PHILADELPHIA — Atop the celebratory stage quickly constructed on the Citizens Bank Park infield Sunday night, Rob Thomson clasped his hands behind his back, and several Phillies players rubbed the head of their closer-in-a-pinch, Ranger Suárez, and Bryce Harper cradled the trophy he had won, as the 2022 National League Championship Series’ most valuable player, as if it were a baby he was trying to settle into a deep sleep. But on the soft, moist grass near second base, maybe the most famous attendee of the 45,485 on hand to see the Phillies reach the World Series for the first time in 13 years was talking to someone, and he wasn’t quite certain who it was.
“Hey,” Miles Teller said as he turned away from his partner in conversation, a beefy Phillies player in a white commemorative T-shirt, “is this Darick Hall?”
Yes, it was. Clad in black jeans and an ‘80s-era, maroon Phillies cap and mesh shirt, Teller — a Downingtown native, Tom Cruise’s costar in Top Gun: Maverick — was indeed sharing a moment with Hall, who as a 27-year-old rookie hit nine home runs in 41 games this season. One man had played a big role in a billion-dollar box-office blockbuster. The other had played a small role in a story that might yet have the sweetest, most satisfying ending for the Phillies since 2008.
That year, of course, was the last time they won the World Series. That team was in the midst of a dynastic period that the franchise had never experienced before and has not matched since: five consecutive National League East pennants, two World Series appearances, that championship to validate its greatness.
This team is not that team. This team won just 87 games during the regular season. This team was the sixth and lowest seed in the National League bracket. This team needed first to qualify for the postseason, to end its 10-year playoff drought, before its fans would get behind and give their hearts to it. In its five-game series victory over the San Diego Padres in the NLCS, capped with that thrilling 4-3 win in Game 5, this team needed Harper to crack three game-winning hits, including his two-run home run in the eighth inning Sunday, the kind of moment that required an orchestral theme from John Williams or Hans Zimmer. It needed Rhys Hoskins to slam four home runs and Zack Wheeler to shut down San Diego over two marvelous starts and Suárez, after going five innings Friday to beat the Padres in Game 3, to step in, record two outs with two pitches, and finish them off to ignite the most joyous party in Philadelphia since February 2018 and Super Bowl LII.
‘We’re going to the NLCS’
Teller had been vacationing in Cabo San Lucas with wife, Keleigh, on Oct. 3, the night that the Phillies shut out the Houston Astros — their opponents in this World Series — to clinch one of the National League’s wild-card spots. “And I said, ‘We’re going to the NLCS. We’ll figure it out. Let’s go,’” he said. One side of his family is from Wilkes-Barre. The other, from South Jersey. “I never had a different team,” he said.
He counts Hoskins and Aaron Nola as friends and texts Tom McCarthy — the team’s radio and TV play-by-play voice since 2001 — during games with questions about strategy and requests for insight. He and his father, Michael, had 200 Level tickets for the 2007 National League Divisional Series, only to see the Colorado Rockies kick off their three-game sweep of the Phillies. The following year, stationed near Citizens Bank Park’s left-field foul pole for Game 2 of the NLDS, the two of them watched Shane Victorino’s grand slam off CC Sabathia sail toward them and land in the nearby bleachers. His seats are better now.
“It’s a pretty big year,” he said. “Top Gun. Also I turned 35, which feels like a number. Hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time. And the Phillies, man. I’ve always lived and died with the Phillies, dude. That’s always been the most important thing to me.”
A history lesson
It has been, too, for who knows how many thousands in the ballpark for Game 5, on street corners throughout the city and surrounding suburbs, in family rooms and corner pubs — those who had felt this joy before and, after a decade without it, hungered to feel it again. “You kind of forget what it was like on that run from ‘07 to ‘11: the intensity, the adrenaline rush, being here and watching games being played,” McCarthy said. “This keeps giving you a history lesson that there’s something special in this city when big moments happen. There’s something special, and they deserve it more than anybody else because they know how to do it. Chris Wheeler used to say to us during that run, ‘Guys, enjoy this. It doesn’t come around every year.’ And we’re like, ‘Ah, this is going to be old hat.’ Obviously, it wasn’t.”
