"This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball...."

I was warned. Repeatedly. Did I really want to do this to myself?

Yes, I said. I was fascinated. I wanted in. I wanted something to believe in.

I became a Philadelphia Phillies fan. An instantly HARDCORE Phillies fan. Last year’s collapse in the National League Championship Series against Arizona, when the Phillies had 2 chances, AT HOME, to win and move on the World Series, put the hooks in me. The Phillies were obviously the better team, and yet they managed to shit all over themselves so spectacularly……pivoting from nearly flawless baseball to the kind you might see after the beer had run out in a Tavern league, that is was positively riveting. No fan base in all of sports is more loyal, or more willing to tell its own players that they suck. Every year some 40k of them show up for every home game, each win celebrated with fireworks and the crowd singing along to “High Hopes”, and each loss treated as an absolute affront to the sacred game these bums were so wildly overpaid to play.

I was led to a wonderfully irreverent Facebook group called Drunk Phils Fans, founded and led by a guy who kept the season almost indescribably fun, and who had an almost pathological hatred for all things METS. It was the most fun I’ve ever had being a baseball fan.

Until….you know…..

How I got here isn’t the point of our story, but briefly…..I grew up a Reds fan, and moved along to the Phillies when Pete Rose did. But gradually I drifted away from the game. Strikes and steroids jaded me. My brother moved to Houston, and we both became fans of the Astros, but their games weren’t readily available here in PA, and the more I learned about the banging trash cans the more uneasy I became.

And then came last October.

It was a Butch and Sundance moment. “Who are those guys?”

To be honest, there weren’t many options. As a kid I used to be able to watch the Mets and the Yankees and the Phillies and the Pirates and the Braves. On cable. All the games. Those days were gone, and unless I wanted to pay yet another streaming fee (I did not), only the Phillies remained on my plan. If I was gonna go all in, I needed to watch as many games as possible. I needed to get to know the players. I needed to become annoying…the kind of guy that can credibly argue about things like middle relief pitchers and platooning outfielders. To get into the groove I even went to the local Rally House that just opened in the Viewmont Mall and bought a Bryce Harper jersey. My 4 different Philly caps (including a green one for Saint Patrick’s Day) hung on the back of the cellar door.

I had help with all of this. My friend Scott is a lifelong Phillies fan (he’s the one who warned me that this would not end well). He filled me in on the roster, and as the games progressed we’d text back and forth. The first half of the season the Phillies were the best team in baseball. The National League infield in the all-star game looked like a home game. Eight of their players made the team. Even Scott dared to hope.

Well that’s not true. It was me who dared to hope because this was all new to me. Scott knew that somehow, someway, the team would catastrophically implode. Because that’s what they always did. As the second half of the season progressed, I began to sense it too. I had never seen a team that could look so good one night, and blow so hard the next. I had a phrase for this. I called it “turning on the suck”. Nobody in baseball could turn on the suck quite like the Phillies. They went from the best team in baseball to one that could lose 18-3 to the A’s, a team of homeless orphans. They went from the joyful abandon of game 2 of the NLDS with the Mets, one of the most exciting playoff games I have ever seen, to looking like a hung-over pick-up 9 at a weenie roast. And the thing is, nobody seemed surprised. AT ALL. It was the price of doing business. It was like living in Florida and dealing with hurricanes.

At the trade deadline, while teams like the Yankees were grabbing guys that would power a second half ascent, the Phillies managed to sign Austin Hays from Baltimore, whom we nicknamed “Baby Ripken” because he hit like an infant. The also brought on reliever Carlos Estévez from the Angels, a meatball specialist allergic to a 1-2-3 inning, and Tanner Banks, a non-descript lefty reliever with a porn moustache who even the Chicago White Sox, the worst team in baseball history, didn’t want. Acquisitions like these signaled one of 2 things from the front office….

