The winners of the Internet Baseball Awards — essentially the MVP, Cy Young, Rookie and Manger of the Year awards as chosen by stathead fans — were announced of the last two days.

More than 1,200 ballots were cast in this year’s installment. The hometown nine  fared well in the National League though, much like this year’s post-season, nobody took home any hardware:

MVP:

Chase Utley and Ryan Howard finished 4th and 10th respectively in the MVP voting.
Jayson Werth (20),  Raul Ibanez (24) and Cliff Lee (28) also made showings

Cy Young:

Cliff Lee finished 9th in the balloting, which is not bad considering he put in less than a half season of work in the red pinstripes. J.A. Happ placed 16th with Cole Hamels clocking in at 19th.

Rookie of the Year:

This was a nailbiter, as J.A. Happ finished 2nd to the Braves’ Tommy Hanson in a photo finish. Happ racked up 5,473 points to Hanson’s 5,487. To my knowledge, no other Phils rookies received votes.

Manager of the Year:

Charlie Manuel finished 4th, behind Jim Tracy (whose miraculous reversal of the Rockies season was deserving of praise even if his handling of the NLDS was not), Joe Torre (who’s kind of coasting on reputation at this point) and Tony LaRussa (see Joe Torre).

Jim Horwat

Click image to see full print.

Jim Horwat, our favorite Phillies-loving, smile-crazy illustrator — the man behind last year’s championship-celebrating tribute/collage — is back with a 2009 print featuring all the stars of this year’s run and Brad Lidge and Eric Bruntlett. Oh, and it’s also got HK and the Phanatic done up like some kind of Mayan priest.

This year’s print is full color and available in a signed and numbered first edition on Horwat’s web site. Do some early x-mas shopping and maybe buy the Phils a little karma tonight.

Courtesy of Laurel Hill/West Laurel Cemetery

Here’s an official MLB urn from the West Laurel Hill Cemetery, although it’s sold at other funeral homes as well. For $650, you can spend eternity with the Phillies, purchased from the final resting place of early Phillies owner Alfred James Reach, Ben Shibe (who created the two-piece cover baseball), his sons Thom and John who helped Connie Mack out with the A’s and, of course, HK.

Hoodie | Birdland/The Fightins

Beat NY: What they can’t buy, we’re gonna take

Running a little behind on this, but tell us who’s gonna win the World Series and how:

Yesterday our own contributing sports editor  E. James Beale sat down with Daily News sports editor Josh Barnett on Marty Moss-Coane’s Radio Times to talk about the World Series. Listen below.

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As if one Phillies song - last week’s blast from NeeKo, “Ill State of Mind” - wasn’t enough, here’s one that’s one that’s a little more sporty: “Unstoppable” from Guerilladelphia.

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Guerilladelphia, made up of Don McCloskey, Chuck Treece (Bad Brains, McRad) and Tom Spiker (Kellis) came into effect after McCloskey watched the Phils beat the Colorado Rockies in the first round of the playoffs, then called Treece and Spiker to record what he’d written.

And then the real work began.

• Like phone calls to out-of-town Philadelphia natives G. Love and Kufie (in Boston at the time, they added vocal and harmonica  tracks).
• Getting Jay Davidson, Larry Toft and Patrick Hughes to add horn parts
• Playing a raw demo at the North Bowl and snagging Phil Nicolo to mix the victory track.

That teamwork’s even better than what you see on the field. Get it for free at  guerrilladelphia.com.

ruckfocktober.com

Today’s Philies T-shirt of the day is more of an anti-Rockies shirt, but hey, we’re feeling a little anti after last night’s 49584739820-hour game, even if the ol’ Phils did pull it out in the end.

The Ruck Focktober T-shirt, seen briefly on-screen during last night’s this morning’s telecast, is available in Phillies red/white, Dodgers blue/white and Giants orange/black (aw, remember when the Giants had playoff hopes?), and has its own Facebook page. (Rocktober, of course, is the annoying Rockies’ October baseball motto.) This is, of course, one of those shirts with a very limited relevance window, and given that the eBay site where this is being sold offers Priority Mail as its fastest delivery option, you’d really need to hate the Rockies — and really, why wouldn’t you, I guess — to order this given that the series will almost definitely be over by tomorrow (rain, snow, sleet, hail notwithstanding).

Speaking of lousy game conditions, how much of last night’s game did you tough it out for?

Today’s Phillies T-shirt of the day is an oldie but goodie: The Birdland/Fightins.com Matt Stairs Moon Shot shirt (submitted by friend of the Clog/CP contributor Matt Hotz)  that’s an appreciation of the take-and-rake slugger’s mammoth home run and subsequent ass-hammering in last year’s League Championship Series vs. the Dodgers.

