When I decided that I wanted to spend the year abroad, I didn't really consider sports. Well, that was stupid. I've spent the better part of my life and a good chunk of my savings over the years supporting the Phillies, a.k.a the losingest team in the history of professional sports. So of course I leave the country right in the middle of the most successful era of the team's 126 year history. Seriously, I'm not making that up. The Phillies are--right now as I type this--better and more successful than they've ever been. EVER. EVER. And, if the team's history is any indicator, this will be the only time in my ENTIRE LIFE that the Phillies will be a dominant baseball team.
Last year, I was at Game Five. Both Parts. In the stands. Geoff Jenkins sprayed me with champagne. I marched down Broad Street. It was probably the happiest I've ever been. Years and years and years of rooting for alternately pathetic, incompetent, underachieving choke-artists had finally paid off. Being at that one game (over the course of three days) made it all worth it.
So, yeah, I'm going a little crazy over here. Last year (and this year until August), I was going to games every week. I was watching every night on TV. When the Phillies won the World Series, it felt like the culmination of 22 years of hard, painful work. Also, I WAS THERE. Now, I can only watch games on the internet because the games start at 7 AM and the bars that would show them aren't open (I didn't even have the internet for my first month here). Most of the people I know are either British or Chinese. They couldn't care less about baseball. Sure, they try to talk to me about the games, but it only makes things worse. My boss thinks it's great that I love the NHL so much. My roommate wants to know how the "football contest" went. I wish those were jokes, but they're not.
This season and these playoffs should have been a thing of beauty for me to watch. It's rare in any sport to see a team defend their championship with as much determination as these Phillies have. All of the clutch hits and late-inning heroics have been incredible. (As my friend and Mitch pointed out on his blog, this Phillies group stands out for being such a great team.) But due to the above factors, by the time the Phillies rolled into the playoffs, I had become a box-score fan. I had probably only watched 3 full games since coming to Hong Kong.
But when the playoffs started, I decided that I couldn't let a little twelve hour time difference stop me from seeing the Phillies try to make history. In the NLDS , two of the games against Colorado started at 4:27 PM EST (4:27 AM here), so I did what any crazy person would do: Took a sleeping pill the night before at 8 PM and woke up at 4 to watch the game before work. When the games started coming on at 8 AM here, I MAY have told a little white lie to have the IT guys install the program I needed to stream live games from my office.
I've been doing my best to watch as much as possible. If I have a class to teach during the 6th inning, there's nothing I can do about that (other than make a bunch of excuses to keep leaving the class to go "grab something from my office real quick"). But if a game comes on and I can watch, I will and I have.
There are, however, a few very, very, very, very, minor upsides to being in Hong Kong for this. A big part of my job is "cultural exchange." What better way to do that than teach the students about baseball? And what better way to do that than stream the games on the overhead projector? I certainly can't think of anything. I've also taken the liberty of plastering my classroom walls
with Phillies stuff.
The bulletin board, an elaborate time-line detailing the team's history (click on it to see the full-sized image), may very well be my masterpiece. I've made it my mission to turn my school into Phillies faithful. I may even have a few converts:
Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
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