MLB Baseball Betting - Phillies Win World Series!– Looking Back and Looking Ahead

Yes, I will eat crow right now, because I thought Tampa Bay would win the Series in six games. But let's face it - you can't do very much when your power hitters like Carlos Pena (.118 with two hits) or Evan Longoria (.050, nine strikeouts) aren't producing. Nor can you do very much when you can't keep Ryan Howard (3 HR, 6 RBI) in the ballpark.

The thing about Philadelphia is that at no time did I ever really look upon this team as the best in baseball. Oh, I believe you could have said that about the Rockies or Tigers at the season's outset, if you were very optimistic, although their hopes were dashed rather early.

The Red Sox seemed a safe choice, but we also speculated about the Yankees, observed Arizona's sizzling start with great optimism, recognized the dominance of the L.A. Angels in the AL West, saw what the White Sox were doing to the AL Central (at least for a while). Then there were the Cubs, who looked like the most balanced team in the game, and a solid favorite in the minds of many to end their long drought. And remember when the Mets were coming on like a freight train at one point? When Tampa Bay looked as if it were succeeding in continually beating back the challenge of the Red Sox, some of us anointed the Rays as the "chosen ones."

But the Phillies?

I didn't look at it quite that way. Sure, I felt the Mets would fizzle out, and at the end of the day the Florida Marlins, who hung tough for a while with their powerful lineup, wouldn't have enough pitching. Philadelphia seemed like a logical choice in the NL East. But I couldn't envision them rolling through the playoffs like they did.

Cole Hamels was great, and I know this team has trotted out the likes of Jimmie Rollins, Howard and Chase Utley in recent years (Utley got a lot of MVP buzz early, and Howard, with his 48-homer, 146-RBI season, deserved consideration), but Brad Lidge is the MVP of the National League. Lidge, who saved 41 games in 41 tries during the regular season, and was seven-for-seven in that capacity in the playoffs, was virtually unhittable from the start. Teams batted just .198 against him. He gave up only 13 extra base hits, facing 253 hitters. Teams SLUGGED just .269 against him.

He took what I thought was relatively shaky rotation beyond Hamels (and perhaps the aging Jamie Moyer) and plugged the gap that made it a winner.

Tampa Bay is most certainly, in my opinion, a team of the future. No team with that much pitching (and more on the way) is going away that easily. Anyone who was looking upon this World Series appearance as a fluke was not paying attention to the emergence of the likes of Andy Sonnanstine and Matt Garza as viable major league starters, to go along with Scott Kazmir, who was already an All-Star (and indeed the AL's strikeout leader last season) and James Shields, who is going to be an outstanding pitcher for years to come. And when you add David Price to that mix (undoubtedly as a member of that rotation), you are looking at a quintet that is going to rival anything in baseball. Let's not forget about Edwin Jackson and Jeff Niemann, the 6'9" right-hander who was a first-round draft pick out of Rice (Price was from Vanderbilt - hey, these guys must be bright too).