philadelphia phillies

PHILADELPHIA, United States (AFP) ― The Philadelphia Phillies clinched their first National League East title since 1993 with a victory over Washington on Sunday as the New York Mets completed a monumental collapse.

Jamie Moyer tossed 5 1/3 effective innings and Ryan Howard homered and drove in three runs as the Phillies defeated the Nationals 6-1 in their regular season finale.

The triumph, coupled with the Mets' 8-1 loss to the Florida Marlins, gave the Phillies their first NL East division title since their NL pennant-winning season in 1993.

The Mets' fate was sealed when starter Tom Glavine could not get out of the first inning.

Cody Ross and Dan Uggla both had a two-run double in the opening frame as the Marlins tagged Glavine for seven runs.

The Mets lost for the 12th time in 17 games, completing one of the most colossal collapses in major league history.

The Mets held a seven-game lead with 17 games left on September 12. No team with that big a lead with as many games left failed to finish in first place. New York also lost nine of its last 10 home games.

In Philadelphia, Jimmy Rollins continued to be an offensive catalyst with two runs scored and a triple - his 20th of the season for the Phillies, who celebrated around the pitcher's mound after Brett Myers struck out Wily Mo Pena looking for the final out.

Myers tossed his glove skyward and players, coaches and manager Charlie Manuel were all soon gathered around the mound area.

The turning point in the contest came in the sixth inning with Philadelphia clinging to a 3-1 lead. Moyer left the game with runners on first and second and one out for Tom Gordon, who got Austin Kearns to ground into an inning-ending double play. The Phillies then tacked on two runs in their half of the frame when Tadahito Iguchi had a pinch-hit sacrifice fly and Rollins hit his RBI triple to make it 5-1 Philadelphia.

Moyer, from the Philadelphia suburb of Soderton, allowed only one run - unearned - on five hits with no walks and six strikeouts.

Howard added his 47th home run, a solo shot reaching the second deck, in the seventh inning. Before the first pitch was even thrown, the sellout crowd of 44,865 was stoked to a fever pitch as Florida's seven-run first inning against the Mets was posted on the scoreboard.

With the Cubs assured of the NL Central title and the Arizona Diamondbacks of the NL West crown, the end of the regular season on Sunday still couldn't bring a close to the race for the NL wild card.

The San Diego Padres could have claimed it with a victory, but fell 11-6 to Milwaukee to open the door to the Colorado Rockies, who forced a Monday playoff game for the final NL berth with a 4-3 victory over the Diamondbacks.
PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 30 ― They have been baseball's biggest tease in this decade, good enough to contend but not quite good enough to win. Somehow, to the fans here, it seemed even crueler than all those hopeless seasons, when the Philadelphia Phillies never had a chance. Their loyalty was being stretched, if not mocked, by the illusion of a winner.

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Schedule/Results Individual Stats | Team History Times Topics: The Mets Now, for the first time in 14 years, the Phillies will be playing in the postseason. The franchise that defined collapse in 1964 completed an historic comeback on Sunday by beating the Washington Nationals, 6-1, while the Mets bungled away their season 90 miles to the north.

Seven games out with 17 to play, the Phillies went 13-4 down the stretch to clinch the National League East title before 44,865 towel-waving believers at Citizens Bank Park. A season that included the 10,000th loss in franchise history has turned out to be special.

Just as Jamie Moyer was preparing to throw the first pitch on Sunday, a sudden, piercing yelp went up from the crowd. The out-of-town scoreboard in right field had been updated to show a friendly bulletin: FLA 7, NYM 0.

Moyer started the day with a strike, and he did not allow an earned run over five and a third innings. Tom Gordon, J. C. Romero and Brett Myers closed down the victory, which included two runs scored, two stolen bases and two hits by Jimmy Rollins, who predicted the Phillies would be champions all along.

