Check out this excerpt about long ago Phillies manager Pat Moran from an upcoming book about Baseball Managers from Hardball Times. Author Chris Jaffe write that Moran “might be the most underrated manager in baseball history”.

Moran coached the 1915 Phillies, who won their first ever pennant, and the 1919 Cincinnati Red who won the World Series over the Chicago White Sox in a fall “classic” that was less than on the level.

Both of the managers in the 1919 World Series had strong Philly connections – Moran as a former Phillies manager and “Black Sox” manager Kid Gleason as a former Phillies player who was born in Camden and died in Philly.

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On this day in 1943, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis barred Phillies owner William Cox could not be involved with the team anymore as a result of betting on the team. The decision was instrumental in making the Carpenter Family the owners of the Phillies. The Carpenters owned the Phillies until after they won the World Series in 1980. Buy low, sell high!

For another interesting angle on this period in Phillies history, check out this article debunking a story that Bill Veeck nearly bought the Phillies before Cox did in an attempt to stock the team with Negro League stars.

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Happy Birthday to former Phillies “pitcher” Adam Eaton, who turned 32 today.

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Todd Zolecki has the scoop on Phillies farmhands in the Arizona Fall League.

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Here are …

Friday is the beginning of the free agent season, and the Phillies look like they are going to sit back and watch things take shape.

Based on the limited options for affordable third basemen, it will be interesting to see if the decision to not pick up Pedro Feliz’s option. I’m sure that Pedro is less than thrilled that the Phillies didn’t pick up the option, and you wonder if he would even come back for less if he could go elsewhere even for the same lower amount of money.

There are very few sexy options for third base, and Beerleaguer says that Mark DeRosa is not one of them.

Scott Lauber caught up with Ruben Amaro Jr. in print.

Mike Miss chatted with Ruben on the air:

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Instead of giving my amateur opinion on who I think will play 3rd base in 2010 for the Phils, I’ve been working on some other site enhancements that I hope will add some value for folks who swing by. For the record, I really have no clue who the Phillies are going to sign to play third, but I am starting to wonder, based on the available options, whether Feliz at $5.5 million was such a bad thing.

Check out the new Postseason Gamelog page, which chronicles every Phillies postseason game ever played, provided the ability to sort by runs for/against, Phils pitcher of record and more. It also includes links directly to each game’s box score via baseball-reference.com.

I am going to have a separate page for postseason stats in a format that I think is more digestible than what I have found elsewhere. I may expand that to regular season as well.

For the first time in 16 years, Phillies fans had to endure the sight of a team celebrating a World Series win at the expense of their favorite team. In 1993, it was a gut punch – I don’t remember moving for quite some time after Joe Carter turned on that Mitch William’s offering.

This time, we were granted a few innings to allow the reality to sink in: the Phils weren’t going to repeat as World Series champions. Ryan Howard’s too-little-too-late two-run home run in the 6th inning of Game 6 helped chase Andy Pettitte and provided a glimmer of hope for the Philly faithful, but it was just a cruel tease. The Phils put up zeroes the rest of the way, and Mariano Rivera closed it out with a 5 out save.

Once the sting of the World Series loss subsided, even a hardened cynic had to admit that 2009 was a very successful Phillies season.

No team gets to Game 6 of the World Series without a healthy dose of plays that brought joy or heartache to players and fans alike.

Top Five Moments

1. Jimmy’s 9th Inning Walk-Off Double – I don’t know where you were, but I was laying on my couch, feeling pretty sorry for myself as the bottom of the 9th got started in Game 4 of the NLCS. The Phillies were down 4-3, and were facing the prospect of having to beat Dodgers’ closer Jonathan Broxton. Ibañez …

I am fully recovered from the World Series loss. The healing process began far before the last out in Game 6. When the Phils were down 7-1 in the bottom of the fifth, I had already resigned myself to the fact that the Phillies were not winning this thing. Even Ryan Howard’s two-run shot in the top of the sixth did not move me. I refused to give in to the notion of a possible rally, especially with Mariano Rivera looming 2 innings or so away.

When the last pitch was thrown, I didn’t immediately turn off the game. I watched probably 10-15 seconds of the Yankees celebrating. My opinion? Lame compare to the Phillies last year. Sorry, but the Yankees and their fans just do not match the Phillies for intensity. They were the better team in the World Series, no doubt. But we smoke ‘em in World Series celebrations. The same goes for their Parade. They can talk about the Canyon of Heroes all they want, but when the crowd size is defined as “many thousands” in a city of 8.5 million, color me unimpressed.

Anyway, thoughts already move to the hot stove and what the Phillies can do to make themselves better and to bridge the gap that exists between themselves and the Yankees. Imagine for a moment that this is where we are as Phillies fans. Instead of talking about what our favorite team would be …

Perhaps it was surprising only in how quickly it happened, and how emphatically.

Less than 48 hours after the Phillies 2009 campaign ended with a 7-3 loss to the Yankees in Game 6 of the World Series, the Brett Myers era was over.

Jim Salisbury reported that Myers had been informed that he would not be offered a contract by the Phillies in the offseason.

Doesn’t matter that Myers just turned 29 years old. Doesn’t matter if Brad Lidge has loose bodies in his throwing elbow and had a historically bad season for a closer. Doesn’t matter if the bullpen is a major question mark during this offseason. Doesn’t matter if the Phillies rotation is anything but set for next year. Doesn’t matter if the only pitching options other than Myers for 2010 are Don Carman or Matt Beech.

