Some Phillies Stuff

See the seats at the top of this picture, the ones above the Ashburn Alley area of the concourse at Citizens Bank Park? Those are the Rooftop Bleachers, so named because they're inspired by the bleachers people had on top of their houses on 20th Street in order to see inside the old Connie Mack Stadium.

And I'll be sitting up there on September 3rd when the Phillies play the Milwaukee Brewers. A while back they posted a link to a special "Social Media Night" promotion on their Twitter feed: buy a ticket in this section for $20 (normally they sell for $28) and not only would they throw in a $10 food/souvenir credit, but you get a Phillies t-shirt with the phrase "Life is Tweet." Ha. I couldn't resist.

So if you're going to that game be sure to let me know. We can meet up, and I'll be sure to post to Twitter and Facebook and maybe blog about it. ;-) I don't know if that Social Media promotion is still running, but that night is also Latino Family Celebration night as part of Hispanic Heritage Month, and there's a discount available at Phillies.com.

I took that picture on Monday, when I was at the game as part of the Gay Community Night contingent.
I'm in the picture below, which was taken by someone I follow on Twitter who was at the game. The annotation I added, I'm sure, will be quite helpful...

The Phillies lost to Houston, 3-2. This was the 8th Phillies gay night -- and the 7th time they lost. The only gay win was in 2008. We know how that season ended, so this does not bode well for 2010. Nor does the fact that they lost the other three games in this series to the Astros. Houston got off to a terrible start and has been out of contention since May, though they're 26-18 from July 6 on. Meanwhile, the Phillies have their entire starting lineup back from the disabled list but have stopped hitting again. In the four games against Houston (almost 5, really, since one of the games went 16 innings) they scored 7 runs. In their last 8 games they've scored 17 runs, 6 of them in a Sunday win over Washington. They aren't getting many runners on, and when they do they're making mistakes such as this one.

The Phils are lucky that they didn't lose even more ground in the standings; Atlanta suffered a 3-game sweep at Colorado, so the Phils are 3 games back in the NL East. San Francisco is now a half-game ahead of the Phils in the NL Wild Card race. What is a bit more important is that they allowed the Rockies and LA Dodgers to gain some ground and hope, which make the Phils' upcoming road trip even more difficult. They have 3 at San Diego (they're up by 6 in the NL West and have great pitching), then 3 in LA and a makeup game at Denver. This is a bad time to be in a slump.