The .500 Phillies? The .500 Phillies!
I'll take average. It's not noble, it's not admirable, it's certainly not aspirational. But it's acceptable.
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.Â
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Sixers yet? Nah. Moving on.
The Philadelphia Phillies. They're a sports team operating just down the block from the Philadelphia 76ers, and also out of an entirely different universe. While the Sixers struggle to maximize a championship window, doing a highwire juggling act of cap and asset management, roster balance on the court and locker room chemistry off of it, in an attempt to make that toughest of jumps from great to elite and validate a strategy enacted by their visionary architect of nearly a decade ago, the Phillies... well, they're around. They'll play 162 games, one almost every night from April to October. In all llikelihood, they'll win close to -- and very probably exactly -- 81 of them.
It wouldn't be accurate to call these Phillies a refreshing change of pace from the Sixers, because there's nothing refreshing about these Phillies. Most of them have been around for a few years now, many of them will still be here a year or two from now. Some of them are overperforming this year and others underperforming, the great majority of them are doing about as you'd expect. They are not compelling, as a team or individually -- as succinctly and intestine-twistingly summarized by this quasi-viral @PanasonicDX4500 tweet. Outside of Andrew McCutchen's roundtripper rock-paper-scissors bouts with Dusty Wathan, the dugout's recent adaptation of the home run sombrero, and this one video of Archie Bradley DJ'ing along to Tiësto's "The Business," I struggle to find anything particularly personable about this squad. They would not be charming as winners, they would not be lovable as losers.
Luckily for these Phillies, they are not either. What they are is the truest group of Even Stevens since Jerry Seinfeld. They are attracted to .500 baseball in the same way they are attracted to the surface of this planet Earth; it is a gravitational force they will not be escaping anytime soon without the assistance of some insane billionaire. I thought I had witnessed true mediocrity with the turn-of-the-'10s Sixers; turns out Lou Williams and Spencer Hawes were mere pretenders at the altar of these blindingly middling Phillies. In 2018, they went 80-82, in 2019 they went 81-81, in 2020 they went 28-32 (and probably would have gone 30-30, except that would have meant a postseason appearance with the pandemic-expanded field, which would've been throoughly unacceptable). And through 88 games this year, they're 44-44.
The team's single most impressive performance of the season came Sunday in Boston against the AL East-leading Red Sox, when a COVID-scratched Aaron Nola (sigh) forced a bullpen who can't avert disaster long enough for Zach Wheeler to leave a shutout midway through the eighth into nine full innings of action. But thanks to a three-run homer from Ronald Torreyes (sure), some help from our old friend Nick Pivetta (now frustrating in Beantown), and a jaw-dropping, cushionless seven-out save from reliever phenom Ranger Suarez (three runs in 35 innings!), they got the victory -- bringing them to 44-44 for the season. They should not have won that game for any reason, except that the fates simply would not allow them to enter the All-Star break with anything but identical integers in the W and L columns.
So no, the Phillies are not refreshing. But what they are is reliable. Not on a night-to-night basis, of course -- wouldn't that be good for a cackle if it got around the bullpen -- but in a bigger-picture sense, this is a team (and a fanbase) that knows what they are, or at least what they're not. It's a team that doesn't encourage you to entertain delusions. Jean Segura is knocking the cover off the ball right now; soon enough he'll spend a week or two swinging at ghosts. Wheeler has been one of the best pitchers in baseball the season's first half while Nola has wildly disappointed; if they switched places after the break no one would be surprised. Alec Bohm was an absolute rookie sensation last year; this year he's a classic sophomore slumper. You don't always know what you're going to get with this team, but you know that over a long enough timeline, it'll all cancel out in the ledger.
No one illustrates this better than Bryce Harper. In his first two and a half years as a Phillie, Bryce has been very good to great on balance, but those years have oscillated between stretches at the plate as dry and as hot as a chardonnay in the Sahara. Check his overall slash line at any point, and chances are it's pretty close to his career averages of .276/.386/513. (This year so far: .278/.375/.516.) He's one of the National League's best hitters, but he's a step short of transcendent -- and for what we're paying him (and what we need from a best player offensively), that's not quite good enough. But he is who he is; anytime he seems like he's breaking out as the MVP Bryce Harper of 2015, he'll go 0-4 and get pulled for a defensive and/or injury replacement in the 8th. Expecting more at this point feels foolish.
That's probably the saving grace of these Phillies, though: There is no expecting more. Sure, they're within 3.5 games from the first-place Mets at this point, sure you could talk yourself into them finally getting healthy and discovering a legitimate and potentially lethal closer in Suarez, sure you could look at how tough their early-season schedule was and how much easier their back 74 are and convince yourself they're better than their record. But you're not really gonna do all that, are you? Not after three consecutive late-season meltdowns. Not when the historic ineptitude of their 2020 pen has been taken like a Teen Witch-style "Top That!" challenge by the 2021 squad. Not when this year's slavish devotion to midball has left the team no more than four games over or under .500 at any point this season.
Isn't that terrible, though? Conspicuous inconspicuousness, overpaid and over-labored mediocrity, treadmilled irrelevance with no outs left at either end -- isn't all of this what the Process was fighting against for so many years? Sure. It's bad. The Phillies did have a four-year run of genuine title contention at one point this century, which is certainly more than the Sixers could say, but unquestionably the current Sixers are still in better long-term standing than the present-day Phils, who are more or less locked into this squad for the foreseeable future, without being either young enough to expect dramatic improvement or old enough to necessitate an obvious teardown and rebuild. The Phillies might not be average forever, but the 2020s may be a bit of a write-off.
For me, though, right now? I'll take average. It's not noble, it's not admirable, it's certainly not aspirational. But it's acceptable. Spare me the life-or-death results, the grand-scheme narrative, the What It Means discourse -- just fucking give me something to text with my mom about on a Wednesday night or Sunday afternoon. Give me a team that's competitive enough to not feel like a complete waste of time but not indulgent enough to get you thinking it could be worth something more than it is. Give me sport that never gets me high enough in the first place to ever really crash. Give me .500 ball and I will not ask for more.