Was pointed towards a little nugget of joy by Tom C. of Phillies Breakdown yesterday, found on Huston Street’s MLBlog.

We can all agree that the officiating in this particular series was awful, with bad calls going both ways. At this point, it has been beaten into the ground by the blog chatter, the radio and TV outlets, the mainstream media, conversations with your Pop, the watercooler, the senior citizens’ mixers that some of us go to when we’re looking to spice up our love lives, etc.

All you can do is stop whining about it. Take it from Zen Master Street:

You can either spend time thinking about what’s unfair, or you can spend time thinking about changing your situation. So any energy spent on feeling sorry for yourself is wasted energy.

Sound final thoughts from a top-notch* closer, especially after he spent the three preceding paragraphs bitching about the controversial Chase Utley foul-ball/infield single that made Howard’s ensuing sac fly possible during Sunday night’s 6-5 victory over the Rockies:

The single by Chase Utley in the ninth inning should have been a foul ball. He hit it, and the ball definitely hit his leg. The umpires didn’t see it.

I also thought he was out at first base, but they said my throw pulled Todd Helton off the bag… Now we have to win to stay alive.

We can argue all night long whether the ball hit him. We can argue all night long whether he was safe at first base. Actually, there’s not much of an argument. It’s right there on video.

As long as you don’t spend too much time and energy dwelling on everything that you want to scream about … You’ve got to move past it. You have to be stronger than the situation.

Just because you’re not openly calling the umps “no-good shit-for-brains fucktard morons” (like most of us were) doesn’t mean you’re not bitching, Street. And as much as you spout off half-baked Tony Robbins bullshit in an attempt to sound calm and collected, you should keep in mind that plenty of shitty calls went against the Phillies this past week, too. *coughStairscough*

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Check out the pitch locations of Matt Stairs’ at-bat last night in the eighth inning. He only swung at one of those pitches, a 2-2 pitch, yet pitches that were essentially in the same location were called strikes or balls depending on what the umpire felt like. No wonder Stairs ended up striking out on a pitch out of the zone; what was he going to do, let it go and hope the ump decided that, nah, this time this same pitch will be a ball? (The TBS announcers, naturally, made no mention of the ridiculousness of this strike zone on this at-bat.) The umps were apparently just as tired as we all were watching the game last night, as the strike zone was all over the place.

How does a player (on either team) approach an at-bat when the strike zone is so unpredictable? Sure, players get information on the tendencies of each umpire and know (generally) what each ump’s strike zone is like, but last night was just silly. It’s not that the Phillies got screwed or anything — they won, and even ended up catching a break next inning, of course, when Chase Utley fouled a ball off his leg and somehow ended up beating it out for a single — but the badness of the umpiring throughout the series has really detracted from the enjoyment of the game. Plenty of people have written plenty of columns about the bad umpiring in this year’s playoffs so far. The question is: Is Major League Baseball going to do anything about it?

Each day(-ish) during the postseason, Dan McQuade will write about the Phillies’ chance at a second straight World Series title. You can usually read his thoughts on baseball at Walkoff Walk. He actually called for replay and a computerized strike zone back in July. So ahead of the trends!

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