A Year To Remember

Phillies Opening Day - April 3, 2021
(frontline workers honored)

2021 was both my best and my worst year as a Phillies fan.

Before the season began, I was chomping at the bit to go to a live, professional baseball game. We had been denied that glorious experience the year before when the coronavirus pandemic shut down the world. My last game was in July, 2019. That felt like a lifetime ago.

I began buying tickets with reckless abandon. By season’s end, I had attended nine Phillies games and 12 major league games overall in four different stadiums. I also added three minor league games to the mix. By the summer, ballparks returned to full seating capacity, and those of us who were vaccinated gladly ditched the masks.

All was not rosy outside of baseball land, however, as my dad suddenly passed away in July at the age of 66. I owed my love of the game to him, and my level of gratitude was such that I even wrote a book about it. We finally crossed the last big item off our baseball bucket list in April when we went to Opening Day at Citizens Bank Park. At the time, it felt important after a year of being stuck at home. 

The pandemic filled everyone’s future with a sense of uncertainty. I think we began approaching life with more of a “seize the moment” mentality, and we’re all the better for it. Dad and I got to go to one more Phillies game together before his untimely passing, and that honestly made accepting his death a little easier.

Going to nine Phillies games in one season (my previous record was six), I definitely experienced things I’d never seen before. I was there for Aaron Nola’s complete-game shutout in April, and it was one of two Phillies shutouts I saw. I’d only attended one other Phils shutout before 2021.

I sat through my first rain delay ever, and another game was suspended to the following day due to thunderstorms. Both times, the Phillies provided me the option of purchasing heavily discounted tickets to future games, which I jumped on. The team also offered a flash sale of $8 tickets after an eight-game winning streak in early August. I very quickly realized the perks of being a die-hard Phillies fan.

Then again, by the time August rolled around, I began wondering if the Phillies had any die-hard fans left.

As I mentioned earlier, I saw games in four different stadiums in 2021. It’s always nice to immerse yourself in the fan atmosphere in another city. Unfortunately, my travels and the sense of loss I felt at Citizens Bank Park after my dad died made me realize that the Phillies have one of the most apathetic fanbases around.

I went to Citi Field in June, and every Met fan in that stadium was riveted by every play and every pitch, and I felt the same vibe when thousands of them flocked to Citizens Bank Park to watch the Phils sweep their team out of first place. Hell, I felt more fan participation at Camden Yards, and the Orioles were the worst team in baseball. At Citizens Bank Park, the fans cheered louder when a fellow fan caught a foul ball than the last out of a win. I realize Philly is a football town, but come on, give me something!

Simply knowing that I could get a better fan experience somewhere else, I won’t be going to as many Phillies games in 2022, and that’s a shame. 2021 will wind up being the exception, rather than the rule. It also ended on a high note, as J.T. Realmuto crushed a walk-off double at my ninth and final Phillies game in September. At least the fans lost their minds for that play.

The 2021 season featured a little bit of everything, including every emotion on the spectrum. I will look back on it with fondness and heartache, and now that it’s over, I only have question: is it April yet?!

Stuck

 

This is getting old, isn’t it?

The rebuild has been over for a while, but the Phillies continue to spin their wheels, stuck in mediocrity. After four seasons and hundreds and millions of dollars spent, I’ve arrived at a troubling thought: the Phillies are terrified of success.

It’s no doubt that the team on paper has holes. The organization has focused most of its energy on creating a powerhouse offense while mostly ignoring the back end of the starting rotation, bullpen and defense. The farm system has been devoid of top-shelf talent for the past decade or more.

These issues don’t always paint the road to failure, however. Just this year, we saw clubs that turned out to be more than the sum of their parts, like the Giants and Cardinals, and in 2020, the Padres, Marlins and White Sox took advantage of a shortened season and wider postseason field to end their long playoff droughts.

I look at the Phillies, and I see a squad fully capable of making the postseason. Bryce Harper won the MVP. Zack Wheeler should’ve won the Cy Young. Ranger Suarez sparkled in bullpen and rotation. Rhys Hoskins, though he stopped walking for some inexplicable reason, put up solid numbers, and Brad Miller provided sufficient pop after Hoskins got hurt. Andrew McCutchen hit 27 home runs at the age of 34. Even with a historically awful bullpen, the Phillies still had a chance to make some noise in 2021.

And then came the end of September.

This is an area of futility at which the Phillies excel. It felt like maybe this year could’ve been different, but once the season got inside that final week, the boys in red pinstripes folded like they always have.

Over the past four seasons, the Phillies tweaked the roster, brought in big names, changed managers. By season’s end, they still ran out of gas. Here are the win-loss records over the final seven games of each Phillies team over the past four seasons:

2018: 2-5 (part of a 9-game losing streak)
2019: 2-5
2020: 1-6
2021: 1-6

 

Those 2018 and 2019 squads only got those two wins at the very end after the wheels had already fallen off. Take those away, and the Phillies are only 2-22 over the last four years in games that mattered the most. Such a poor showing was the most frustrating in 2020 and 2021, when the Phils were fighting for a playoff spot.

