These Phillies know what it takes to get to baseball’s postseason

Andrew McCutchen got drafted in 2005 by a team that hadn’t had a winning season since 1992. The run of futility reached 16 years before he made his major-league debut in 2009. It wasn’t until 2013, when he was crowned National League MVP, that the Pittsburgh Pirates finally broke through after two decades of losing.

You better believe, then, that McCutchen knows all about a playoff drought.

If Phillies fans are starving for the postseason after nine years on the outside, their counterparts from across the state were positively famished on Oct. 1, 2013, when the Pirates hosted the Cincinnati Reds in the NL wild-card game. More than 40,000 people — standing-room only, if you can still imagine that in our pandemic world — pulled on their best black T-shirts and jerseys and jammed into PNC Park. They cheered and chanted, roared and rollicked, as though they were releasing all of the enthusiasm pent up inside them since 1992.

“First time I ever experienced a playoff game, and it was amazing,” said McCutchen, whose mother, Petrina, sang the national anthem before he reached base four times in the Pirates’ 6-2 win. “It’s something that I’ll never forget.”

That puts McCutchen in the minority within the Phillies’ clubhouse. Eleven of the 26 players on the opening-day roster have experienced at least one postseason game. Only three (Didi Gregorius, José Alvarado, and utilityman Ronald Torreyes) have advanced to the league championship series. None has played in the World Series.

So, it isn’t only the youngest generation of Phillies fans who haven’t seen the postseason up close. It’s many players, too.

“I’ve never been able to experience any playoff games, and I’ve spent almost nine years in the majors,” second baseman Jean Segura said. “I want to go there. I want to see that crowd, I want to see how it feels when the whole stadium is packed, and play a baseball game like that. I really, really want to go there and see how it feels.”

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The Phillies were in the wild-card race in 2018 and 2019 but came unglued down the stretch both years. They might have reached the playoffs in an expanded field last season if not for an abysmal bullpen and late-season injuries to Rhys Hoskins, Bryce Harper and J.T. Realmuto.

But for the core members of a team that is 33-53 over the last three Septembers, the question of whether they can get over the hump and into October will dog them until they actually do it.

“I think it’s learning how to control everything around you — your surroundings, your emotions in big situations, understanding what your job is that day, being prepared all the time even if you’re not in the lineup for a situation that might come up, being able to discipline yourself when you are beat up and tired,” said manager Joe Girardi, a four-time World Series winner, including as a manager with the New York Yankees in 2009. “I do believe that you have to learn how to do that. Winning baseball is something I think you need to learn all the time.”

Matt Moore skipped a few of those steps.

Ten years ago, Moore’s first playoff start — for the Tampa Bay Rays in Game 1 of the 2011 American League Division Series — came 16 days after his major-league debut and eight after his first major-league start. He held the pennant-winning Texas Rangers to two hits in seven scoreless innings, one of a few postseason gems for the veteran lefty in the majors and Japan.

“I couldn’t believe that it was me that got Game 1,” Moore recalled. “I hadn’t even been to major-league spring training at that point. It was like, ‘I can’t believe [James Shields] or [David] Price isn’t starting this type of game.’ ”

Looking back, Moore figures he kept it together because he didn’t know better.

“I didn’t have a lot on my mind that year,” he said. “I was mostly in my own world. It was maybe a once-in-a-lifetime type of year, where I’m just picking a side of the plate and attacking it. I was kind of brain-dead to anything else. It was probably me being a little bit ignorant to the situation I was in.”

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Gregorius understood the stakes in 2017.

The Yankees hadn’t won a playoff game in five years — by their standards, it might as well have been 50 — when they gave up three runs in the top of the first inning of the AL wild-card game against the Minnesota Twins. Gregorius came to the plate with one out in the bottom of the first, worked the count full against Twins starter Ervin Santana, and pumped life into Yankee Stadium by lining a knee-high fastball into the right-field bleachers for a game-tying three-run homer.

“Without that,” Gregorius said, “we couldn’t have kept on going.”

Gregorius had other big postseason moments for the Yankees. There was the two-homer outburst in Cleveland in decisive Game 5 of the 2017 Division Series and the grand slam that ripped out the Twins’ heart again in Game 2 of the 2019 Division Series. He has gotten 112 plate appearances in 28 playoff games, making him the Phillies’ most frequent visitor to the October stage.

Harper got there in 2012 as a 19-year-old rookie and became the second-youngest player to homer in the postseason when he took St. Louis’ Adam Wainwright deep in the third inning of Game 5 of the Division Series. But that run ended when the Washington Nationals suffered a historic collapse, blowing a 6-0 lead and allowing four runs in the ninth inning of a 9-7 loss at home.

As young as he was, Harper didn’t take for granted that playing in October would be an annual thing.

“All I could think about that year was Dan Marino getting [to the Super Bowl] and never getting back, you know?” Harper said a few years ago while reflecting on his postseason experiences. “I think you have to cherish those moments and know how hard it is as a team and as a group to get to that point.”

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Harper has reached the postseason in four of his nine major-league seasons, but none of his Nationals teams made it beyond the Division Series. McCutchen and Moore haven’t gotten past the Division Series either.

Take it from them, though: Getting there is even more difficult than advancing. For some players, it can be downright paralyzing.

“The way I try and treat it is that baseball doesn’t know that baseball’s important,” McCutchen said. “Baseball is baseball. Throwing, hitting, catching, you’re doing the same stuff that you did in spring training. It’s all in your head. I don’t take it lightly, but the way it helps me just go out there and perform is you treat the game the same way that you’d treat game one, the middle of the season, end of the season.”

Said Moore: “For me it’s always been a situation where less is more. The moment’s going to keep you up, but maybe back off a little bit because more’s going to be coming at you than you think. But just talking postseason, man, that’s why we play. That’s the stuff that makes you feel alive.”

It’s been too long since the Phillies and their fans felt that way.