Far from it. That five-year stretch of excellence gave way to a precipitous fall and some desperate attempts over the last decade to reclimb the mountain. The Phillies tried clinging to aging superstars, hoping those franchise immortals — Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley — would conjure in their mid-30s the magic they had in their late 20s. They tried going full-bore into analytics. They tried replenishing the farm system, the course of action that caused John Middleton, standing on the field after Game 5 and thinking back a decade, to scrunch his face into a pained expression. During the 2012 season, the Phillies traded away Shane Victorino and Hunter Pence, and Middleton said that David Montgomery, whom he succeeded as the franchise’s managing partner in 2014, had pushed the team to make those trades for the sake of acquiring prospects.
“My reaction when I was told we were going to do that was, ‘Well, are you getting All-Stars back? Because Shane and Hunter are All-Stars,’” Middleton said. “If you give away All-Stars and you don’t get All-Stars back, your team’s going to be worse. But if your team’s going to be worse, then why don’t you get rid of a lot of other people who are in their prime? They didn’t do that. That probably prolonged our rebuild.”
It wasn’t the only factor. There were, under the Andy MacPhail-Matt Klentak administration, misbegotten signings and acquisitions and draft picks and once-promising players who never panned out: Jake Arrieta, Mickey Moniak, Vince Velasquez, Spencer Howard, more. There were August and September collapses under managers Gabe Kapler and Joe Girardi and the going-nowhere vibes early this season before the Phillies fired Girardi and elevated Thomson to the position.
Those failures acted to tamp down the enthusiasm of the Phillies’ fan base and increase the skepticism that this was a team one could believe in. But once the Phillies made the playoffs, once they dispatched the St. Louis Cardinals in the wild-card round, that latent fervor and desire for winning baseball burst forth like a river undammed, so much so that the people who have filled Citizens Bank Park for each of the Phillies’ five postseason games there have become characters in this team’s narrative.
It is often too convenient to pay lip service to Philadelphia sports fans’ passion and loyalty, for it tends to give them too much credit for developments and results on the field that, in reality, they do little to influence. This Phillies run is something different. Pro athletes speak often of their ability to shut out distractions, to focus fully and completely, even on the grandest and most public of stages, on their performance and the tasks they must carry out.
One loud crowd
The charged environment here, though, is unique in Major League Baseball — raucous and fevered and loud in a way no other setting is. “It’s Philly, man,” Harper said. “They hate you. The other team on the other side, they can’t stand. ... They don’t like you, and I love that. I loved walking in as an opposing player knowing that I was going to get absolutely blasted by these fans, and it was what it was, and I loved it. It made me want to come here and play because I knew how much they cared.” Citizens Bank Park has become a living, seething thing, and it has punctured the mental and emotional membrane that’s supposed to protect the Phillies’ opponents. It is an advantage no other club can claim. Not the Padres. Not the Astros. No one.
“I know this fan base,” Middleton said. “I said to a lot of the guys here, ‘When we start to prove to these fans that we’re real, they will come out.’ I expected this, and they were still spectacular. These guys are like sharks with blood in the water. They’re so tough. I listen to other players talking about coming in here and what it’s like. [They] say, ‘It’s a tough place to play.’ Look, 45,000. There were 2,500 standing-room tickets sold. They’re crazy. They’re great. They give us such an edge. They really give us a lift. The fans helped the players reach down and reach a different level. They really do.”
The spoils of that fresh and flourishing relationship were all-consuming Sunday. From 10 feet outside the open doors to the Phillies’ clubhouse, the wafting funk of champagne and Bud Light was strong enough to stop you in your tracks. Team employees emptied bottles on each other’s heads. Alec Bohm and Nick Castellanos, both shirtless, danced in the center of the room to Lil Wayne’s “I’m Me.“ The bleachers at the ballpark were mostly quiet, Philadelphia’s biggest baseball party, born of the wondrous surprise of a team that wins when few think it can or will, already raging and spreading throughout the city, everyone remembering what it was like to have the Phillies in the World Series. “It just feels like a movie, especially with this team,” Teller said. “It really does.” No one would know better. No one here would disagree.
