This little girl sitting in front of me was among the fans at a 'sold-out' CBP for Friday's celebration, the culmination of the parade down Broad Street. She looked to be about five but, like all of the fans in attendance, waited patiently till the team made it to the park. Here she's waving her towel and World Series teddy as postseason highlights are being shown on the big screen. About 10 minutes before the Phillies made their way into the park, everyone stood and started cheering. We in the lower bowl never sat down again. Luckily, the little girl had her father there to hold her up.It was Halloween and it was a school day, but there were tons of kids from tots to teens in attendance at the ceremony and parade. Why not? It was a day to remember. Though most of us waited for five or six hours, it was a placid, happy crowd. The Phillies first stopped across the street at Lincoln Financial Field, home of the football Eagles, to greet the overflow of some 60,000 fans there, then headed for the park. I've just been watching a TV replay of the ceremony (with Chase Utley's comment totally edited out---BOO!) and was touched to see that several players--Jamie Moyer, Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins--teared up when speaking.
Stuck for hours in traffic on the way home that evening, I heard one of the dopey hosts on sports talk radio say with some wonder that the Phillies have a lot of female fans. It took him this long to notice? Sheesh. And it's not all because they're a pretty sexy group of dudes. The Saturday Inky had a cute little piece about a 77-year-old Turkish woman whose daughter and son-in-law live in the Lehigh Valley. Four years ago on a visit, the woman went to her first baseball game and fell in love with the Phillies. Since then she has followed them as best she can. Here this month on a visit, she was supposed to return to Ankara last Wednesday but refused to go. No way was she going to miss the World Series. She told her daughter she was sure the Phillies would win and even, according to an old superstition, turned her slippers upside down so that the other team would have bad luck. She was of course at the parade on Friday.