1. We’ve got this. No worries. Keep buying tickets.

2. We have no idea what we’re doing. Keep buying tickets.

Their pitching was ok. More than OK at times, with perennial Cy Young candidate Zack Wheeler leading the charge. Wheeler never got much run support, but then he didn’t need much. He was part of a group of solid starters, except for Taijuan Walker, a former Met whom the Phillies were somehow paying $18 million a year. In the second half, Walker looked like somebody throwing during a home run derby, and every 5th day he’d look like Charlie Brown getting undressed by line drives. Fans eventually treated Walker starts as forfeits, as just about all of them ended up with undersized backup catcher Garett Stubbs pitching. Stubbs is a ringer for John Wilkes Booth, so I took to calling him “Booth”, and soon Scott did as well. Booth had an ERA of 15.75, which as it turns out wasn’t that much worse than Walker’s. Booth was a leader in the clubhouse, and everybody loved him there. Not so much anywhere else, because he could barely hit his weight.

Their relievers were leaky but mostly were able to pump out what they let in. Except for Jose Alvarado, who we took to calling “the A word” because even saying his name would trigger him being called into the game to walk the bases loaded and then throw a wild pitch to score a run.

But all of this is just white noise. We’ve come to the portion of our program where we discuss this team’s complete inability to hit the baseball when it mattered most. It’s what happened to them in the NLCS last year. At the plate, the team would be suddenly victimized by a nuclear fallout of sucking. It would get to the point where opposing pitchers could ROLL the ball to the plate, and as long as it was a foot outside guys like Trea Turner and Brandon Marsh would swing at it. Turner made $27,272,727 this year, and if I was being snarky I’d say that was $100 for each time he struck out with runners in scoring position. A slight exaggeration perhaps, but that is what this level of sucking does to Philly fans. It makes them crazy. Bryce Harper is a sure-fire first ballot hall of famer, but way too often he looked like the kid with a roll of quarters in the batting cage at the old Bell Mountain on the Scranton-Carbondale highway, desperate to impress a new girlfriend. Nick Castellanos would swing at pitches that required a 9 iron. Alec Bohm and JT Realmuto would walk up, and infielders would call time to laugh and lay odds on who’d get to start the inevitable double play. Bohm went from an all-star, perhaps the best 3rd baseman in the National League, to a guy who needs fucking therapy. Realmuto batted .000 in the division series against the Mets, which is something I could have done. Kyle Schwarber either hit lead-off home runs or walked back to the dugout shaking his head. Guess which was much more likely?

Never in my life have I seen a playoff team so likely to get no-hit on any given night.

And they managed to do all of this looking, for the most part, like cyborgs. No real fire. No emotion. What looks like steely determination when you are winning can look like you’re more interested in your morning tee time when you’re losing, which is the part that drives fans crazy. Manager Rob Thomson seems like a perfectly likable bloke, but nobody was even pretending that he was the sort of guy to put a boot up Harper’s ass when it was required. At times it seemed like he left pitchers in the game because he didn’t want them to get mad at him. To be fair, this IS Philly. Fans have been calling for Thomson to be fired since he lost his first spring training game. But even when you filter out the talk-radio loons, having a manager with the guts to stick some bench splinters up a star’s ass in August might have paid dividends in October.

The Mets focused on the strike zone. They showed discipline. They moved runners. They were patient. And when a Philly pitcher made a mistake, they made him pay for it. "This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball.” So said manager Ebby Calvin in the movie Bull Durham. If you can’t do the last part, the first two don’t matter all that much.

The Philles are a highly paid Major League Baseball team that simply cannot hit the baseball. It’s like watching an NFL team suddenly unable to execute the center/quarterback exchange, or a golfer unable to place the ball on a tee. Without a major overhaul, expecting a different result next year is the definition of insanity.

You may hate the Phillies (or the Yankees or the Mets), but baseball is infinitely better when they are still playing in October. They arouse passion, one way or the other. NOBODY wants another Texas / Arizona World Series.

I’ve learned firsthand that there is nothing more passionate than a Phillies fan base. Sure, they are crazy. Sure, many of them need medication. But I think they were fine coming in. It was the Phillies that damaged their psyches. Don’t let anybody try to tell you it’s the other way around.

I don’t know about you but I’ve got opening day circled on my calendar already.

In a bit…

—tf

Free column today. We do this sort of thing twice a week. I’d love to see you again!