Philly Fluke

Part 3 of a four-part series on the 1993 Phillies

 

How the hell were they so good?!

I tried to search online for any other “one-hit wonder” MLB teams, but the only results were articles/posts about players who had one good season. A deeper search revealed that the Kansas City Royals had just one winning season between 1994 and 2013, which came in 2003, but they finished just four games over .500 that year. That’s quite different from a pennant-winning campaign. The 1993 Phillies were an anomaly of historic proportions, and I will try to explain how that happened.

For context, we need to look at 1992. The Phillies limped their way through a 70-92 season, but they were actually significantly better than that record. On the offensive side, they placed second in the National League in runs and third in home runs. The nucleus of Lenny Dykstra, John Kruk and Darren Daulton was already established, and Dave Hollins emerged as well. The ’92 team also had two solid starting pitchers in Terry Mulholland and Curt Schilling. The front office definitely had foundation from which to build heading into 1993.

A fair amount of luck was involved as well. The Pittsburgh Pirates dismantled their powerhouse team, and the Atlanta Braves were still a year away from joining a realigned NL East. As far as the pundits were concerned, the division was up for grabs, but no one was predicting a first-place finish from the ragtag Phillies.

The best way to describe the 1993 season is that the Phillies entered what I’m labeling a “Trisection of Success.” That year, the team was comprised of three different groups: new players, players who had their career year and players in their last full season. This flash-in-the-pan bunch brought all the right ingredients together at once.

The organization was busy in the offseason, adding an incredible six players who all had key roles during the ’93 season: starting pitcher Danny Jackson, outfielders Jim Eisenreich, Milt Thompson and Pete Incaviglia and relief pitchers David West and Larry Andersen, the latter two providing desperately-needed stability to the bullpen. The Phillies don’t win the division without those six guys, and they not only produced, but they bought into the crazy clubhouse culture. The 40-year-old Andersen and his unique sense of humor fit in particularly well with a group that was notorious for its practical jokes and hijinks.

West joined a group of career-year players that included Dykstra, Mulholland, Tommy Greene and Ben Rivera. With the latter three excelling at once, you suddenly had the most stable starting pitching rotation in baseball. Not only did all five starters reach double-digit wins (no Phillies team had done that since 1932, and no other team did that in ‘93), but they all had winning records and each recorded at least one shutout. They also led the league in complete games with 24, and the pitching staff as a whole placed first in strikeouts with 1,117. That alone is mind boggling, and I haven’t even talked about the offense yet.

The ’93 Phillies, likely more by accident than design, produced numbers championed by Bill James nearly 10 years before Billy Beane’s “Moneyball” A’s changed the baseball landscape. They led the NL in runs, walks, doubles, on-base percentage, on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) and OPS+. They also led the league in home runs for most of the season before a power drought in September. Walks were the hallmark of the offense. This team walked A LOT. The Phillies’ 665 walks were well above the runner-up Cardinals’ 588. Not even a pitcher like Greg Maddux, known for his surgeon-like precision, made it through a game against this lineup without surrendering a free pass or two.

A big reason for the Phillies’ base-on-balls prowess was that their lineup of mostly left-handed batters did not fall victim to a trap typically laid for lefty hitters - the breaking ball low and away (a trap Ryan Howard fell for more and more as his career progressed). You could almost see Kruk and Daulton give smirking, ‘nice try’ expressions as they’d watch those breaking balls fall harmlessly into the catcher’s glove out of the strike zone. The ’93 Phillies set a National League record, becoming the first team to feature three players - Dykstra, Kruk and Daulton - with at least 100 walks.

No one knew it at the time, but 1993 also wound up being the last hurrah for several players. Dykstra, Kruk, Daulton, Greene, Rivera and Mitch Williams never played a full season again after 1993, and Hollins didn't until after he was traded in 1995. Another major reason for the team’s success was that no one spent significant time on the Disabled List (now known as the Injured List). You could even see during that year how the season might have unfolded without that stability. The Phils hit a bad stretch in the early summer at the same time that Hollins and Mariano Duncan were injured, and their other dip in mid-September happened when Mulholland was shelved. No one denies the amazing team chemistry that group had, but they needed all 25 guys healthy to succeed, and for the most part, that’s what they got.

One last thing I will say about the ’93 team is that man, did those players hustle! Up and down that lineup, guys constantly took the extra base, especially in the first half of the season. It got to a point when if there was a runner on second, he was going home on a single, no matter what, and he made it nearly every time. That’s why they wore pitchers out all year. They’d work deep counts, draw walks and fly around the bases. It was so much fun to watch.

