Phillies Win NLCS Opener With Less Awful Starting Pitching

“Winning with three-run homers” is a baseball bromide that describes a certain type of offensive philosophy, but it made the leap to reality in Thursday night’s National League Championship Series game, as the Philadelphia Phillies rode a pair of (yes) three-run homers to an 8-6 win and 1-0 series lead over the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Dodgers starter Clayton Kershaw gave up five runs and threw three wild pitches in the fifth inning.

Dodgers’ starter Clayton Kershaw struggled mightily, allowing five earned runs and not making it out of the fifth inning after looking solid over the first four frames. “At some point in the fifth inning, Kershaw went from a dominating pitcher to a clueless one,” ESPN’s Jorge Arangure Jr. writes. “At some point, Kershaw lost his release point and couldn’t find the strike zone. At some point, Kershaw lost the game.”

Kershaw’s troubles ensured that he wouldn’t end up with the win, though Philadelphia starter Cole Hamels was not terribly effective himself on Thursday night. While the postseason-dominating 2008 edition of Hamels has been missing in action all year, Cliff Lee has stepped in as Philadelphia’s unhittable postseason master-ace. “It remains to be seen if Lee can continue replicating Hamels’ phenomenal ‘08 playoffs,” Yahoo’s Alex Remington writes. “With the actual Hamels being a member of the same rotation and providing support, Lee probably won’t have to completely nail the role. Of course, no one in Philadelphia would complain if he did.” The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Phil Sheridan worries about Hamels’s struggles all the same.

The New York Yankees and Los Angeles Angels begin their American League Championship Series on Friday night at what promises to be a cold, damp and generally unpleasant Yankee Stadium. There was a whiff of implacable inevitability about the Yankees during their sweep of Minnesota in the ALDS, but that’s nothing new for them. What is new is that this year’s Yankees seem to be enjoying themselves somewhat. By the unscientific metric fans and sportswriters use to gauge happiness — a measurement scale that incorporates counts of postgame shaving-cream pies to the face — these Yankees are both looser and much more successful than in recent years.

In the Journal, Matthew Futterman and Austin Kelley address this particular chicken-and-egg debate. “These Yankees seem eerily comfortable with their lot,” Futterman and Kelley write. “[Which] leads to an inevitable question: Are the Yankees playing better baseball because they’ve loosened up? And is looseness the key to success?”

In the Orange County Register, Mark Whicker adds the roster’s youth and (very relative) leanness to “just having fun out there” in sussing out why the Yankees look so tough to beat. In the Los Angeles Times, Mike DiGiovanna reports that the Angels refuse to be intimidated by any of the Yankees’ newly shaving cream-streaked mystique. Elsewhere in the L.A. Times, Ross Newhan delivers a wonderfully colorful history lesson on the Angels’ hellish early days in Los Angeles.

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The Red River Rivalry between the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma has emerged as one of the most eagerly anticipated games in college football. While both teams still feature superstar, Heisman-contender quarterbacks, a pair of tough-luck Oklahoma losses due in part to the injury-dictated absence of quarterback Sam Bradford has reduced the team to a spoiler role in this year’s BCS race. A win on Saturday could spoil Texas’s bid for a berth in the closest thing major college football has to a national-championship game, which significantly raises the significance of what already promised to be a hard-fought game.

In Sports Illustrated, George Schroeder explains the stakes in this year’s face-off. At Fox Sports, Jeffrey Martin ponders the possibility that this year’s game has lost some of its excitement, while the Daily Oklahoman’s David Ubben suggests that the hangover from last year’s complicated Big 12 tiebreaker — which sent Oklahoma to the Big 12 Championship Game and, eventually, the BCS championship game despite the Sooners’ loss to Texas in last year’s installment of the Red River Rivalry — injects plenty of tension to this year’s match-up.

While it’s unlikely to have national-championship implications, this Saturday’s game between Notre Dame and USC has a make-or-break feel for the Fighting Irish, who are trying to prove themselves after a couple of rough seasons. It’s also a rematch of what has been the most memorable “win” of Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis’ career at Notre Dame — an instant-classic 34-31 loss to USC back in 2005. “Saturday’s latest meeting with USC is a reminder that there still isn’t a signature win five years into Weis’ stay in South Bend,” Dennis Dodd writes at CBS Sports. “That’s why Notre Dame has to beat No. 6 USC. Not just so players don’t settle for big victories in the middle of the Pacific. Not for whatever ill-defined job security there might be hanging out there for Weis, but because Notre Dame has to take the next step toward becoming itself again.”

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Even those of us who didn’t spend our childhood Saturdays watching professional wrestling probably knew and liked Captain Lou Albano. In your Fixer’s case, that was at least in part because Albano’s brother, Carl, was my health and driver’s-ed teacher in high school, but it also derived from the goofily menacing Albano’s genial and constant cultural presence during the early 1980s — as the man who gave the world Cyndi Lauper, in a memorable supporting role in Brian DePalma’s justly forgotten gangster caper “Wise Guys” and the star of the syndicated kids program “The Super Mario Bros. Super Show,” but mostly as one of the defining stars of pro wrestling’s 1980s renaissance. Albano passed away on Wednesday at the age of 76.

Albano began his career in the ring and played both heel and hero during his wrestling career, but he made his name as a “manager,” the designated promo-cutters who are the character actors of the wrestling world. “It was standing at ringside that Albano made his biggest mark,” Newsday’s Alfonso A. Castillo writes. “As the mouthpiece for some of wrestling’s most ruthless villains, including ‘The Russian Bear’ Ivan Koloff and the Wild Samoans, Albano discovered his gift — talking trash.”

At the Baltimore Sun’s terrific “Ring Posts” blog Kevin Eck provides an impressively comprehensive appreciation of Albano. “Even though he was nowhere near as clever or smooth on the mic as managers such as Bobby Heenan or Jim Cornette, Albano cut highly entertaining promos,” Eck remembers. “He would yell and scream and what he said usually was nonsensical. He also used the same phrases over and over, such as saying that if you put (insert babyface here)’s brain into a parakeet it would fly backward. As much as you hated him, you had to laugh at Albano’s antics.”

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Whatever happens over the rest of 2009’s postseason, it’s highly unlikely that the World Series will wind up with a more unlikely Most Valuable Player than the 1969 series, which wrapped up 40 years ago on Friday. The MVP of that series was Al Weis, a light-hitting second baseman whose career stats exemplify the expression “good field/no hit.” A .219 hitter over the course of his career, Weis batted .455 in that series, and hit a game-tying homer in Game 5 that wound up as one of just eight roundtrippers in 1,780 big-league plate appearances. In Newsday, Mark Herrmann catches up with Weis, now 71, to reminisce on his implausibly magical series.

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