Rob Thomson, J.T. Realmuto, the Phillies and their entire fandom are counting down the wins

A journey to a World Series championship starts one game, one win at a time, and now the Phillies are four wins away.

Phillies manager Rob Thomson celebrates with his players after the team beat the Houston Astros to clinch a spot in the postseason.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

Published Oct. 27, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

HOUSTON — Shortly after Rob Thomson was promoted to the Yankees’ major league staff in late 2003, he noticed something about the way Joe Torre would address his club. The Yankees were perennial winners; they’d made the postseason every year from 1995-2007, and won the World Series four times over that span. Expectations were always high.

But despite that, Torre, who managed from the Yankees from 1996-2007, would break up their annual goal into small increments. If the goal was a 100-win season, he’d start by setting the bar at five wins, and then move it to 10, and then to 15, and so on. It was a simple tactic, but an effective one. It made the ambitious seem attainable.

“It’s kind of like a hitter who looks at his season in every 10 at-bats,” Thomson said. “Instead of looking at the board when you’re hitting .180, you just take it at 10 at-bats for now. If you can go 3-for-10, or get on base 40% of the time in your next 10 at-bats, that’s progress.”

When Thomson was named the Phillies’ interim manager after Joe Girardi was fired on June 3, he decided to give Torre’s tactic a try. The goal at that point was vastly different than anything Torre had to contend with in New York; the Phillies were 22-29 and in a tailspin. But Thomson followed his mentor’s lead.

He calmly set the bar at .500. Once the Phillies reached that, he moved the goal to five wins over .500. Once they reached that, he moved it to 10 wins over .500. By the end of the regular season, they were at 12 games over .500 — a feat that seemed unimaginable in April and May. By Oct. 3, they’d clinched a playoff spot with a 3-0 win over the Astros, ending an 11-year drought.

On that Monday night in Houston, Thomson gave a speech as his players clutched their champagne bottles in anticipation.

“After Wednesday, we’ve got 13 more wins,” he said. “Then we’re world champions.”

Since then, the Phillies have gone 9-2 in the postseason. And after every series win, just before the bottles pop, Thomson has counted down how many wins they are away from a world championship. After they won the NL wild-card series in St. Louis, Thomson turned to his catcher, J.T. Realmuto.

“Hey, where’s J.T.?” He asked.

“Eleven more, Thomson!” Realmuto responded.

After they won the NL Division Series against the Braves, Thomson turned to Realmuto again.

“We’ve got eight more, Topper!” He yelled.

After they won the NL Championship Series against the Padres, Realmuto could barely wait for Thomson to call his name.

“We’ve got four more, Topper!” He yelled.

Realmuto isn’t quite sure how he became the team’s designated Wins Counter, but he has embraced it. The fans have, too. Whenever the Phillies have played a home playoff game at Citizens Bank Park this October, the crowd has been littered with signs counting down the team’s wins. It has become a mantra.

But more importantly, it has been effective.

“This tournament lasts a long time, from three weeks to a month,” said first baseman Rhys Hoskins. “And that can feel daunting because of how big the moments can get. But if you break it up … it makes the moment smaller. It doesn’t feel so big and overwhelming. It allows us to go out there and focus on what’s in front of us, instead of the big picture. It allows us to relax and go play.”

On Oct. 3, when the Phillies clinched a postseason spot and Thomson set his team at 13 wins away from its ultimate goal, FanGraphs said the Phillies had a 5.8% chance of reaching it. Internally, some players scoffed at those projections (“[expletive] them,” in the words of backup catcher Garrett Stubbs) but only because there was a genuine belief that they could do what everyone else deemed unbelievable.

Now, people are believing.

“We’ve been saying all year long that once this team gets hot, nobody is going to want to play us,” Realmuto said. “And that’s what has happened. We’ve had that confidence all year long, even when we were struggling. We would talk after the games about how we had a chance to do something special. We had a chance to turn it around and we did.”