experience that included my uncle and grandfather taking me to see Juniors Griffey and Ripken, scalpers, almost getting hit by a car in the streets of Baltimore, moldy bread, and my cousin falling down flights of Camden Yards stairs, leaving me -- a nine-year-old boy -- unattended for several innings... maybe this explains me keeping my distance from Major League Baseball for so long.

I joined Little League at age 10 because everyone else was doing it. I was horrible -- couldn't hit, couldn't catch, couldn't throw, couldn't run, didn't understand the strategy. Only now, 14 years later, am I starting to discover some tiny nugget of athletic ability in my body -- and my current quarter-life crisis is making me freak out that it's all downhill from here.

I was aware of the 1993 Phillies because I do live in eastern Pennsylvania, even if it's not Philly or the 'burbs. I guess this is as good a place as any to say that I grew up in the Pottsville area, county seat of Schuylkill County and home to America's Oldest Brewery. I went to Elizabethtown College and, after I graduated in 2006, my girlfriend and I moved into an apartment together about a mile from the college where we still live today.

Back to the narrative: The '93 Phils were all over the TV and newspapers. I "watched" some of the games, which I put in quotation marks because I don't consider it watching something unless I really understand it and absorb it. But I knew the names Dykstra, Daulton, Kruk, Morandini, Eisenreich, Incaviglia, Schilling, Andersen, Hollins, and, of course, Mitch "Wild Thing" Williams. Come October, I knew the Phils were in the World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays, and I knew if they lost game six, it was over. My bed time, strictly enforced by my parents, was 9 p.m., so I didn't get to see much, if any, of the game, but my mom came in to wake me up in the middle of the night and tell me that the Phillies had lost. The next day, SportsCenter showed me all I needed to know about Joe Carter.

It's funny that I mention SportsCenter here, because for the following 10 years, that program was my primary source of baseball information. I didn't attend a Major League game and I only occasionally attempted to watch one on TV.

Then, in 2004, I was invited to go on a bus trip to a Phillies game with my girlfriend's family. That game marked the beginning of my modern Phillies fan-ism. The game was a classic: 16 innings!

So, I'm a late-comer to the Phillies party. I hope you'll welcome me nonetheless.

Getting back to the point (there was one?): much like that very long autobiography was, this blog serves partially as a catharsis. When things go well or poorly with the Phils, this gives me an alternate outlet for venting my rage rather than throwing remote controls or punching durable goods.

But the two primary reasons, I'd say, that I've created this blog are: (1) to serve as an organizational tool for my own thoughts about the Phillies, and (2) to provide a medium for conversation and an exchange of ideas between me and a much more insightful, much more seasoned Phillies fan: Mike M. (I'll let him decide if he wants to divulge his last name.) I hope he posts an introductory message soon so that our legions of future fans can click on "introduction" labels and get to know our stories... not that I expect anyone to care that much.

One more reason for this blog -- and I'm pretty confident I speak on behalf of my friend, semi-colleague, and co-blogger when I say this -- is that we like to think we know more than we do. So this blog is a bit self-serving in that respect, too -- but then again, aren't most blogs?

Speaking of most blogs, I'll address the ostensible "subject" of this particular posting: blog naming. I wanted to start this blog in the middle of last season simply to catalog all the ways in which Gary Matthews annoyed me. The only thing that prevented me from doing it was coming up with a title for the blog. I just wasn't witty enough to come up with a good play on the syllable "Phil." Finally, today, I gave up. I decided to take the easy way out. After rejecting my first idea -- Untitled Phillies Blog -- I settled on ripping off Greenberg and Golic. I'll probably change the title when something better strikes me.

I'm done with the background stuff now. We're here, ready to do business. Welcome, if you exist, and please come back to visit often. It's my hope that we will be able to provide you with some interesting things to ponder: shuffled batting orders, prescriptions to save the Phillies' season, musings on transactions and rumored trades, etc. We're going to aim to provide something profound that you can't get anywhere else, and while I'm sure we'll fall far short of that, we'll at least be serving our own selfish desires.

I don't know when I'll post again, and I won't make any kinds of promises about how frequently we'll be posting. But I do promise that future posts will not be this long and boring.

Ok, I can't promise that either.