Former Philadelphia Phillies' ace Cole Hamels joined Angelo Cataldi and the 94 WIP morning show Tuesday to promote an upcoming event for ''The Hamels Foundation'', which will take place in Philadelphia.
In between discussing the specifics of the event and talking about his first few months in Texas, Hamels also talked about whether pitching for a bad team was a challenge for him at the end of his Phillies' tenure.
''It's tough, because you want to be able to go out there and show people what you're all about. You want to be able to show the fans, 'this is what I'm working towards every day', because they don't get to see us every day when were in our workouts, when were training, throwing our bullpens. They get so see you when you are obviously in your game-time and you want to throw in front of a sell-out, that's just the most fun. And I think when you have that memory of what it was like for those five, six years at Citizens Bank (Park), sellouts, fans are traveling, it gets you excited and gets you a little bit more motivated and a little bit more adrenaline. Then you're able to go out there and produce at an extremely high level. When you're not able to have that, you have to get into a different mind-set and sometimes it can be a little bit more difficult than certain days.''
From the sounds of that, Hamels seems excited to be opening a season on a team that's going to be projected to be in the playoffs, as opposed to the rebuilding — or should be re-building — teams that he opened the past few seasons on.
Hamels did say that he believes the Phillies are destined to return to the success that they had between 2007 and 2011, which brought out the type of crowds that he spoke about above.
''I know they are going to bring it around and they're going to get back to their Citizens Bank sell-out crowds, loud and crazy, which every player loves to play in front of.''
