Carter, Richards and the Orange and Black oasis of LA

by Bob Herpen
Phanatic Hockey Editor

Now that Jeff Carter and Mike Richards have been reunited after a long, torturous eight months apart, the NHL's most passionate Bromance is free to continue.

In a serious understatement, Carter said this upon the revelation of the deal: "I am obviously excited. I am familiar with the team and a lot of guys on the team."

And how.

It's hard not to notice what's going on out in Los Angeles. It's as if the Kings are an incubator, or dare I say it, a rehab space, for former Philadelphia Flyers.

Though Serenity Knolls it's not -- and despite the fact that stories of the Terror Twins tearing through Olde City are legion -- it's becoming very obvious that the future of the Crowned Ones is hitched to Eastern stars.

With the addition of Carter from Columbus on Thursday night, that brings the total number of former Philadelphia players on the roster to four (Simon Gagne and Justin Williams are the others). Add to that, former head coach and assistant Terry Murray and John Stevens presided over the club at the start of the season, and that LA's assistant GM is none other than Ron Hextall and its general manager is former scout Dean Lombardi, and no wonder it's being called Philadelphia West.

So what if this is no accident? What if it really is meant to be that so many ex-Flyers wind up on the Left Coast? And what if this is just a pit stop for the one-time babyfaced assassins who roamed the ice, the bars and frat parties "back home?"

The New York Yankees wouldn't have been as good as they were in the late 1950s and early 1960's if the franchise hadn't struck an "agreement" with the Kansas City Athletics. The skids were greased because then-Yanks owner Dan Topping persuaded friend Arnold Johnson to buy the A's from Connie Mack and relocate to Western Missouri in 1954.

Over the next six seasons, a suspicious number of players saw "playing time" in Kansas City before being called back to the big leagues: Bob Cerv, Clete Boyer, Billy Martin, Ralph Terry, Hank Bauer and the most famous of all in the pipeline, Roger Maris.

The Flyers are notorious for finding willing trade partners whose influence will not affect the club's playoff hopes in the East. Phoenix and Nashville had gained Most Favored status in recent years, up until a virtual Breakaway Republic gravitated away from Philadelphia and out to Southern California.

Now, with the sweet set-up in Los Angeles, the possibility of being burned through trade has been eliminated. There's a ready-made feeder system in place. And two new projects have popped up on the radar.

“He made a long-term commitment to Philadelphia," said Jackets GM Scott Howson. "It was hard for him to deal with the trade [from Philadelphia to Columbus]."

Given that obvious fact, it's hard not to think of the former 2003 draft picks as waiting to be molded back into the kind of players (and for that matter, men) who will be ready to return to the Flyers with more seasoning and maturity.

They're in the best possible environment now, far away from the passionate but fickle fans and the intrusive media here, under the wing of simpatico front office personnel. It's an audition as much as it is a convalescence. What happens from now on is up to them, and any distractions and blame can't be directed anywhere but on their own heads.

With any luck, in four or five years, sometime close to the end of their original decade-long contracts Paul Holmgren awarded them, Carter and Richards will ride back out of the sunset. It'll be a fiery orange ball of glory directed to the Quaker City. And, sufficiently chastened, they'll be able to capture the magic of the 2010 playoff run on a more consistent basis.

The waiting is always the hardest part.

Pay No Attention to the White Elephant in the Room

by Bob Herpen
The Phanatic Magazine

In this day and age where the internet constantly keeps traditional print and visual media locked in a battle for respect and integrity, you can pretty much do anything you want online and people will follow.

Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should, and that is a concept lost not only on the internet, but in a society which eagerly awaits and consumes constant and rapid advances in technology on a pace the Tasmanian Devil would be hard pressed to maintain.

Such is the case with Philadelphian J.T. Ramsay, who's apparently got a nice thing going with his new Facebook page, "Bring Your A's Game." As of now, it is 574 people strong and growing by the day.

This is completely mystifying.  We already have a baseball team, remember? 10,000 losses? Boo? F*** You? WFC? Two-time defending NL Champs? Hellooo??

Or maybe not. Facebook is notorious for giving any user the chance to create his or her own little group, based on a million little likes, dislikes or grievances not normally given voice through ordinary means. So, it's not surprising that there's a group out there that gives voice to the idea that the financially-strapped A's should return home and take up the mantle of the stately Athletics.

What is surprising is that Ramsay, and no doubt a percentage of his followers on the page, actually think this is a good idea or a viable economic reality to have a baseball team representing the city in each league.

Excerpts from his recent interview with Comcast blog "The700Level.com" reveals the method behind his madness:

"I'm trying to bring the A's back to their rightful home, here in the City of Brotherly Love. It sounds crazy at first, but then when you hear what's going on with the A's franchise, it's not that farfetched. Oakland can't afford to keep them and San Jose can't afford to move them...

I can think of a half-dozen other cities which might be able to support a baseball team in North America outside of the financial disaster that is California and before you arrive in the financial disaster that is Philadelphia.

In no particular order: Vancouver, Montreal, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Portland and Buffalo come to mind - and with the exception of the second city on the list, none had previously hosted a professional baseball club but whose markets aleady host at least one team in one of the Big Four leagues and are hardly stagnant in terms of population growth.

