On Baseball | Phils' biggest foe . . . fans?

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. - To hear Billy Wagner tell it, the Phillies' biggest hurdle this season won't be the Mets, Braves or Marlins.

It will be you - the fans.

"The Phillies have the best team," Wagner said at Mets camp the other day. "But there's a lot of pressure playing in Philly.

"It's just a tough environment. Nothing is close. That team's biggest challenge will be playing at home. Their personnel is great, but it's a tough city to play in. They can't get off to a bad start."

The implication seemed clear: Wagner believes fans will bury the Phillies if they get off to a bad start. Either that or he's playing some mind games on his old team.

Wagner had a love-hate relationship with Phillies fans during his two seasons with the club in 2004 and 2005. The fans loved it when he would close out games with 100-m.p.h. thunder. But he hated it when fans booed the team during tough times. He still shakes his head that Citizens Bank Park was not consistently sold out when the Phils were pursuing the National League wild card in 2005.

"It's easy to come in there as a visiting player when you're only there for three days," Wagner said. "But 81 days, that's different.

"People there expect you to perform, and when you do perform, they're still on your ass. In Philly, you can't have a good enough year. It's different in other places. In Philly, you should never give up a run or you should hit a home run every time up.

"When you're booing Mike Schmidt - come on."

Home was not kind to the Phillies last year. They finished just a game over .500 at Citizens Bank Park and needed to go 5-2 on their final homestand just to pull that off.

But does that have anything to do with the fans, or the pressure they can put on players, as Wagner contends?

"Nah," pitcher Brett Myers said. "I think it's a great place to play. If you screw up, the fans will put you back in line. It's like tough love.

"Billy might think it's a tough place to play. Me? When someone tells me I [stink], I try to show them I don't. It fuels me.

"The way I look at it, fans are allowed to tell us we stink. When I was a kid and I stunk my dad would tell me on the ride home, so it kind of brings back memories."

Playing in New York isn't exactly stress-free, but Wagner says Shea Stadium is a much easier to place to play than Citizens Bank Park. Part of his dislike for Philadelphia's park is the coziness and proximity of the fans. The guy has acute eardrums and hears everything. It's more difficult to pick out individual insults in New York.

"You can't pay attention to it," Myers said. "That's why Billy couldn't make it here. He could have been a superstar in Philly. The fans loved him because he threw 100. But he chose to focus on the negative part instead of the positive: The fans are the way they are because they care."

Wagner insisted that he wasn't "blowing smoke. The Phillies are a good team," he said. He wasn't about to offer the Phils any advice on beating the Mets, but he did have some advice for Phillies fans.

"Support them, good and bad," he said. "When a player is in a slump, look at his track record and say, 'It's just a slump; he'll be OK.' No one knows he stinks better than the player. Get on a guy when he doesn't run out a ball, but not when he doesn't perform well."

You can thank Billy for the advice - and we know you will - when the Mets come to town on April 16.

Phillies chairman Bill Giles fondly recalled former commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who died Thursday at age 80.

"I thought Bowie was a good commissioner because he always put the fans first," Giles said. "When he made a decision, he used to say, 'Whatever is best for the fans, we should do.' "

Kuhn made the decision to play World Series games at night. He saw prime-time television as a way for the game to grow.

"He never wore a top coat at the World Series," Giles said with a laugh. "He took quite a bit of criticism from some media for moving the games to night. People said the kids couldn't watch and it would be too cold. So he never wore a top coat and never would acknowledge that it was cold. I remember we used to say, 'He probably has long underwear on.' "

Giles was on a committee with Kuhn that negotiated baseball's first $1 billion television contract in 1982. Later that year, Giles said, Major League Baseball had a chance to buy half of ESPN for $30 million. Giles urged Kuhn and his executive council to make the purchase. Kuhn declined.

"Didn't have the money," Giles said. "Now ESPN is worth something like $20 billion."

Pete Rose has told so many lies over the years that he's not even sure what the truth is anymore.

The Hit King managed to briefly elbow his way into baseball's consciousness last week with a claim that he bet on his Cincinnati Reds every day when he managed them. Well, that's just not true. Investigator John Dowd long ago established that there were nights Rose did not bet on his team, particularly when Bill Gullickson or Mario Soto was pitching. Three years ago, Rose acknowledged that everything in Dowd's 1989 report was true. The report detailed Rose's gambling on baseball, including games involving his team.

This is just Rose's latest attempt to gain attention in hopes of someday being reinstated to baseball. Sadly for Rose, he might have been on that path until public support for him and his case evaporated in response to his 2004 book in which he profited for years of lying. Commissioner Bud Selig, who had been reviewing Rose's case, is very cognizant of public opinion, and when the public got down on Rose, so did he.