However, we’re making special notice of the available Moon Shot hoodie, given that the whole team could probably use one or four of these tomorrow night in Denver where the high temperature is predicted to be 34, the low 28 and, oh yeah, there’s snow in the forecast.

All of which makes this armchair analyst a little suspicious of Charlie Manuel’s burning potential game-3 starters Joe Blanton and J.A. Happ in yesterday’s loss, meaning that the guy they’re now more likely to start  (unless Manuel pulls another trick from up his sleeve) is Pedro Martinez, a frail, aging hurler who hasn’t thrown more than four innings in a start since tossing 119 and 130 pitches in back-to-back starts Sept. 8 and 13.

Granted, that would seem to make Kyle Kendrick Pedro’s caddy should the great one get bumped early (or should his arm, say, freeze, drop off his body and shatter), and given Kendrick’s ground-ball tendencies, that might actually be the decent Plan B for (given that yesterday, original plans A and B limped off the field and threw 19 pitches respectively). Though, now that we think of it, pitching at Coors is probably Kendrick’s main role on this roster.

Anyway, back to shirts: Let me add that I’ve always appreciated the clever way the people at Birdland/Fightins get around the licensed team logo issue by just popping the player’s uniform number on the front panel of the hat/helmet.

Got a nomination for a Phillies T-shirt of the day? e-mail it to bhoward (at) citypaper (dot) net.

And don’t forget, Phils play again Saturday at freaking 9:37 on TBS (unless, y’know, it’s snowing).

The Phillies are playing things close to the chest with regards to their playoff rotation in that they’ve not yet announced it. In fact, all they’ve announced is that they’re not announcing it.

So we’d like you, dear readers of the clogosphere, to pick the rotation for them.

Of the pitchers on the Phillies roster who’ve started games in September (not including Jamie Moyer who’s out for the season), what 4 pitchers should be in the rotation? And what should that rotation be, which is to say, who should start Wednesday’s 2:37 p.m. Division Series opener and so forth?

Illustration | Evan Lopez

Yesterday’s double-header sweep of the Mutts which officially, if anticlimactically, eliminated New York’s junior team from playoff contention — putting an end to a season which for all intents and purposes ended two months ago — was  a perfect microcosm of all that is right and wrong in the Phillies universe.

Game one saw the return to starterdom of one Kyle Kendrick, 2007 sensation, 2008 afterthought, 2009 headcase. Kendrick pitched into the 8th, allowed just two runs and left with a two run lead. Tyler Walker — by some metrics the Phils most effective reliever this season — was given a rare chance to pitch in a high-leverage situation and finished off the Mets’ half of the 8th. The Phils tacked on an insurance run in their half of the 8th and then turned the ball over to Brad Lidge, who needed every bit of his three-run cushion to close out the win, “earning” his 29th save with a 1-inning, 2-earned run, 3-hit, 2-strikeout performance during which the beleaguered reliever threw 28 pitches and saw his ERA and WHIP rise to 7.18 and 1.82 respectively.

Pluses: Kendrick seems to have found his old ground-ball mojo, and having that kind of starting pitching depth like that helps a lot. The offense put up some runs, and two didn’t even come via the long ball (a Ryan Howard double and an Andy Tracy single). Charlie Manuel finally saw fit to use Walker, a pitcher who has been a (middle of the road) closer in his career, in a higher-leverage situation (12 of Walker’s last 14 appearances, and 18 of his total 23 in 2009,  have been in losses).

Minuses: Brad “That Boy Ain’t Right” Lidge is fumbling around in the ninth like a teenager making out for the first time.

Game two saw the Phils (albeit momentarily) solve the riddle of Tim Redding, putting a quick run on the board in a first inning that would be the site of all of the game’s scoring and two thirds of the Phils hits for the contest. Pedro Martinez, likely rejoicing in the fact that if he could shut down the players wearing the same uniform he did last year (to call this rag-tag bunch of minor leaguers his former teammates would be stretching things), they would be officially eliminated from post-season play. And did Pedro ever shut the Mets down, throwing 8 innings of no-run baseball during which he allowed just 6 hits and 2 walks and struck out 7. He threw 130 pitches, which has to a concern going forward as the last time Pedro threw more than 130 pitches was May 1 in — wait for it — the year TWO THOUSAND AND ONE. Good thing they’ve got all that starting pitching depth. Ryan Madson finished the game off with his eighth save, inspiring confidence only in that he was less shaky than Lidge earlier in the day. Madson gave up a single in a ninth in which he was bailed out by an acrobatic play by Ryan Howard (and his own nice cover of first) and a lineout to Pedro Feliz.

