Rich Hofmann: Phillies get to write a new chapter in their history

LOS ANGELES - The clock read 8:37 on the big scoreboard above the rightfield pavilion. Historians will note that it had been a warm evening. Tension and frustration, the products of portent, were evident all night in the stands, on the field, all around the place they call Chavez Ravine. But the air was oddly still.

The final out went like this: Nomar Garciaparra, popping up foul to catcher Carlos Ruiz. He was standing on the painted NLCS 2008 logo along the third-base line when he squeezed the ball. And with that, the Phillies are going to the World Series. It is a simple sentence that masks so many emotions, that cannot come close to untangling 15 years of frustrating tangents. Yet there is beauty in the simplicity.

The Phillies are going to the World Series.

For the first time since 1993, since Macho Row and Schill and Mitchie-poo, the Phillies will play on baseball's biggest stage. Fifteen years. The emotions touched off a continent away, in some ways, will exceed those that erupted on the perfect green infield of Dodger Stadium - which is hard to believe, but true. That is how much this means, both the accomplishment and the promise of what lies ahead.

"It will be absolutely madness from a Philadelphia standpoint," said Cole Hamels, so young, so good, the starter and winner last night in the Phillies' 5-1 victory over the Dodgers.

"The excitement, the energy level, it'll be something," he said. "Philly has missed this. I'm so happy to be a part of this. To get back to the World Series, they deserve it."

It is so odd, clinching on the road. What you see is an isolated celebratory mob, a silent storm. That is what it was - these great, leaping, back-patting red-and-gray amoeba, two jumping circles of Phillies players, then joining into one.

In the dugout, manager Charlie Manuel and his coaches shook hands and embraced. Then Manuel bounded out of the dugout like a 64-year-old kid, looking for someone to hug. The first guy he found happened to be centerfielder Shane Victorino. Manuel would get on a plane later and fly home to Virginia to bury his mother, who died last Friday. Victorino's family has decided to wait until the World Series is over to bury his grandmother, who died the same day.

Manuel said, "I guarantee my mom's watching right now."

It has been such an emotional journey, for those two especially, but for all of them. And then there was - what was Hamels' word? - madness. It was the perfect word.

"This is huge, and I can only imagine what's happening at home," first baseman Ryan Howard said, before he and his teammates all bounded out of the clubhouse to return to the field and greet their families and hundreds of chanting Phillies fans crowded behind their dugout.

Their favorite chant: "Four more wins . . . four more wins . . . "

The clock read 8:44 when Bill Giles arrived at the makeshift clubhouse podium with the trophy that bears his father's name. Giles is the Phillies, for better or worse - the man who in 1981 put together the group that owns the team today; the man who led them through great times and then into a wilderness created by the sport's cockeyed economic system.

He was a visionary, in many painful ways. He was the man who first set foot into Baltimore's Camden Yards in the early 1990s and announced to everyone who would listen that the Phillies had a problem that only a new ballpark could fix. It was years and years later before that certain truth became a reality, and he would be shunted aside as the managing general partner in the interim. But here we all finally are.

"This is the result of building that ballpark," Giles said. "And to be able to hand the trophy to the guy [David Montgomery] I hired to run the club, to see how he has grown, to see how hard they played, to know how much this means to the people at home, it's unbelievable."

The Warren C. Giles Trophy isn't bad-looking as big, ugly sports trophies go. It goes to the National League champion. For years and years, Warren was the president of the NL. These days, Bill is honorary president of the NL, a league that exists now only on paper. Bill's main function is to hand the trophy to the winner of the NLCS.

The clock read 8:47 when Giles handed the trophy to Montgomery, his protégé. Across the country in Philadelphia, it was 13 minutes from a new day that had already just began. *

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