The Phillies’ quiet offseason shows what fans really value. And loyalty isn’t it.

First and final thoughts …

The Phillies’ offseason has so far been uneventful. I don’t mean uneventful by the standard of They didn’t give three quarters of a billion dollars to a guy who bats just four times a game. I mean uneventful by the standard of They’ve signed a 31-year-old corner outfielder, and that’s it.

Outrage and frustration from much of their fan base have greeted that relative inactivity, and that public reaction has been revealing — not for what it says about the organization, managing partner John Middleton, or head player-personnel honcho Dave Dombrowski, but for what it says about Phillies fans and sports fans in general these days.

What it says is this: The notion that fans of particular teams in particular cities want to root for particular athletes over long periods of time is dying, if it’s not dead already. They’re happy when it happens, sure: Jason Kelce, Brandon Graham, the core players on those 2007-2011 Phillies teams, Allen Iverson. And, of course, in the olden days when free agency either didn’t exist or was still a new thing, neither the fans nor the athletes had much choice in the matter. But forming that lasting bond is no longer anything close to a priority for the people watching in the stands or on their screens, and it’s unlikely to be ever again.

» READ MORE: Baseball knows it has a pitching problem. The question is whether it can solve it.

Usually, this discussion — about the disintegration of loyalty in sports — gets framed in a way that puts the blame on the athletes: They make sooooo much money, and they spend so much time chasing that next, bigger paycheck that they show themselves to be nothing but selfish mercenaries. There’s plenty of truth in that perspective, but fans often ignore, forget, or refuse to acknowledge that they increasingly view their relationship with athletes as transactional. The lack of loyalty is a two-way street.

Consider the Phillies again. After three straight postseason berths that didn’t lead to a world championship for the hometown club, people here are losing patience, and now that fantasy sports and prop betting are ubiquitous, the sugar rush of trades and signings is, for most of them, the real excitement anyway.

So the Do something! chorus starts singing and doesn’t stop. Never mind that Middleton and Dombrowski had already spent nearly $262 million on the team’s 40-man roster last season. Never mind that the Phillies, over the previous several years, had paid out the yin-yang to get and keep Bryce Harper, Trea Turner, Kyle Schwarber, J.T. Realmuto, Nick Castellanos, Zack Wheeler, and Aaron Nola. Never mind that, as my colleague David Murphy noted recently, the Mets could have paid Juan Soto $45 million a year, paid Baltimore Orioles ace Corbin Burnes $30 million a year, and re-signed slugger Pete Alonso for $25 million a year, “and they’d still have a lower payroll than the one the Phillies already have.”

The Phillies pretty much have their team. They picked their superstars years ago. They’ve made their huge moves. “I would be surprised,” Dombrowski told reporters Friday, “if we got into impactful free-agent signings from an offensive perspective.” The truth is that he can do only so much this offseason. Everyone around here now has to do the hardest thing to do in sports anymore: live with it.

Once again, Speedy Morris is a candidate for induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Officially, he has been nominated as a “contributor.” More accurately, he deserves induction for his 1,035 victories — including 754 at Roman Catholic, Penn Charter, and St. Joseph’s Prep, the most wins in Philly high school history — for his 32 regular-season and postseason championships, for the innovations he helped introduce to college hoops while at La Salle in the late 1980s, and for being the quintessential Philadelphia coach.

Yeah, “contributor” doesn’t quite cover it, does it? Without him, The Hall is a lesser place and always will be.

» READ MORE: Dick Allen’s induction into the Hall of Fame is a victory for his greatest advocate and friend

Was transcribing notes the other day, and this was the closing line from a recent interviewee:

“Fact-check what I said. I’m 78 years old and took a lot of acid in the ‘60s. Things are not the clearest.”

If you’re still looking for last-minute holiday gifts, here are two suggestions: Ray Didinger’s play Tommy and Me, about his relationship with Eagles great Tommy McDonald, opens at the People’s Light Theater in Malvern on Jan. 7 and runs through Feb. 1. And recently retired WIP veteran Glen Macnow is starring in The Wizard of Oz — as The Wizard of Oz — at the Players Club of Swarthmore through Jan. 5. Tickets are available to both. Get them.