Through the slog of a 162-game baseball season, teams, especially our Phillies, drive fans slowly insane. With ten games left, our nerves are all now completely shot. I am not just talking about the people who are saying they don’t want the team to make the postseason either. That’s right, all you people yelling at them that they aren’t real fans have lost your goddamn minds too. We are all wound so tight that nothing makes sense anymore.
All season, as soon as we form an opinion about a player, everything changes. You thought Brandon Marsh was an All-Star caliber hitter? You thought Alec Bohm was the worst player in baseball? I sure did! How does that look now? The problem was that those opinions weren’t wrong. Those were FACTS through half the season. Sure, players regress, but we had no reason to believe that both guys would 180 their seasons. It feels like they are messing with us.
No one is messing with us more than the manager. Rob Thomson was 9-19 and was fired. Phillies brass had to make a move before the season was lost. Don’t believe me? Just ask the Mets. They had the same expectations and the same awful start, but they stuck with their guy. Baseball has been dead in Queens for months.
So, the Phillies bring in Don Mattingly and immediately the ship is back on course. The team is in playoff position and has even brought themselves back into the division race. All is good! Except for the bullpen… and the hitting… and the base running. It sure doesn’t feel good.
There’s serious tension here, for all of us.
After 3 consecutive years of playoff underachieving some of us want the Phillies to miss the playoffs. Why? Because we’ve seen this play out before and we are scared. We don’t want to be hurt again by a team with barely any dependable bullpen pieces, minimal hitting discipline, and the most shoddy baserunning you can imagine. We’ve seen this movie before and we want the team to understand that they can’t keep playing it.
Of course, anyone who can remember the last 3 seasons can also remember 4 seasons ago when a team exactly like this one (just 4 years younger) had the exact same problems and somehow managed to get themselves to within 2 games of a championship. It was pure magic in the most nerve-wracking, anxiety soaked way possible. These people do not want to hear your bitching that there isn’t a chance. There is ALWAYS a chance and even 1% is better than ZERO.
To ratchet up the tension even more, the Phillies have their next 4 games in Queens against the Mets who would like nothing more than to ruin us. Typical, right? What better way to have our guts ripped out than to lose to our underachieving archrivals? It would be such a gut punch. After that, it is home games against maybe the two best teams in baseball, the Brewers and Rays. Nothing will be easy. The only good part of the schedule is that the Padres and Diamondbacks play each other to end the season. Since they both have to overtake us to miss the playoffs, for the most part, destiny is in our hands, for better and for worse.
As if that combustible cocktail wasn’t enough, now Jesus Luzardo is hurt. One of the few universally positive elements of this mercurial team is now done for the regular season. Super. As if things weren’t hard and turbulent enough.
We are all Phillies fans no matter how much the team wants to tear us apart. Now we just have to get through these last 10 games together. As of the afternoon of 9/17, the team is 84-68, .5 games behind the Cubs for the top wildcard spot. The Cubs own the tiebreak. We are only 1 game ahead of the Padres but we own the tiebreak against San Diego.
That means we have a 4.5 game lead over the Diamondbacks to make the playoffs. We probably lose the tiebreak against them, but with a magic number of just 6 the playoffs are likely going to happen. So, even with Trea Turner doing nothing, J.T. Realmuto battling the Mendoza line, and Luis Arraez never seeing a double play he wouldn’t like to ground into, let’s all try to keep it together these last 2 weeks. We can lose our minds in the playoffs.
Photo: Jon Gudorf Photography, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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