He had a couple of his kids with him, too. They would share this forever. Two months ago, Eyre was exiled by the Cubs because manager Lou Piniella would no longer use the lefthander out of his bullpen and the general manager felt as if he had to do something. Two months later, the Cubs are kaput and Eyre is a contributing piece in a Phillies bullpen that is anything but done.

"Basically, I got new life here,'' he said. "These people gave me life. [General manager] Pat Gillick and [assistant GM] Ruben Amaro called me and asked me if I wanted to be a Phillie and I said, 'Yeah.' They gave me a new start.

"I got here and Charlie Manuel said, 'I'm going to ease you in because you haven't thrown in a while.' But then he started using me, giving me an opportunity to pitch in meaningful games. And . . . ''

He stopped, kind of looked around. The champagne was literally dripping from his hair.

"I've been thinking about all of this,'' Eyre said, his voice cracking just a little. "When I start, well, I'm not going to get teary over it, but, you know, I might.''

Baseball clubhouses are places, more than anything, where paths converge. The players arrive from everywhere and are thrown together, and they fit together or they don't. Some share nothing upon arrival, other than the fact that they all claim ownership to their own particular path, their own unique road - and that these paths are never perfectly straight. Eyre's certainly was not.

"I watched the Cubs game,'' he said, referring to the Saturday night loss to the Dodgers that ended their season so suddenly.

"I saw faces on TV, faces of good, good friends of mine. I saw their sadness. Now, I'm feeling this great joy right now. It's . . . you know, right? I mean, I feel for them. I really do. But I'm so happy where I'm at. I really, truly love it here.''

His name is Eyre, pronounced "air.'' There are people who see it for the first time and maybe mess it up, and he understands. What he cannot figure out is how Piniella managed to get both his first and last names wrong for the better part of the 2007 baseball season.

"Lou called me the wrong name to my face,'' Eyre said. "He called me 'Stevie Ire.' I'm sorry, that's wrong. The only thing I wish is that he never one time said, 'Hey, that's my bad.' It was just kind of accepted, just funny to him. Me, personally, I would have liked an apology. If I had called somebody the wrong name for 3 months - and I don't know if he did it on purpose; who knows? - I think I would have said, 'Hey, that's my bad for messing up your name.'

"Last year, I just kind of laughed it off. The media in Chicago wanted me to say something but I didn't want to. I had Rawlings make me a glove with 'Stevie Ire' on it and I pitched with it on, just as a way of saying, 'Hey, I don't care, it's not a big deal.'

"I'm not a controversial guy,'' he said. "I just want to sit in my locker and hang out.''

Sunday, he could not sit in his locker. Like all of them, it was covered by a clear plastic tarp to keep the champagne spray from ruining the contents. Two months; a baseball lifetime.

Eyre says that Cubs general manager Jim Hendry did him a favor by trading him to a National League contender and not to some forlorn American League outpost. He says, "I knew I could pitch and get people out - I'd done it for a long time. I just don't think Lou Piniella thought I could . . . But coming here in the middle of the year, it was refreshing. Any part of the baseball love that I have, which was kind of diminishing there, it has brought it back.''

You show up in a baseball clubhouse in August and you are a stranger in a strange land. You are a part of the team but not a part of the months and years of shared experiences. Fun memories, inside jokes, conversations that began in February, stopping and resuming, stopping and resuming - you can contribute nothing. It can be hard.

Eyre said he knew he was accepted when teammates started teasing him about a couple of one-out wins that are on his short Phillies resume. Now, they are united by champagne, brothers in bubbly. For Scott Eyre, as it turns out, there is life after getting fired, after Chicago and Lou Piniella and Stevie Ire.

"It happened to me once before, in Toronto,'' he said. "I thought I was doing a good job. So did all of my teammates - they were shocked when I got designated and then claimed on waivers by the Giants. We went to the World Series that year.

"I'm kind of hoping history repeats itself,'' Eyre said. *

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