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.
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