Essentially, the Phillies don’t want Brett Myers back, no matter what. Period.

With the uncertainty surrounding the Phillies pitching options going into 2010, the decision here was definitely character related, although not exclusively.

Myers’ worst off-field problem was the domestic violence incident involving his wife in mid-2006 while the Phillies were in Boston for an interleague series with the Red Sox. If you think that incident played a huge role in the Phillies’ decision to sever ties with Myers, think again: they offered him a 3 year contract the February after he was charged with striking his wife.

Myers also had a well-documented scrap with …

It didn’t come crashing down on the Phillies tonight in a flash.

No, if you were watching Pedro closely enough, you could see this one coming from the first inning. Pedro’s velocity was too low for him to fool anyone and his pitches didn’t have the movement on them that a guy pitching in the 80s needs to miss bats. Especially these bats.

In the bottom of the second, Hideki Matsui hit a towering 2 run home run to right field for the game’s first runs. Thoughts of Pedro pitching deep into the game, or finding some unknown gear that he’d put aside in 1999 for just this occasion were gone. Even on full rest, Pedro had nothing. I’m not casting aspersions here. Pedro gave us a strong half year, and for the right price, I wouldn’t even mind seeing the Phillies discuss re-signing him. But tonight was not his night.

Pedro escaped further damage in the 2nd, but he needed a lockdown 3rd inning in order to keep the Phillies in the game as they worked to solve a very beatable Andy Pettitte.

But it wasn’t to be. Pedro got himself into trouble in the 3rd inning after initially striking out Brett Gardner, who resides at the bottom rung of the Yankees order. The problem is that the top of the order follows the bottom. Baseball is funny that way. The Phillies definitely won the battle of the bottom hald of the orders, but the trophies are …

Whoever says that baseball is a boring sport has never watched October/November baseball. And they definitely have never tuned in to a Phillies game.

The Phillies won Game 5 of the World Series with an 8-6 win that shouldn’t have been nearly that close. Cliff Lee wasn’t as sharp in this one as he was in Game 1, but he certainly outpitched AJ Burnett, who brought absolutely nothing to Citizens Bank park except extended batting practice for the Phils.

This is the kind of game that the Phillies needed to play in order to beat the Yankees. You can’t score 3 runs and hope to hold on. The top half of the Yankees order is relentless. The Phillies haven’t faced such a formidable 4 batter stretch in the playoffs in the last 3 years like they have Jeter, Damon, Teixeira and Rodriguez.

A couple of thoughts while I await a decrease in my heart rate.

1. Johnny Damon is some hitter. He works an at-bat and finds a way on base. The sense of deja vu after he hit that single in the 9th was enough to make me run from my TV and find the nearest bed to crawl under.

2. The Phillies can absolutely win this series, but whatever happens, they’ve given the Yankees trouble in all 5 games of this series. This is no one-sided affair. The pundits will write about how this was just delaying the inevitable. But the Phillies are not dead. Andy Pettite was …

It will go down as one of the worst losses in Phillies history, given the time and place. We won’t ever forget this one. It will haunt us.

The Phillies came within 1 strike of heading to the bottom of the ninth with a tie game and Phil Coke on the mound for the Yankees.

The possibility of a 2-2 World Series and Cliff Lee pitching tomorrow night was so close you could already imagine the headlines in the papers tomorrow and talk of how the resilient Phillies struck again – how these Phillies were not to be taken lightly. I could already imagine myself reading NY Post columns from bad writers bitching about Girardi’s decision to leave in Joba Chamberlin to pitch to Pedro Feliz.

It was so close.

But it wasn’t to be. Instead, I’ll have to avoid print media, electronic media, non-electronic, non-print media, ancient hieroglyphics that foretold of this disaster. It’s iPod time in the car tomorrow.

With a full count and no one on the ninth pitch of the at-bat, Johnny Damon singled to left field. Should have been a minor speed bump even with the dangerous Mark Teixeira coming to the plate.

The Phils put the shift on for Teixeira, which someone with more baseball knowledge than me will need to explain to me, as I don’t see the sense in shifting the entire infield over when you are protecting a one run lead and you’ve got a runner on base. Of …

I turned to my Dad in the late innings last night as we shook excess rain off of our ponchos from Sect. 420.

“It’s hard to believe that on the one-year anniversary of the parade, Cole gets booed on his way off the mound”.

Jason Weitzel at Beerleaguer wrote that last night’s start used up any remaining goodwill that Hamels had built up from 2008.

Being an athlete is akin to having a banking relationship with your fans. You make deposits and withdrawals. The truly great players keep their accounts consistently in the black, making huge deposits consistently and only withdrawing small sums here and there.

Cole’s 2008 was a massive deposit. So much so that his atrocious 2009 cannot ever take away the magic that was his 2008 postseason. But Weitzel is right that the extra love that comes along with being a World Series hero one year can vanish in a subsequent fall failure. At this point, we must grapple with the duality of Cole’s October fate: 2008 hero. 2009 heel.

We’ll always have 2008, Cole. In 20 years, I suspect we’ll remember a lot more about last year than we will this year if 2009 doesn’t end with flatbeds on Broad.

But if the Yankees do go on to claim another World Series championship this year, Cole will be as much the goat for this year as he was the man for last year.

He’ll have company though, as several Phillies players are coming up very …