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!

April 10, 2000: Phillies vs. New York Mets

My support of the Phillies renewed, I eagerly counted down the days to the 2000 season.

I even bought a magazine that previewed the new season in the form of one-page breakdowns for all 30 major league teams, and I read it cover to cover. I was aware that despite my great knowledge of baseball, I still didn’t know it well enough to converse about it at length with my peers at school. My window on that potential boost to my popularity was nearly closed, with high school graduation just two months away, but my recent acceptance to Penn State University earned me a new and much bigger group to impress.

My dad still came first as far as attending games was concerned, and we crossed off another wish list item when we acquired tickets for the Phillies home opener, my first game at the Vet in nearly five years. We didn’t know quite what we were in for.

In my eyes, the Phillies’ biggest rivals were the Atlanta Braves, but that probably stemmed from my own hatred of the perennial division winners, and their fans’ insufferable and racially offensive Tomahawk Chop. I know now that the Mets are the main foe by simple proximity. Philadelphia, Boston and basically the entire state of New Jersey constantly deal with living in New York City’s shadow.

We entered a fog of tension that engulfed all of Veterans Stadium. Thousands of Met fans made the trip down the New Jersey Turnpike, and Philly fans expressed extreme displeasure of their presence in a variety of ways. My dad and I could hear the noisy taunts all around us, and more than once, we saw security guards leading the worst offenders out of sight.

The guards couldn’t respond fast enough to two different groups of Phillies and Mets idiots (they don’t deserve the label of fan) who leapt onto the field between the sixth and seventh innings to pummel each other into the Astroturf, an effective weapon against any enemy as I learned the previous December. It was impossible to believe in that moment that my dad and I shared anything in common with those mindless barbarians.

This was the first time I felt ashamed to be a Philadelphia fan, and given our general reputation, I knew it wouldn’t be the last. I admit that I get a little too critical and worked up at times, but I feel fortunate that on the whole, my dad raised me to be a respectful fan. If given the opportunity, we would have both personally apologized to the Phillies for the selfish acts of those brawlers, who not only behaved without regard to the people around them, but also disrupted the game.

The contest on the field was pretty wild as well, though it only got physical once when Phillies bench player Kevin Sefcik collided with the Mets’ Mike Piazza at home plate. A total of 16 runs crossed the plate in the game, all before the sixth inning.

New York scored four times off Paul Byrd in the first (the exact opposite of what occurred at the previous Phillies game I attended, also against the Mets), but Philly batted around in the bottom of the second, taking a 5-4 lead. The Phillies rebounded a second time in the fifth after the Mets retook the lead with three runs in the top half. Philly had already knotted the game at 7 when catcher Mike Lieberthal stepped to the plate with two outs and a man on. As he had done so many times the year before, Lieby launched a two-run shot to put his team in front to stay. It was his first bomb of the season, and the only one in the game.

I still wrestle with deciding between Bobby Abreu and Lieberthal as my favorite player from this era. Lieberthal was the new Darren Daulton, and he had proven as much in 1999 with an All-Star performance. He played a career-high 145 games behind the dish (earning his only Gold Glove award) and hit .300 with 31 home runs and 96 RBI. He would never achieve that kind of production again, but he remained a presence in the lineup and behind the plate for several more years, and contrary to Abreu, he was well liked by the fans.

The Phillies’ win jump-started a week full of excitement for me. I attended my senior prom, as well as a Boys and Girls Club scholarship award presentation. That organization, which my dad helped me join to avoid the dangerous streets of our neighborhood, played a pivotal role in my development as a youth, even on the baseball diamond with two years of T-ball.

The Phillies, meanwhile, beat the Mets again the following night to reach .500 (4-4) for the only time during the 2000 season. I eventually allowed my social life and preparations for college to occupy my time, as it was clear the Phillies were going down, not up. Their two newest recruits failed to deliver. In fact, Mike Jackson didn’t throw a single pitch in 2000 due to a bad shoulder. In the lineup and the starting rotation as a whole, only Abreu, Doug Glanville, Robert Person and Randy Wolf avoided serious injury or trade in 2000, and the Phillies languished in last place for all but 10 games.

Realizing their fate, the Phils traded away their last tie to the 1993 team, Curt Schilling*, at the end of July. He was finally rewarded for his great talent by winning the World Series, once with the Arizona Diamondbacks and twice with the Boston Red Sox. He joined ’93 teammates Mariano Duncan (’96 Yankees) and Daulton and Jim Eisenreich (both ’97 Florida Marlins) as the only players to get a ring after leaving the Phillies. Given how much joy and excitement they brought their fan base, they all deserved a taste of ultimate glory.

 

*Mickey Morandini also played for the Phillies in 2000, but he spent the previous two seasons with the Chicago Cubs. After being traded to the Toronto Blue Jays in early August, Morandini retired at the end of the season. I saw the writing on the wall in this game. During the eighth inning, I ventured down to the 200 level of Veterans Stadium to get a closer look at the action. I arrived just in time to see Morandini get picked off first base. The look of panic on his face as the first baseman's glove swiped across his diving hand seemed to say, "Oh man. I think I'm getting too old for this."