World Series: New faces on display; history to be made

The 2008 version of the Fall Classic will put many, many new faces on the grandest of all baseball stages and the world will be introduced to the stars of tomorrow when guys like Evan Longoria, Cole Hamels and B.J. Upton take the field.
Sure, we in the baseball community know, and have known for some time, that these players are fantastic, but John Doe living in South Dakota who only watches the World Series, has never heard of them.
So, if you happen to live in the Dakota's and this is your first time watching some of these players, you are in for a real treat.
This series is interesting because you have the losingest franchise in baseball history, the Phillies, against a Rays team who has been the losingest since their inception 10 years ago.
Philadelphia has lost well over 10,000 games, posting a winning percentage of .470 over the 125 years of its existence.
In that time, this is just the sixth trip to the World Series. By comparison the New York (now San Francisco) Giants went to the World Series six times in the first 19 times it was played and the Yankees won six World Series titles between 1947-1953.
Clearly, this city is starving for a title and probably can't hang on to the lone championship, the 1980 WS win over Kansas City when Mike Schmidt hit a big two-run home run in Game Five and Steve Carlton and Tug McGraw teamed up on the mound to hold the Royals to one run in the deciding Game Six.
In the 10 seasons before this one, the Rays finished in last place in the AL East in nine of them. They won 70 games only once, going 70-92 in 2004.
They finished with the worst record in the AL five times and with the second worst record in the league three times more.
To say this season has been a surprise would be an understatement. Rays fan or not, this is good for baseball because it does two things. For one, it shows you can build a team from within and build a championship caliber team and secondly, it makes the Rays a team worth going to see because they were the only expansion team that still felt like an expansion team.
They've never had big crowds consistently. Even the Marlins, who draw fewer fans than a De La Salle High School football game, have had years where the park has been packed.
The two teams actually have some history, believe it or not, and in fact, the last series opener these two teams played, back in Philadelphia during June of the 2006 season, respective aces James Shields and Hamels squared off.
Shields went six innings and got the win while Hamels (who will deservingly start Game One) gave up six runs (five earned) in 3 2/3 innings and suffered the loss.
There are only two Rays players that actually played in that game, Carl Crawford and Rocco Baldelli. Crawford was 2-for-3 off the lefty and Baldelli went 0-for-2.
Ryan Howard went 1-for-3 off Shields as he Jimmy Rollins and Chris Coste are the only other current Phillies to have hits off Shields in that game.
Scott Kazmir, the other Game One starter, beat them the next day, striking out nine and allowing just two runs over five innings. The runs were solo shots by Abraham Nunez and Sal Fasano; both players no longer on the team and if there is any decency in this world, they are no longer employed by a Major League team.
For the life of me, I can't remember a single Rays/Phillies game but the teams have played 15 times and the Rays are 10-5 in those games. They are 6-3 in Philadelphia and 4-2 at home, so as you can see they have a brief history that the Rays have dominated.
The brief history is about to become a very heated one starting tomorrow, which will last for just over a week.
There is no guarantee of getting back to the World Series in this age of parity, development and big dollar spending, so you have to treat the team on the other side of the field like a hated enemy.
Expect an all out war against a team trying to lose the moniker of a bunch of losers against a team trying to erase 10 years of embarrassment.
Who wins? Rays in six games.