Portland even had talk of funding a domed stadium and had those joke MLB symbols drawn up with the batter holding an umbrella, when it looked like the Expos would leave Canada in 2002.

When I think about how few people saw Braden's perfecto in person, I want to weep. The overflow crowd from Citizen's Bank Park on Mother's Day would've been bigger than the 12,000 paid in Oakland that day...

You're telling me that on a national holiday - a holiday dedicated to what can be argued as the day devoted to the most devoted parent - a new team like the Athletics could have drawn more than 12,000 people? On a day which also happened to feature a sell-out at the ballpark of the current Philadelphia baseball team with the rival Braves in town?

Boy, J.T. you must have some hot new insight that most of us aren't tuned into, that a lot more Moms would have agreed to be dragged to a stadium to sit in the hot sun for 3 hours instead of being waited on hand and foot by her family with a nice lunch or dinner that she doesn't have to cook or pay for.

I want to weep at the way I've just destroyed your hyperbole.

As far as allegiance goes, I don't think anything would have to change, really. Philadelphians could have an AL and an NL team. It'd be another opportunity to root against the Yankees and Red Sox. Who doesn't want that?"

As with the complex set of guidelines set forth in the movie "Wedding Crashers," I don't know all the regulations that govern pro fandom by heart, but I can recall the first Five Commandments:

I.    Thou shalt root for thy hometown team.
II.   Thou shalt root against thy hometown team's enemies.
III. Thou shalt never split loyalties.
IV. The friend of my team's enemy is my enemy; the enemy of my team's enemy is my friend.
V.  Thou shalt invest in as much gear as possible for thy hometown team.

Though shoehorning another team here wouldn't by definition cause a problem with One and Two, Ramsay's idea clearly violates the Third if he, or anybody for that matter, thinks if the A's come back to Philly it will be OK to root for both at the same time.

Nonetheless, there is bound to be some dark corner of your mind prodding you to put together the A's nine World Serieses and the Phillies two, so that you might be tempted to feel real good about yourself as a Philly baseball fan...

Still, given the transitional nature of a certain part of the population who are college students or young professionals from out of the area who stay after school, there are enough baseball fans around where we frankly don't need another reason to hate the Yankees or Red Sox. Interleague and World Series play is enough. Anyone who knows a New Yorker or member of Red Sox nation in this town knows what I'm sayin'.

When the A's left for Kansas City in 1954, Philadelphia was a bustling industrial powerhouse with well over two million residents. More than a half-century later, mostly due to suburban expansion, it is down 1.475 million. The city has dropped from fourth in the nation to sixth in total population.  Unlike New York or Chicago, the split between A's and Phillies didn't run along neighborhood or sectional lines - it was split in general around class.

That is still a touchy subject, so you can see how I'd give this guy the hairy eyeball when he comes up with a gem like this:

"I love Philadelphia and baseball so much that I think we'd be a great home for the A's. They're the kind of working class heroes Philly loves..."

That assertion flies in the face of history and...you know those pesky things truth is made of...facts.

In my own family, my great aunts and uncles on my father's side were middle-class business people and therefore could afford to be fans of the Athletics. The aunts often attended Ladies' Day games at Shibe Park. My mother's father, on the other hand, hit hard by the Depression, became a Phillies fan because it only cost him a nickel to watch through a knothole in the outfield at Baker Bowl. This was the way it was, I was told.

The American League club was for those who were of better means. Everyone else converted to the Phils by default when the A's left for Kansas City. I'm sure there are countless other stories like this throughout the Delaware Valley that are disappearing with our grandparents' generation. They need to be told if only to smack some sense into this growing effort.

Given the checkerboard nature of Philly's neighborhoods, if the old ways hold in this hypothetical return, I can't see anything good coming from disparate areas like the Main Line, Haddonfield, Chestnut Hill, Media, Northern Liberties and Wynnefield supporting one club while South Philly, Roxborough, Secane, Gloucester City, and the Northeast claim another.

But seriously, who ever goes to the internet or Facebook to think? It's too much of a tough concept. It's easier just to click a button and sign up, and, in the case of a group administrator, to get wild ideas of legitimacy when a couple hundred people take two seconds of their lives to click the "Like" tab.

Oops, I was wrong...now it's 576.

So this is what passes for legitimate, and this is what gets you some sizeable recognition and publicity these days? Hmmm...I knew I should have worked harder when I put out my Facebook "John Stevens Must Go" page two Summers ago and got only 13 people to join. Turns out I was a mere 287 "likes" away from a guest shot on Daily News Live.

The A's are not coming here. The A's will have no shot to ever come back. We are a Phillies town, and even when the winning and playoff appearances wane, we still are a Phillies town. They didn't leave, and they've been here since 1883. Win or lose, the people in this city respect staying power. There's no harm in lending your blind support to a bit of make-believe, but it's a potential hornets nest to mistake an idea that's no more than imaginative talk over a few beers for substantive reality.

I wish J.T. Ramsay the best of luck with his endeavor, but I also wish clarity for he and his followers who take this all a bit too seriously.

If not, I can forward them my soon-to-be released book, "The 50 Do's and 500 Don'ts of Pro Fandom." Facebook page pending.