Pluses: Pedro cowboyed up. Madson got it done. The Phils played some great defense, especially Carlos Ruiz, whose handling of a ball in the dirt and subsequent nailing of boneheaded Daniel Murphy trying to advance to third ended an eighth inning threat.

Minuses: The Phils scored just one run, and off a guy who remains a major league pitcher ONLY because of his bizarre ability to shut down the Phils. Manuel’s sudden and warranted lack of confidence in his bullpen would be comical if it didn’t result in him pushing an historically frail  pitcher farther than he’s been pushed since before the war on terror. Also, it’s unfortunate that Manuel’s lack of confidence in Lidge and Madson seems to have manifest itself in his ONLY using them, overlooking the likes of Chan Ho Park and the aforementioned Walker, both guys who could actually help fix this mess.

So what the hell do you make of this team, one with so many cylinders, none of which seem to be firing at the right time? Are they getting all the kinks out now? Or are they limping into the post-season where they’ll be be completely exposed to a team with a hot hand — or, y’know, a closer?

The Los Angeles Dodgers, who could very well find themselves facing the Phillies again in the playoffs this season, made last-minute deals for Jim Thome and Jon Garland. The Dodgers last week saw their once-comfy lead in the NL West shrink to just 2 games. Though they’ve rebounded and now hold a relatively safe 5.5 game lead over the Giants and the Rockies (who are leading the chase for the NL Wildcard), the Dodgers are no doubt aware of the fact that Manny Ramirez, since he came back from his suspension for using performance enhancing drugs, is hitting a pedestrian .275/.376/.464 with just 6 HR and 20 RBI in 43 games.

It appears that Thome  — who spent the entire season as the White Sox DH — will not unseat the Dodgers’ current 1B, James Loney, and will rather step into what we’ll call the Matt Stairs role. Thome has zero defensive value at this point in his career, so coming off the bench and swinging for the fences in a pinch hitting role seems about all he’s cut out for in the National League. How Thome, a starter his entire career, adjusts to pinch hitting, will alone determine the prudence of this deal.

Garland comes over from division rival Arizona where he was decidedly mediocre, but the Dodgers are a team in desperate need of starting pitching, given that its two best pitchers, Chad Billingsley and Clayton Kershaw, are both very young (24 and 21 respectively) and showing fatigue at their increased workloads, that fourth starter Hiroki Kuroda recently took a batted ball off his head, and that the team has recently turned to the dessicated remains of one-time Phillies cast-off Vicente Padilla for rotation help.

I can’t imagine Garland being more than the fourth member of a playoff rotation (after the resurgent Randy Wolf, Billingsley and Kershaw), so ostensibly the Dodgers saw this as a need for fending off the hard-charging Giants and Rockies.

Getting the deal done before midnight last night means both players will be eligible for playoff rosters.

Does this make the Dodgers more formidable? Or does it just show that they’re scared?

Embattled Phillies closer Brad Lidge has now saved two games in a row, and fairly convincingly. He’s also done this with a day of rest between appearances, lending credence to Rich Hoffman’s theory that, at least right now, Lidge needs a closing partner because for whatever reason, Lidge is horrendous when pitching back-to-back games.

Last week, with Lidge at the height of his struggles, Clog readers overwhelmingly voted for a change in closer, with Chan Ho Park and Brett Myers the leading vote-getters, but with only Park receiving more votes (including write-ins)  than the 30 folks who felt Lidge should keep his job.

Well, how do you feel about it now?

The voting has been fast and somewhat furious on our “Who should close games for the Phillies” poll.

90 percent of voters at present are sure Lidge is not the guy, while 10 percent feel Lidge should be allowed to work it out.

Voters are not so unanimous on who should be his replacement, with the leading vote getters being:

1. Chan Ho Park with 18 votes (13 votes and 5 write in, as he was left out of the first iteration of the poll)
2. Brett Myers with 15 votes
3. and a distant third, Ryan Madson with 6, who’s just edging out “Keep Lidge” (5)

Other vote getters include Jason Isringhausen (2 write ins), Tyler Walker (1 write in), JA Happ (4), J.C. Romero (3), Jamie Moyer (1) and “whoever has the hot hand) (4).

Pedro Martinez has received zero votes.

Have your say below.

The Phillies and Mets, playing the final game of their four-game series right now at Citi Field, are attempting to out-weird yesterday’s plenty-weird game.

Thusfar, in two innings, the Phillies and Mets have committed 4 errors — including a dropped pop-up by Chase Utley whose throw to second sailed into left field allowing Angel Pagan to circle the bases in his first at bat without the ball leaving the park for the second game in a row. There’s been a hit batsman (Victorino), a first-inning three-run home run (Ryan Howard) and two unearned Mets runs. And Eric Bruntlett got the start at shortstop. So really anything could happen from here on out.

Tune it in on 1210 AM if you can.