At first, people blamed Gabe Kapler, and he was replaced by Joe Girardi, a veteran manager with a proven success. And yet, in two seasons Girardi’s managerial record is two games below .500, the same as Kapler.

When I look at the big picture, I feel like the Phillies culture must change. When the organization declared that the rebuild was over, it adopted a lazy approach to winning – add a bunch of pieces and hope it works out.

Outside of Harper and Wheeler, I don’t sense a whole lot of pride on the team either. Hitters on winning teams consistently work the count and extend at-bats, and pitchers on winning teams consistently retire batters once they get to two strikes.

I look at a team like the Dodgers who have an airtight system (complete with a mental health division) that is the same from the lowest level of the minor leagues to the major league club, or the Rays, whose player development is so fine-tuned that it can turn any pitcher into an out machine, and I ask, “Why can’t the Phillies be like that?!”

Of course, the short answer is that they aren’t willing to spend that kind of money, and honestly, a lot of teams aren’t, but the Phillies do have the money to put together a winning team. They simply need to make the players and fans believe it.

There’s a reason Carlos Santana had a career year with the Indians after his one down year with the Phillies. There’s a reason Kapler went to the Giants and led them to a 107-win season. There’s also a reason why a seemingly talented team collapses at the end of every season. At their core, the Phillies don’t believe they can play in October. Until that changes, they never will.

2020: MLB Unmasked

 

The true creed of this nation has always been: value the dollar over the individual. Major League Baseball followed that creed to the letter in 2020.

As we all remember, professional sports were forced to shut down in March due to the coronavirus pandemic. The virus raged on until mid-May, when the number of new cases began to drop. That’s when the haggling began.

MLB put together a plan for a shortened season, but its salary proposal to the players union was immediately rejected. The two sides argued back and forth for weeks until MLB finally agreed to the union’s demand that the players earn a prorated salary based on the length of the shortened season. Sixty regular season games were scheduled, so all players (except those lucky few who were owed a club option in their contract for 2020) would make roughly 37 percent of their 2020 salaries. However, the players actually made much less than 37 percent, because the $170 million advance they collectively received from MLB back in April could only be kept if the 2020 season was cancelled completely.

I know you’re probably thinking that anyone getting paid in the seven-to-eight-figure range has no right to complain, but keep in mind that a large chunk of players aren’t actually millionaires (i.e. - bench players, middle relievers and virtually everyone who’s been in the league less than three years). I admit that the squabbling between the league and players came off as petty, but there’s an overlying reality that leaves me emphatically siding against the league and owners.

I personally felt like MLB should have canceled the season outright back in March. Unlike the NBA and NHL, baseball did not have the luxury of placing all 30 teams in a single quarantined area to play a shortened season, and anyone who paid even the slightest attention to the CDC and NIAID Director Dr. Fauci knew that the reprieve from the pandemic was only temporary.

Predictably, by the time the season began on July 24, the second wave of the virus swept across the nation at double the intensity of the first. Within the first few weeks, the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals both suffered COVID-19 outbreaks that each infected more than a dozen players and staff. Each team was forced to take a week off and play out their 60-game schedules with a grueling stretch of doubleheaders. This was exactly why the season was postponed in the first place.

A few players decided on their own to sit out the entire season due to the pandemic, and I salute them. Given how virulent this virus is, if you’re not doing everything you can to prevent exposure, both for your and everyone around you, you’re making it worse. The one thing MLB got right was not allowing any fans in the stands during the regular season, but I personally feel that it was the league’s human obligation to stand up and say, “There will be no baseball in 2020. We refuse to put our fans or our players in harm’s way.” The only professional sport more profitable than baseball is football, so they could’ve withstood the financial blow of a season-long lockout. Hell, that already happened to the NBA and the NHL. But in the true American capitalist tradition, MLB let money dictate its decisions.

Due to my strong feelings on this issue, I barely watched any baseball until the World Series. I could not support the game I loved being played in such horrible circumstances. I can’t remember the last time I went a whole spring and summer without it, and that’s probably why I’m so baseball crazy now.

MLB’s gamble paid off in the end, so I’m sure baseball will return for a full season in 2021. With sanity and basic human decency returning to White House in a few weeks and vaccines being widely distributed, I’ll feel better about watching as well.

A big thank you to everyone who read my latest ramblings. Happy New Year, and let’s all hope for a safer and happier 2021!

Take the Bad with the Good

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

 

Now it is time to address the elephant in the room.

The 1993 Phillies never claimed to be a group of upstanding citizens. On the contrary, they played up their rough-around-the-edges appearance to the fans and the media. At the time, their antics were sheer entertainment, but a few players were hiding skeletons in their closets, which they eventually released for all to see.

I talked about the ’93 Phils a fair amount in my book, and I must admit that I made one claim that was factually inaccurate, and evidence to the contrary was already available. I wrote that despite the steroids scandal that rocked the sport, the ’93 Phillies played the game in its purest form. Lenny Dykstra alone disproves that claim.

