Jeez!

I can hardly watch! Can this be happening?!?!?

On a hunch, I just checked my son's bank statement online. He paid $300 for that ticket, the little #@$#%$

Tim McCarver just insinuated that the Yankees let this one slide so they could win the series on their home field.

He's been broadcasting too long. At this level, when the opportunity presents itself, a good team goes for the throat. Nobody throws a game in order to please the home crowd...winning the Series pleases the home crowd just fine. This give the Phils hope, and hope has a funny way of becoming momentum. Confidence builds in the Philly locker room, doubts surface in the Yanks locker room...suddenly a sure thing turns around (he said, hopefully).

well, yes! I'd say that momentum definitely carried the Phillies last night.

a convenient construct for how things seem to look and feel as long as things are going your way . . . until they're not.' [note similarity to your "feelings and superstitions and doubts"]

Another way to put that is, it does not exist except as an emotional state of the person who perceives it, hence "illusory" (noting question was framed as a forced choice between "illusory" and "real"), which, as noted, can reverse on a dime due to either imposition by external events/influences or the subject's own actions ("create your own momentum").

A (no-doubt imperfect) analogy: in birthers' and teabaggers' "feelings and superstitions and doubts", it's a fact that Obama's a Kenya-born, non-citizen, Marxist/communist/socialist/Ma​nchurianCandidate pretender whose principal goal is bringing America to its knees (see, e.g., Dallas, TheJokeFrom). Does their subjective emotional state make any of that nonsense "real"?

In physics (from which the sports/politics metaphor is drawn), momentum is the product of mass times velocity. This is what gives resonance to another metaphor, the "ship of state" and the difficulty and time required for reversing or even just changing its speed and direction (combined=velocity) -- often likened to a supertanker or aircraft carrier for their very large mass, hence great momentum, hence slow response to steering/propulsion changes.

As noted, sports/political "momentum" can reverse instantaneously, i.e., does not show this trait of "real" momentum.

Certainly, people sometimes subjectively perceive "momentum" to be with or against them. I called this subjective emotional state "illusory" because it has no external reality independent of this emotional state and subjective perception.

Everything you wanted to know about baseball and streaks, but were afraid to ask.

Short answer: illusory.

He's a blight upon baseball, broadcasting, and the United States of America. He is a shining example of everything that is wrong with the nation. He's a man who sputters along spewing out inanities dressed up as inside knowledge, paid handsomely for his insight, when any basement-dwelling nerd with a laptop and a subscription to Baseball Prospectus knows that the things that McCarver "knows" are pure bullshit. McCarver is Joe Morgan without the personality. He's the Chris Matthews of baseball.

It's the spouting of all those meaningless fucking statistics I can't stand. I mean, okay - most home runs within a World Series, fine. That's all you need, really. One of the reasons baseball remains timeless and so appealing is because it is such a simple game, really.

(Then again, I'm dealing in 2 year liberal arts degrees). They've shut Ryan Howard down completely during this series, with their continued reference to meaningless statistics. Every time the poor schmuck gets up to bat, it's like he's wearing a sandwich board for the World Record For Strikeouts Within a World Series

eom