“That’s about as hard as I’ve been through,” Phillies manager Joe Girardi said last night, following a brutal 8-7 loss at the hands of the Mets. “We played a really good eight innings, and it was just the top of the ninth that beat us.”
It’s hard to tell why exactly Girardi chose to mention those eight good innings. A baseball game is nine innings long, after all. One way to hear it is that Girardi mentioned the eight good innings as an explanation for why this particular loss was so awful.