With the Mets' game over, Myers worked the ninth inning with the fans on their feet. He struck out Dmitri Young, retired Austin Kearns on a fly to left and froze Wily Mo Pe?a with a third-strike breaking ball to clinch the division.

Myers flung his glove to the sky ― the way the Mets' Jesse Orosco did at the end of the 1986 World Series ― and the Phillies joyously swarmed him at the mound.

The victory had special resonance for Moyer, who was a senior at Souderton Area High School, in the Montgomery County suburbs, when the Phillies won the 1980 World Series. He cut school to attend the victory parade down Broad Street.

Now he is 44, a father of seven who wears old-fashioned stirrups with the liberty bell on the side. Fifteen years ago, already a journeyman, he was offered a minor league coaching job but decided to keep pitching. At this rate, he might never stop.

Yet the 1980 parade remains as close as Moyer has gotten to the World Series. He spent a decade in Seattle, missing one postseason when a batted ball broke his kneecap in a pre-playoff workout.

In 2001, Moyer won all three starts he made over two playoff rounds, yet the Mariners won only one other game. Now, after allowing one unearned run over five and a third innings, he has another chance at the postseason, where the Phillies have not been in the wild card era.

Their last appearance was in 1993, the season that ended with a Mitch Williams slide-step and a Joe Carter home run in Toronto. Lean years followed, but the Phillies quietly built a strong farm system that has produced Cole Hamels, Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley ― the guts of the current team.

Only the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox have a longer active streak of winning seasons than the Phillies. But it took until the final day of the fifth consecutive winning season for the team to reach the playoffs.

The city, maniacal about the Eagles but forever skeptical about the Phillies, has responded. It was symbolic, in a way, that the Phillies clinched on a Sunday afternoon with the Eagles playing at night. They had the undivided attention of their town.

The team drew 3,108,325 fans to its four-year-old park this season, selling out 24 times. After Friday's victory, which lifted the Phillies into first place for a day, there was hardly any room for the Nationals' bus to move.

"It was a zoo," said Tim Redding, the losing pitcher that night. "Everybody was honking their horns, waving towels. You get 44,000 people drunk and hollering, and you've got to party somewhere."

It was different after Saturday's game, Redding said, whisper-quiet with no revelry in the streets. The Phillies knew all game that the Mets had whipped the Marlins, and they lost, 4-2, making errors and failing to sustain any rallies.

There was disturbing symbolism, too, for the most fatalistic of Phillies fans. The winning pitcher on Saturday was Matt Chico, and Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz made a pivotal error. Chico Ruiz, Phillies fans know, was the Cincinnati runner who stole home in 1964 to send the Phillies on a 10-game, pennant-losing spiral.

But that was long ago ― within Moyer's lifetime, naturally, but no one else's on the team. These Phillies are striving to make their own imprint, and they have followed the lead of Rollins, who has backed up his spring assertion that the Phillies, not the Mets, were the team to beat in the East.

Rollins, who heard "M.V.P." chants whenever he hit, led off the game with a single. The Phillies have the best success rate on stolen base attempts in major league history ― better than 87 percent ― and Rollins swiped second and third. He scored on a sacrifice fly by Utley.

While Moyer baffled the Nationals with his changeups, curves and 80 mile-an-hour fastballs, the Phillies added to their lead against Jason Bergmann. They loaded the bases with two outs in the third inning for Howard, who drove a liner to right. Second baseman Ronnie Belliard was playing in shallow right for just such a hit, but the ball landed over his head for a single, scoring two runs.

The fans had been in a frenzy all game, and they stood and waved their white giveaway towels. During the seventh-inning stretch, the scoreboard showed a fan holding a sign that said, "Hey Tug, We Believe!"

With that, it seemed, the Phillies had officially seized all things Mets. Tug McGraw, the chest-patting, plucky closer, first belonged to the Mets, and then to the Phillies. The N.L. East, likewise, was first the Mets' and now belongs to the Phillies.