The 2023 Phillies: A Pretty Chill Hang Where Everything Will Probably Turn Out OK
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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This is usually around the time of the year where, at least temporarily on pause from the dread, panic and all-consuming bad vibes that have followed the prior three Sixers playoff exits, I kick back with a nice tall glass of writing about the no-stakes Phillies. At around this time the last handful of seasons, the Phillies found themselves somewhere between mediocre and very very slightly above average with little hope of growing into anything more anytime soon; the playoffs were hardly more than a hey wouldn't it be funny if consideration. It was fun, honestly; they gave me 162 games of entertainment -- well, 162 games of distraction, anyway -- without really expecting anything in return. Compared to [gestures with partial eye roll, as if to say "those fucking guys"], life with the Phillies was easy like Sunday morning.
But then: the playoff run. The Phillies surged in late July and early August, and got just good enough they actually kinda had to make the playoffs. They did -- barely -- and then y'all probably remember what happened next: Jean Segura seeing-eye single, Rhys Hoskins bat spike, Bedlam at the Bank, That's What's In. The Phillies didn't win it all, but they won enough that they would actually have something to defend this year. Throw in a reinvigorated fanbase, an offseason spending rush, and a preseason Hoskins injury to get everyone all Do It For Johnny'd up, and expectations for the Phillies this season were exponentially higher than they'd been any year since Ryan Howard lost his leg and Chris Carpenter lost his shirt at the end of the 2011 season.
So given all this, obviously the experience of watching and following the Phillies has become a Sixers-like doomscroll of anxiety, fear and cowardice, right? Nah. It's still pretty low-key, actually. Kinda nice.
It's tough to explain why. Vibes are pretty much the most overrated thing in sports, as least when they're understood as cause rather than effect: Generally speaking, teams that win have good vibes and teams that lose don't. There are degrees of course -- some losing teams can still show a certain camaraderie through the growing pains, and some winning teams can still seem kinda flat in their enthusiasm even after their Ws -- but 99% of the time, if you're looking at good or bad vibes as the reason why a team is doing well or poorly, you're looking at it backwards.
I couldn't say with confidence that the 2022 or 2023 Phillies are in the exceptional 1% for that. But the vibes for this team... well, they're maybe just a little more resilient and unflinching than most. There might be some individual frustration -- I'm sure Trea Turner in particular has had some crawling-in-his-skin moments over the past couple months, as his protracted slump began to look more and more like a lost season -- but it doesn't appear to infect the collective. Which isn't to say they seemed to enjoy being seven games under .500, as they were just a couple months ago, but even when everything was going wrong back then, it still felt like all it took was one thing to go right for them to turn back into the lovable lunks that enraptured the city last October. The real signs of decay setting in -- the no-hustle moments, the quotes questioning the coaching staff or one another, the players-only meetings -- never totally materialized.
And the fan response seems to be in turn. I mean, not on Twitter or on talk radio, of course -- you'll still get the accusations of fraudulence, the calls for Thomson to be fired, the general panic that this team hasn't shown enough to be worth upgrading at the trade deadline and of course Middleton and Dombrowski probably aren't really gonna do anything there anyway. But at the park? Still looks like a pretty good time to me, anyway. The fans didn't seem to give up on the team when the early results weren't there at all, and they don't seem overly reactive to a mini-losing streak now either. There's a sort of default arrogance that's set in around this team that's reminiscent of the '09 squad: That team was a lot better, a lot more accomplished, and a lot smarter than this team, but the last part of that kinda ends up offsetting the first two and resulting in the feeling around the two being close to equivalent.
I think beyond the collective meatheadedness of this bunch, the biggest reason for the steadiness in vibes is that, while the team is still nominally split into the vets and day care, everyone is basically somewhere in the creamy middle of their career. Bryson Stott is the youngest as a second-year guy, but he's also already 25 and plays older; meanwhile, no one else but (the surprisingly resurgent) Craig Kimbrel among the regulars is older than 33. There's no kids to piss everyone off, no old guys to get crotchety about anyone not taking the game seriously enough to risk blowing a Last Shot at This Thing -- but still enough of a range between so that everyone stays on their toes. It also helps that there's a sorta small range of how good everyone is: no one's having an MVP-caliber but no one (outside of Turner, taking this year's Nick Castellanos role as the bad-karma sponge) is totally shitting the bed either. There's expectations with this team, but there doesn't seem to be real burden yet, and whatever burden there is divvied up among the 15 or so most relevant participants until it doesn't afflict one of 'em all that majorly.
And me? I'm chilling, boss. Yeah, I get a little anxious when the team loses four in a row, or goes two weeks straight of spotting teams a 3-0 lead by the second inning, or somehow turns a two-out, bases-empty, 0-2 count into a crisis situation. But at the end of the day? I think they'll probably be fine. They lose a couple this week; they'll probably win 'em back. They slip to a game behind in the Wild Card standings; they'll be a game over again soon enough. Bryce Harper can't hit home runs anymore? He'll walk a bunch and get some late-game hits and he'll be fine. Moon schedule says it's time for Aaron Nola to have his monthly disaster start? Guess that means it's probably about time for Taijuan Walker to go seven strong, too. Trea Turner looking like he's at the start of one of the worst contracts in Phillies history? Bryson Stott being the greatest second baseman in the history of baseball (or at least since Chase Ultey) will absolve all of that. I just feel like one way or the other, this team's gonna work it out. They have so far. They may as well keep doing so.
Of course, this is all easy to say at this point: The team is still just in Year Two of actually mattering, bathed in the afterglow of one of the most unlikely world series runs in MLB history. Another disappointing postseason end and that all could vanish for next year, the team's charming insouciance curdling into mere immaturity and laziness. Hell, the playoffs themselves are far from guaranteed with this bunch -- even with seven spots available and the Mets and Padres both a couple losses from pulling the final ripcords on their catastrophic seasons, there's still a very non-imaginary chance this team's season ends on October 1st.
But I don't think it will. And it's not so much that the Phillies have earned the benefit of the doubt as it is that they haven't earned the, uh, detriment of the certainty? Unlike the Sixers, who have given us six years of evidence now that they aren't really worth having faith in when the games matter most, we just don't have to feel that way with these Phillies yet: There's no real reason to believe that the floor is always seconds away from opening underneath them. And it works the other way, too -- we haven't given the team any reason yet to assume we'll ultimately give up on them, either. The relationship between us and the Sixers has been damaged in such a way that's it hard to know if we'll ever be able to fully trust one another again, but with the Phils we can still feed off each other, learn from each other, make one another better. It's a near-totally satisfying relationship -- one that makes that oncoming anxiety, fear and cowardice of the Sixers season really feel like the start of the school year after these long, relaxing and romantic Phillies summer nights.