In Phoenix for their own baseball glory, these 16 Phillies fans hope to turn Chase Field into ‘Citizens Bank Park West’

For 16 Phillies fans, the stars aligned when it became clear that their team would play the Arizona Diamondbacks for the National League Championship Series.

The Baseball BBQ Forkballers — “old-guy baseball players from Philly” — were already set to spend this week in Phoenix, making a run at their third-straight Men’s Senior Baseball League 40 and Up World Series title.

So naturally, after vanquishing Clancy’s Irish, a team from Oregon, 8-4 Friday, they’ll head to Chase Field to root for the Phillies in Game 4 of the NLCS.

“We may turn it into Citizens Bank Park West,” said Ian Downes, a Forkballers pitcher.

That the Phils are poised to make a World Series run as the Forkballers do is pure magic, the icing on what is already highlight-reel week for Brett Mandel, the Forkballers’ player-manager and commissioner of the Greater Philadelphia Adult Men’s Baseball League.

World Series week started in 2008, when the team now known as the Forkballers began going to Arizona in mid-October for a tournament that attracts teams like the Cen Cal Nuts and the Virgin Island Waves.

The Forkballers have a Harvard-educated lawyer, entrepreneurs, a sitting judge, a detective, a software engineer and more on their roster. But for a week, they’re all ballplayers, living a dream, playing at spring training complexes and talking baseball nonstop.

There’s a lot of baseball — eight games in a week — but also a lot of downtime in between. The Forkballers rent a giant house and live like kings, bringing in a chef to cater steak night, holding a kangaroo court with one Forkballer, Chester County Common Pleas Judge Bret Binder, presiding. The rookies are on permanent laundry duty.

“It’s the most fun week of the year,” said Mandel, a former candidate for Philadelphia City Controller.

“We play ball all day, we eat, we drink, we talk baseball — it’s a nice break from reality, to live like ballplayers,” said Binder, the judge, who’s weathered numerous surgeries to keep pitching for the Forkballers. (“I’m 44, my shoulder is 86.”)

The Forkballers are named for Baseball BBQ, a company that makes baseball bat-handled grill tools and cutting boards, started by Mandel and other team members in 2020 and now carrying MLB licensed products. The company’s namesake team has evolved into an improbable juggernaut — league rules limit teams to carrying two ex-pros who played no higher than AA ball, but the Forkballers have zero.

“It was a lot of years of chasing the ring and coming up short,” said Downes, a Philadelphia lawyer who’s 48.

One year they had just nine players for most games, and still made it to the championship with no bench. But Mandel gives the Phils’ Rob Thomson a run for his money in the managing department, his players said, and there’s beauty in simply showing up on the diamond, even as their bodies age.

“The arms and the legs and the bats all slow down at once,” said Mandel, 54, who’s written two books about baseball. “The ground balls that are harder to get to are also harder to leg out. Guys aren’t throwing 90 anymore, maybe they’re throwing high 70s.”

And though the Forkballers are the focus, the Phillies aren’t far from anyone’s mind this year.

Binder was a year old when the Phils won their first World Series, in 1980. Then came the long stretch when titles were far out of reach.

“I suffered through the days of Steve Jeltz as the starting shortstop,” Binder said of the lifetime .210 hitter who hit five career home runs and played for the Phils from 1983 to 1989. “He symbolizes the futility of those mid-1980s teams.”

The Phils’ bats were quiet in Game 3 of the NLCS, a 2-1 loss, but Binder believes in this incarnation of his team.

“It’s unbelievable to watch them,” said Binder. “And these fans are so smart — we get a bad rap sometimes, but Philly fans are so passionate, like nothing else.”

The Forkballers aim to bring a sampling of that passion to Chase Field on Friday. There are 20 players on the Forkballers’ roster, and 16 are going to Game 4.

Mandel said he’d hoped to see the Phils clinch a pennant on Friday. Now, with the Phils up 2-1, the Forkballers may just have to buy tickets for Saturday’s game, too.

“They say it’s not a series until the home team loses,” Mandel said of the Diamondbacks. “I don’t fear this team and don’t think the Phillies will be held to one run again.”