In the early hours of Thursday morning on Five, 01.22 BST to be exact, the Phillies will begin game five of the NLCS with a chance to break their franchise’s history of failure.\u00c2\u00a0 The Phillies are, to use an American word guaranteed to bring a smile to any Brit’s face, the ‘losingest’ organization in North American sports.\u00c2\u00a0 At the end of the ’08 regular season, their losing tally had reached an unimaginable 10,089 games.\u00c2\u00a0 In fairness to them, that total is a product of 125 years of hard, and often desperate, work so they’ve had plenty of time to rack up such an embarrassing number.\u00c2\u00a0 The sore point for the Phillies is that they haven’t had a great deal of success to go with those losses.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/p>\n
This year’s World Series is shaping up to be a contest between two teams who have little to no experience of what it feels like to end October on the top of the baseball world.\u00c2\u00a0 The Tampa Bay Rays, now in the same 3-1 boat as the Phillies after their 13-4 victory over the Red Sox yesterday, have a distinct lack of flags flying in their ballpark, but then again they have only been\u00c2\u00a0in existence\u00c2\u00a0for ten years.\u00c2\u00a0 The Phillies can’t use the same excuse.\u00c2\u00a0 They\u00c2\u00a0have won the World Series just once in their 125 year history: a 4-2 triumph over the Royals (when they were a good team rather than a good\/bad joke) back in 1980.\u00c2\u00a0 Their most recent appearance in the Fall Classic came in 1993 when they were beaten by the Toronto Blue Jays in the second half of the latter’s back-to-back World Series championships (their 1992 victory came against the Braves).\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not exactly a glittering record of achievement.<\/p>\n
The Dodgers haven’t been frequent visitors of late to the World Series either: their last appearance came in 1988.\u00c2\u00a0 However, they managed to win a ring against the A’s twenty years ago and they had four World Series championships to their name (one of which as the Brooklyn Dodgers) before that success.<\/p>\n
The Dodgers already have the iconic name and the World Series rings.\u00c2\u00a0 The Phillies want to turn a record of failure on its head.<\/p>\n
Step one can be taken tonight.\u00c2\u00a0 They need to win one more game to make it to the World Series and, with Cole Hamels on the mound, they could get over the NLCS finishing line at the first attempt.\u00c2\u00a0 If the Dodgers are to stop them, or at least postpone the inevitable, Chad Billingsley is going to have to pitch much better than he did in game two.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
After putting together such a successful regular season, Billingsley will be determined to make sure that his year doesn’t end on a sour note.\u00c2\u00a0 Despite the fact that Dodger Stadium is known for being a pitcher’s ballpark, Billingsley actually has a better ERA on the road (3.12) than he does at Chavez Ravine (3.58) in his career so far<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 His performances at home have still been impressive though and history and form often take a back seat in a sudden death situation.\u00c2\u00a0 One shut-down outing from the Dodgers’ ace could take the series back to Philadelphia where the expectant home crowd, fully aware of their team’s lack of World Series success, might just put the Phillies on edge.\u00c2\u00a0 The Dodgers would be playing with nothing to lose and, before we know it, a game seven decider could be on the cards.<\/p>\n As they take the field in the early hours of Thursday U.K. time, the Phillies will be focused on avoiding that nerve-jangling scenario.\u00c2\u00a0 They have a World Series to compete in and a losing history to overturn.<\/p>\n Five’s coverage begins at 01.35, so they will most likely miss the top half of the first inning.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the early hours of Thursday morning on Five, 01.22 BST to be exact, the Phillies will begin game five of the NLCS with a chance to break their franchise’s history of failure.\u00c2\u00a0 The Phillies are, to use an American word guaranteed to bring a smile to any Brit’s face, the ‘losingest’ organization in North […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=942"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7317,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942\/revisions\/7317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}