I won’t get into all of the financial and legal troubles Dykstra has faced over the last several years, but I will say that he did not play the game cleanly; far from it. First, both he and backup catcher Todd Pratt were named in the infamous Mitchell Report that was released in 2007. Dkystra then stated in interviews that he used steroids, beginning in 1990, because he realized his skills were diminishing, and he had a family to support.

More recently, Dykstra claimed that in 1993 he paid private investigators $500,000 to dig up dirt on umpires so that they would give him a more favorable strike zone. Dykstra said that’s why he led the league in walks that year, and the numbers seem to support that. His total of 129 was far and away the best he ever posted in a single season. His walk numbers in other years didn’t even come close, even when you take into account seasons in which he missed time due to injury.

Since I’ve been re-watching games from 1993, I’ve scrutinized nearly every Dykstra at-bat to see if I could tell a difference between the strike zone umpires gave him in comparison to other players. It was very difficult, though, because John Kruk and Darren Daulton walked so much themselves.

Speaking of “Dutch” Daulton, he was asked in a 2009 interview if he used steroids during his career. He somewhat dodged the question but said, “I can assure you, there’s probably no one in any sport that has taken more drugs than I have.” Based on that, we can’t say for sure if Daulton took steroids, but chances are, he was on some kind of illegal substance during the 1993 season.

Let’s consider that in ’93, Dykstra was 30 and Daulton was 31. Most major league players begin to decline after the age of 27 (the age Dykstra was when he allegedly began taking steroids), and yet the two of them were still performing at a high level. I’d say Daulton was even more suspect than Dykstra because he was a catcher, and by the early 90s had been through several knee surgeries. In ’93, he set career highs in games and at-bats, and he was sprinting around the bases better than most catchers in the game. Considering his later admission, it doesn’t look good.

Dutch was my favorite player on that team simply because he was a better hitter than most catchers, and I was definitely sad when he passed away at the age of 55 from brain cancer. Unlike Dykstra, Daulton owned up to all the mistakes he made when he was younger, and he moved on from them. It’s still a shame that some of those transgressions cast a dark shadow on one of the most exciting seasons in team history.

I’m not going to pretend that Dykstra, Daulton and Pratt were the only ones cheating to gain a competitive edge on the Phillies in 1993. Not everyone who cheated got caught. But I also can’t say that this really changes all the good feelings I have about that team. I know the era in which they played, and I know they were far from the only ones breaking the rules behind closed doors. I refuse to feel sorry for the 10-year-old me who watched that team ascend to heights no one expected, and they taught me to love the game of baseball. I will forever be grateful for that.

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.

Friendly Voices

I would now like to focus on the 1993 Phillies. This will be the first of a four-part series.

I have spent the last several weeks watching Phillies games from 1993 on YouTube. The odd thing is that I will end up watching more games from that season than I did when they were played because in 1993, my family didn’t have Prism, the TV station that carried 40-45 of the Phillies' games. I’d obviously forgotten nearly all of the games before I began re-watching them, and I’ve taken great pains to avoid looking at the final scores. I wanted as authentic an experience as possible. As expected, the picture quality isn’t great because the games were transferred from VHS, but they still oddly feel recent because the players wore very similar home uniforms that the Phillies wear today during non-weekend games (a classic pinstripe look that debuted in 1992). The road uniforms were the same as well.

Of course, the best part of this return to the past is hearing Harry Kalas and Richie “Whitey” Ashburn call the games. I personally only heard Whitey’s voice for five years before he died in 1997, but it sounds as familiar as it did back then. I will spend the rest of this post sharing some interesting realizations about the broadcast team, both from 1993 and now. In my next post, I will do the same with the players.

I heard color commentator, Chris “Wheels” Wheeler, several times before I saw him on camera, and it blew my mind how old he looked (he was 48 at the time) because I thought he sounded so young on the air. I also finally understand why so many people didn’t like Wheels. I still appreciate his commentary for the most part, but listening to him now, I can tell he was clearly a know-it-all who talked too much. It was especially noticeable when he was in the booth with Whitey, because as we all remember, Whitey was a man of few words. I didn’t much care for Andy Musser, the lesser-seen fourth member of the broadcast team, but I don’t mind him nearly as much now. He sounded too much like a news anchor (like Tom McCarthy), but I see now that he was a solid play-by-play announcer.

And then there’s Harry. My high opinion of him has never wavered over the past 27 years. He had so many catchphrases that it’s difficult to keep track, and I always hope a Phillie will do something amazing so I can hear that magical voice raise with excitement. In those moments, he knew the right words to use to get me even more excited. During this long re-watch, every time I’ve clicked on a new game, I’ve hoped it’s a WPHL 17 game so that I can hear Harry call it. He was quite simply the best at what he did.

Harry and the other guys had plenty of opportunities to yell with excitement during that amazing season. I didn’t think I would enjoy watching these games as much as I have. After all, everyone knows how well the Phillies did. But watching familiar players performing at the top of their game, even if it was nearly three decades ago, somehow never gets old. Who knows; I might do this again in another 30 years on whatever advanced medium is around then.