Phillies score 3-2 win in Game 1 of the World Series

The World Series has begun!

It's an epic day in the otherwise boring history of 2008 (can you tell I'm not into politics?), and the Phillies have left their mark on it by scraping past the Rays' offense and defense with a 3-2 win. This was mostly due to Cole Hamels (7 IP, 2 ER, 1.55 postseason ERA, and now a perfect 4-0 in postseason starts) and Chase Utley (with a 2-run shot in the top of the 1st, he became only the 34th player in baseball history to hit a home run in his first WS at-bat). If there was a single-game MVP award, it would definitely go to Hamels, who would probably start wondering what to do with all those postseason MVP awards (besides getting a larger salary increase than the one he would have already been looking at even if the Phillies' 2008 had ended in September).

Scott Kazmir certainly left his mark on the game as well, although not in a way that would endear him to those people just jumping on the Tampa Bay bandwagon. In a postgame interview, he stated that he just wanted to change that "one bad pitch" that Utley homered off of - and, well, Scott, I'd want to change that pitch too, if it'd been me. In fact, that one pitch could mean the difference in the series - the team that wins Game 1 has gone on to win the Series in 10 of the last 11 instances - and yet, with such a dynamic pairing of teams, it hardly seems advisable to look at the past as a prediction of this postseason's future.