NOW PLAYING LEFT FIELD AND BATTING IN THE FOURTH POSITION, NUMBER 44, ROY OSWALT: I've been on a streak of attending Cole Hamels starts lately -- so I knew to expect solid pitching and minimal run support, and for the first time since May 21 all eight Phillies position players in the starting lineup. I just didn't expect to see 16 innings worth of madness.
There's a certain type of mania that seeps in after you cross the 10th, 11th and 12th innings and head towards the 14th Inning Stretch. Among other things, they ran out of film clips to use, exhausting nothing is over until we decide it is! and the like by the 12th, with the Varsity Blues Van Der Beek slow clap speech capping it off. After about a five-inning hiatus, the Phanatic came back in the 13th or so and just started doing random shtick with the fans, pulling one guy's top off and placing random hexes on players.
And then Ryan Howard got ejected, losing his cool worse than I've ever seen. We were out of position players. Hence, the title to this post, and when the first batter lofted a lazy fly ball in his direction ... bedlam. Look at that smile on his face. We won't talk about the rest.
