The Phillies raised the stakes to a new level. Doing it again is a historically tough challenge.
Only two teams have repeated as NL pennant winners over the past 25 years. One Phillie who’s been here before says there’s “more hunger than there is hangover” for this team.
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Whatever you’re doing, stop for a moment and think about the last time the Phillies played in Citizens Bank Park.
Maybe you were among the 45,693 fans who were there that first Thursday night in November. Maybe you watched on television. Either way, remember the energy, the ear-splitting noise. It didn’t actually produce seismic activity, but it sure as heck felt like it could have.
The Eagles were playing simultaneously, not that it mattered. For the first time in a decade, baseball was the headliner in Philadelphia. And the stakes couldn’t have been higher. World Series. Game 5. Series tied. Winner moves to the doorstep of a championship; loser to the precipice of elimination. Ready, set, pitch.
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Now, imagine feeling that same urgency and emotion in April. Or June. Or August.
It’s impossible. Isn’t it human nature, then, to treat anything else as a relative letdown, even at a subconscious level? Maybe that also helps to explain why only two teams — the 2018 Dodgers and 2009 Phillies — repeated as National League pennant winners in the last quarter-century.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber said this week before a game at Yankee Stadium. “Everyone said it when I was with the Cubs: ‘The Cubs have a World Series hangover.’ We made it to the [NL] championship series that year [2017]. I would say this game’s hard. With us, I think there’s more hunger than there is hangover. Just because we didn’t finish it. And we want to.”
OK, let’s be clear: The Phillies didn’t lose their first four games — by a combined margin of 37-12, no less — because the atmosphere in Texas and New York couldn’t touch the postseason in South Philly. It had more to do with pitching depth that has been eroded like a Jersey Shore beach by a wave of injuries to Ranger Suárez, Andrew Painter, and others.
And that issue, as much as any, could end up sinking the club’s repeat chances.
But as the Phillies — 1-5 for the first time since 2007 after Wednesday’s 4-2 loss to the Yankees — return for the home opener Friday, Citizens Bank Park will be sold out again for one more celebration of last year. Another will come Sunday, when the players receive their NL championship rings.
And then, it will be back to the grind of a normal regular season. The postseason energy can’t be replicated, so it will need to be manufactured.
“It was just at a whole other level — and we loved it. We loved every single part of it,” Schwarber said. “That’s what we want it to be like this year. We want that same energy. Do we wish it was going to be sold out every single night? Absolutely. I get it. Everyone’s got jobs and stuff going on. But it doesn’t need to be sold out to still have that same energy. That’s something we feed off of, and it’s awesome.”
The Phillies don’t take it for granted, either. Because lest anyone forget, they ranked 10th in the league in total attendance and averaged 28,093 fans per game for the final homestand, consistent with their season average of 28,107. When they left for a season-ending 10-game road trip, they held a wild-card berth but hadn’t clinched it yet. On the whole, the fan base remained cynical.
Everything changed over the next 17 days. The Phillies clinched in Game 160 in Houston, swept the Cardinals in the wild-card series, and split the first two games of the divisional round in Atlanta.
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“It wasn’t just that it was playoff baseball,” owner John Middleton said recently. “It was. But it was the fact that people said, ‘Wow, these guys just took two out of two in St. Louis, and they took one out of two in Atlanta.’ That really catapulted it. I think people understood, coming back to that first home game with Atlanta, that this is a team that could literally go all the way, at least to the World Series.”
The enthusiasm built on itself. Rhys Hoskins spiked his bat after homering against the Braves in that first game back. A day later, J.T. Realmuto hit an inside-the-park homer to help vanquish the Braves. The Phillies rallied from a 4-0 deficit to beat the Padres in Game 4 of the NLCS before Bryce Harper hit his pennant-clinching homer in Game 5.
Cue up the highlights — on super-sized PhanaVision, to boot.
But consider, too, everything that the 2022 Phillies overcame, from a 21-29 start and the firing of manager Joe Girardi to Harper’s broken thumb in June and a late-season sweep in Wrigley Field that shook the faith of even the owner.
“I remember walking out from the last game in Chicago, and one of our fans grabbed me and said, ‘You’ve got to believe,’” Middleton recalled. “I said, ‘Listen, I believe. But they’ve got to play better.’”
They did, of course, so the age-old baseball player tendency to leave the overreactions to outsiders proved to be justified. It’s a long season, and mountains are almost always treated as molehills, at least outwardly.
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But after surviving so much adversity one year, is there an even greater inclination to shrug off real problems early in the next?
Let’s turn again to Schwarber, who won 92 games and a division title with the Cubs in 2017 after capturing a hex-breaking World Series crown in 2016.
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“I think the biggest thing is there’s experiences, right?” he said. “We were able to go through that and we came out on the other side. Do we want to have that [21-29] start again? I think if you ask everyone in this room they’d say, ‘Absolutely not.’
“But even if we did have a start like that, we know we’re still capable. You don’t ever want to get too low on yourself because there’s always a way that you can get yourself back into it.”
The Phillies sure did get back into it last year, and they’re about to be served a timely reminder.
Making it happen again? That will be the hard part.
After winning the pennant and getting all the way to Game 6 of the Series last year, the Phillies are back to finish the deal. The home opener of the 141st season in franchise history is set for Friday at Citizens Bank Park — and The Inquirer will have it covered. Join Phillies/MLB reporter Scott Lauber and staff writer Matt Breen as they host Gameday Central starting at 1:30 p.m. at inquirer.com/philliesgameday.