I’m back – it took 13 hours door to door Saturday (and Sunday, since I arrived home at 3:00 AM). Five beds in seven nights is a rough way to travel. I missed the best day in recent Phillies history – tho Krishna fed me the play-by-play of the last half-inning of the division-clincher over the phone – and just about all of the Phils short tragic run in the playoffs, getting to hear a little more than one inning over ESPN radio while I was stuck in Seattle traffic Thursday waiting for a train to go by. Then the signal went dead & by the time I was able to get it back, in the parking lot for the Bainbridge Island ferry, the 10-5 rout was complete. When I noted September 28, that

in recent years, wild card teams have had a better than average chance of taking the whole enchilada. That’s usually because they’re performing at playoff intensity for two, maybe three weeks before the playoffs even begin….

I wasn’t even thinking of the Colorado Rockies. Tho they had obviously had a good run, I just presumed that they were too far back and that there were too many decent teams still competing for the wild card spot – the Phils, Padres & Mets, even the Braves – for the Rockies to sneak past them all. But obviously, they have the hot hand right now, and in the playoffs that matters. Plus, once again the cliché held true: good pitching always beats good hitting.