It’s a shame that the Phillies’ moment in the spotlight was so brief. Even if the 1994 season hadn’t ended in August with the strike, the Expos and Braves would have battled for the division title, leaving everyone else in the dust. The 1995 Phillies gave fans a thrill with a 37-18 start, but a pitching rotation full of rookies and a collection of position players well past their prime could not sustain that success. It was clear that the team had to break down and start again.

At least we had 1993. Had everything not come together just right, it could have easily been 15 straight years of losing seasons. The long-suffering fans got a brief respite, and I believe we’re all the better for it. I certainly know that I am.

Now and Then

Part 2 of a 4-part series on the 1993 Phillies

 

Fans my age and older well remember that whacky bunch of players that defied all expectations by winning the National League pennant and coming within two games of winning the World Series. That special group only lived to play baseball and have a good time, capturing the hearts and minds of a city well known for its blue-collar mentality.

As both the ’93- and ’08-era teams drift further and further into the past, I find myself feeling much more nostalgic about the ’93 team. The memories aren’t nearly as vivid because I was only 10 and didn’t understand the game as well as I would later, but that team taught me to love baseball. Plus, great events in life are more revered when they’re unexpected. That team literally came from out of nowhere and faded just as quickly. I will now share some observations I formed as a green kid, alongside changing opinions and different things I’ve noticed while watching this team again over the past few weeks.

When I was 10, I always deferred to the players who hit the most home runs, so it annoyed me when Milt Thompson and Jim Eisenreich were put in the lineup more than Pete Incaviglia and Wes Chamberlain. Of course, I understand now that the left-handed Thompson and Eisenreich were typically used against right-handed starting pitchers. They were also better outfielders. I love Incaviglia and his monster home runs as much now as I did then, but I can’t get enough of Eisenreich. The guy sprayed the ball all over the place, making it a nightmare for opposing teams to defend against him. He unassumingly went about his business, quietly becoming one of the Phillies’ best hitters of the 1990s, and who doesn’t love a good comeback story like his? When he was diagnosed with Tourette’s Syndrome, he initially felt his baseball career was over, but after receiving the proper treatment, he fought his way back. I don’t think I knew what Tourette’s was before I learned about Eisenreich.

I’m also realizing that Eisenreich was one of the few hitters who didn’t prolong the game by trouncing well outside the batter’s box after every pitch. Instead, he would simply retreat a few steps to the back corner of the box while staring intently down the third-base line until the pitcher returned to the rubber. He was an all-around model of efficiency.

Moving onto other players, another habit I’ve noticed is that during every game, starting pitcher Curt Schilling was perched on the top step of the dugout and always the first to congratulate anyone who scored a run. That makes him appear like the ultimate teammate, but given everything else I’ve learned about Schilling in the years since, he was probably doing it just to look good in front of the camera. Schilling evolved into one of the best pitchers of his generation after leaving the Phillies in 2000, but his outspoken, ultra-right views that at best border on homophobia and xenophobia have turned him into a villain. The seeds of this persona were actually planted in 1993 when cameras caught Schilling with his head buried in a towel when closer Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams was on the mound. Schilling claimed it was a joke, and the fans and media accepted it as such, but Williams was not amused, and it drove a wedge between the two that has never been removed.

As the ’93 season came to a close, I was surprised that John Kruk only hit 14 home runs. I simply assumed that because he was a bigger guy, he was a home run hitter. Of course, I know now that bigger does not necessarily mean stronger, and Kruk was most known for his patience at the plate and hitting for a high average. If anything, he was the Phillies version of Tony Gwynn, Kruk’s former teammate when he was with Padres. The beer-drinking, mullet-wearing country boy from West Virginia often liked to play the fool for the media, but there were actually few in the game who studied it and understood it more than he did. Kruk did reach the 20-homer mark twice in his career, but by ’93, all that constant running on Astroturf began giving him chronic knee problems that would sadly result in his retirement two years later. And actually, if we’re to believe his claim that he rarely worked out, then it’s a miracle he played until he was 34.

Kruk was just one of dozens of miracles to happen for the Phillies in ’93. I’m loving the experience of this crazy team’s Cinderella season, where for six months, everything that could go right did go right. Consider the unbelievable fact that 1993 was the only year between 1986 and 2001 in which the Phillies posted a winning season, and they went all the way to the friggin’ World Series! I doubt we’ll see anything like it again. In my next post, I will delve into how that happened.