The Philadelphia Phillies: When Good Enough Is Finally Good Enough
We had just one goal for the 2022 Phillies: get to the playoffs.
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes 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.
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Sports fans, even Philadelphia ones, are often more reasonable than we're given credit for. Our hopes and dreams may be outsized -- as well as our fears and anxieties -- but our actual expectations tend to be fairly grounded. We all want our team to win the championship every year, but only a small percentage of us are afforded the luxury of actually getting disappointed if they don't do it. The rest of us end up being more modest with our goals. And ultimately, we just want our teams to be as good as we believe -- think, feel, know -- that they are.
The Philadelphia Phillies are not a great baseball team, a fact that becomes abundantly clear pretty much any time they have to play against a great baseball team. They are arguably not even a good baseball team, as evidenced by their breathtaking helplessness against lower-middle class teams like the Cubs and the Giants. What they are, though, is a good enough baseball team -- good enough to be the sixth-best baseball team in the National League in the first year where six teams get in the playoffs, and thus good enough to bust what for a whole three days had been the longest postseason drought in all of baseball. This year, with this team, that means that good enough is absolutely good enough.
And for a minute there, good enough looked like it might have once again been a short porch too far for the Philadelphia Phillies. We all saw the "Lost [big number] of their final [slightly bigger number] games" graphics circulating about the past four seasons of Phillies baseball, each of which seemed at some point like it might've ended with a postseason berth and each of which actually ended in... well, "heartbreak" would probably be too strong a word for teams none of us truly believed in, but disgust, anyway. When this year’s Phils went 3-6 against the Blue Jays and Braves and then got swept by the Cubs, it looked like we might've been headed to a fifth straight late-season collapse, as the team got tighter and tighter and their Wild Card lead dwindled to peanut sweepings.
But the thing that mid-nuclear meltdown Phillies Twitter seemed to forget was that a true end-of-season collapse takes two: one to completely fall apart and one to step over the shattered remnants. If the 2007 Phillies hadn't first come into their own as future playoff perennials down the stretch of the season 15 years ago, then the 2007 Mets would've just been another division winner limping to the finish line, rather than a group of shameless chokers soon to be totally disassembled. And if the 2022 Phillies had a gnarlier team nipping at their heels than the 2022 Brewers, who hadn't played consistently better than middling since early summer, then maybe the Cubs sweep would've been the death blow it was proclaimed to be. Instead, the Brewers were never able to get in front of the failing Phillies, and after a 3-1 series against the Nationals capped with a beautiful win last night in Houston, they are behind the Fightins for all time.
And that was the other thing Phillies Twitter wasn't giving the team enough credit for: No matter how inadequate the team proved all season against the highest-level competition, the one thing they showed the ability to reliably do time and time again was beat up on the cellar dwellers. They were staggeringly proficient against the league's worst, particularly once Rob Thomsen took over in the dugout; before last night, they'd gone 27-7 against the Marlins and Nationals in the Topper era and played exactly .500 ball against everyone else. It's not exactly the stuff of Jimmy Valvano speeches to make the playoffs on the back of your performance against glorified Triple A squads, but in the past that's been what's separated the Cancun-bound Phillies from the teams that actually made it to the postseason -- and indeed, if the Brewers weren't busy dropping three of four to the Fishmen while they were taking three of four from the Nats, the Phils' clothes and locker room would undoubtedly be a whole lot drier this week.
Really, the most surprising thing about the Phillies making the playoffs has to be the way they clinched: It was dramatic and cathartic to make the postseason on the wings of a soaring near-perfecto from our long-September-suffering ace Aaron Nola, on the road against an elite Astros team showing up (mostly) in full effect despite technically having nothing to play for. But it would've been much more authentic to this Phils squad if their ticket was punched in the eighth inning of an eventual loss because Milwaukee could only muster one run against the Diamondbacks with their season on the line. The Phillies never had to run faster than the bear to get to October baseball, they just had to run faster than the team next to them. And even at their worst, the team that they were all year seemed good enough to do that.
Again, you probably don't get to raise a banner, literally or metaphorically, for crumpling across the finish line as the sixth-best team in your half of the majors. But from the first time it seemed like an actually reasonable proposition, we had just one goal for the 2022 Phillies: get to the playoffs. Didn't matter how, didn't matter when, didn't matter what came of it from there, but after 11 years of creeping up the standings of teams with the most years sans postseason appearance -- and with those last four years being especially unkind -- the most important thing was just crossing our names off that list. Getting Nola and J.T. Realmuto and Rhys Hoskins and Jean freakin' Segura their first taste of postseason ball. Having something to show for 10-plus years of disintegration and/or rebuilding. Saving us from feeling like total horse's asses for allowing ourselves to believe that this year, things would finally end differently.
And the fact that they actually did so is a big deal -- especially because, as Sixers fans, we know all too well what it is when modest expectations aren't met. We know what it is to compromise our goals for a team to handicap their chances to get out of the season still in our good graces, and for them still to go "actually, nah." We know what it is to say OK they don't have to win the championship this year, but please just at least just get to the conference finals for once. At least don't let Jimmy Butler get the satisfaction of dominating against us. At least take a game or two from Boston. We know what it is for "at least" to still prove too much. And what it is isn't just disappointing, upsetting and angering, it's also actively humiliating. It makes you feel dumb for caring in the first place.
I don't feel dumb today for caring as much as I have about this Phillies team. I feel vindicated for keeping the faith in them staving off total catastrophe, even as fellow fans were (understandably) taunting me with Charlie Brown football-kicking memes. I feel excited to witness them as part of this year's postseason pageantry -- the preview columns, the commercial montages, even the "Red October" branding -- even though I wouldn't bet on them even hanging around long enough to make it back to a home game at Citizens Bank Park. And I feel satisfied that the sorta pretty good team that I watched all year turned out, 160 games into the season, to actually be sorta pretty good, even if that may be as good as it ever gets for them. We'll worry about championship contention again when the Sixers season starts in earnest in a couple weeks. For these Phillies, just being who we thought they were is plenty.