Scott Rolen In A Gay Bar*

Harry and me in 2003

On my flight out to San Francisco on the 13th I finally finished reading "Harry the K: The Remarkable Life of Harry Kalas," by Randy Miller. It's a must-read for Phillies fans, Philadelphia sports fans, baseball fans in general, fans of Kalas' work for NFL Films, or anyone interested in a fascinating biography. Miller's book is not a fluff piece. He spares no details in telling the life story of the late Phillies broadcaster. Harry was a drinker, although he never let it interfere with his work. And he was a womanizer. He was living with, and had a son with, the woman who eventually became his second wife years before his divorce from his first wife became final. He cheated on both wives for some time. Yet, for all his flaws, he was beloved by his family and friends, not to mention Phillies fans.

But that's not why you're reading this, are you? You read that headline and want the dirt, you naughty little minx. Well, you may have guessed that the following tale comes from Miller's book.

The team traveled to Pittsburgh for a series in June 2001. The night before the series was to begin, a group of Phillies personnel was at the hotel bar, including Kalas, fellow broadcasters Larry Andersen and Scott Graham, and third baseman Rolen (who eventually moved on, of course) and his fiancee. At 1 a.m. the bartender announced that it was last call -- early for Pennsylvania, since the bars are allowed to stay open until 2. The group, except for Graham, wasn't ready to call it a night.

So the bartender directed them to a nearby block where bars were still open:

Hating The Phils -- On TV, That Is

Way back in that magical year of 2008 I did a series of posts on the Outsports Jock Talk Blog in which I reviewed a game broadcast of every major league team (thanks to my subscription to the MLB Extra Innings package that year) as well as nationally televised games on ESPN, TBS and Fox. A summary of my grades for every broadcast can be found here. For the Phillies, I assigned a C-plus grade to the Comcast Sportsnet broadcast of a Phils-Nationals game. One key quote from my writeup: "It’s impossible to imagine a Phillies broadcast without Harry Kalas. It’s unfortunate that the Phillies haven’t built a better broadcast around him."

Sadly, the "impossible to imagine" became the norm in April 2009 when Harry Kalas died. Since then, Tom McCarthy has exclusively done TV play-by-play. Chris Wheeler (1st-3rd innings, 7th inning on) and Gary "Sarge" Matthews (4th-6th innings) handle the "analysis." And the broadcasts have, of course, suffered. McCarthy continues to talk and talk and talk, especially rambling during his innings with Sarge. Matthews still hasn't met a cliche he doesn't like. Wheeler, unpopular as ever, now is even getting on my nerves at times.

Back To The Drawing Board

Here's something that amused me while reading my Twitter feed and watching the Phillies game tonight. Schmaps & Schnaps has a workable idea: authorize it to link to your Twitter account and it can add a map to your tweets showing the location of your business, event, etc. They have Twitter accounts such as this that retweet posts, presumably at random, and add their "schmap" to it in order to promote their service. Here's one such example:

When you click on the link they add, you get this:

Cool, right? Well, sometimes their retweets are a little...off...I happened to click on one of these posts, the one below, and found this:

The tweet in question is referring to the Phillies' radio broadcast. "LA" is Larry Andersen, and "Schneider" is Phillies' catcher Brian Schneider. How this information was extrapolated and turned into a map showing the location of Lawrence H. Schneider, MD, is a mystery. So it seems that if you're in control of when to add the "schmap" it's fine. If it's added to every one of your tweets automatically? Not so fine.