Will the Phillies Ever Feel Like the Sixers?

The Phillies are dominating this year, and it's beautiful. But will we soon hit the "but can they do it in the playoffs?" point we've gotten to with the regular-season Sixers?

30-13 -- it's a real good record for a baseball team, man. Hell, it'd be a real good record for a basketball team, in a sport where the best teams are actually supposed to win 2/3 of their games. But in baseball, where that happens maybe once or twice a decade, to post a 70% winning percentage through the first quarter of the season is a pretty crazy thing. That's what the Philadelphia Phillies have done through their first 43 games this year, the best start in baseball, the franchise's best start since their 1993 pennant season. Considering how even in their last two playoff runs, the Phils were looking up at mediocre until June, being this good this early certainly feels... special. Unique. Relaxing. 

In fact, the most remarkable thing about this Phillies team is the lack of stress associated with watching them. They haven't won a lot of games 13-2, but in most of their wins, they get ahead early, their starting pitching holds it down as the offense expands the lead through five or six, and then the bullpen does just enough late to finish the job. There's about as much agita watching this team as there is in catching an Entourage marathon on HBO. Even when they had to come from behind against the Mets on Monday night, in a game I actually went to -- whole lotta Phillies fans at Citi Field these days, by the way -- I only felt actually put out by the team once, when Alec Bohm made what felt like his first defensive flub of the entire season at third. Then when they roared back into the game in the ninth and ahead in extras, it wasn't like it was cathartic or mind-blowing or even all that exciting. It was more Oh word, the Phillies actually win again? Sick. Unexpected, but not shocking. 

I don't know if this Phillies team is actually that much better than this year's Sixers. They're obviously playing a little over their heads right now, and they haven't had a series against a demonstrably good team since they hosted the Braves to open the season. Part of me strongly suspects there's a 13-30 stretch coming for them soon. Another part of me believes they may never lose again. But regardless, this team plays like they still have something that the Sixers will likely never have again: the benefit of the doubt, and the freedom from history's weight. From how it looks right now, they might have it for the foreseeable future. 

Of course, they played this way for a good deal of last year, too. But then in the playoffs, the worm turned: Their home invincibility came crashing down in nut-smashing fashion as they dropped Games 6 and 7 of the NLCS to the Arizona Diamondbacks in Philly, turning what everyone had assumed to be a World Series run into an embarrassing punk-out. It was a decidedly Sixers-y end to the season -- and we had to wonder if our lovable locker-room louches weren't starting to let their Broad Street neighbors' playoff personality rub off on them a little, and if watching them would start to feel similarly exhausting and emotionally loaded the next season. 

So far, so nope. Winning helps, of course -- hard to feel too spiritually encumbered by a team that hasn't lost a series since the first week of the Drake-Kendrick Lamar feud -- but the Phils just don't seem to really carry last October with them. Sure, there was the requisite preseason talk about unfinished business, and I don't doubt they care about winning into November this time. But it's just not baked into everything they do. It's not visible on Bryce Harper's or Zach Wheeler's face the way it has been on Embiid's for years now. And watching them, you can still just go Holy shit these Phils are good and fun without mentally stipulating but just wait until it all comes crashing down in the playoffs again. 

It also helps, of course, that despite the team mostly retaining its core the past three years, it still feels pretty fresh. That's largely due to the fact that it still has guys who are on the rise, and are currently taking the next step to stardom. In fact, they have three different players who could claim to be their Tyrese Maxey this season: Alec Bohm, potential batting champ and no-longer-hating-it-here third-base vacuum, Bryson Stott, who feels like he's maybe a year or two away from being the team's best all-around player, and Ranger Suárez, who might be the best pitcher in the NL through eight starts. None are really young -- Stott is the baby of the bunch at 26 -- but there's nothing more rejuvenating in sports than an already-good player elevating beyond their perceived ceiling, leaving you wondering what heights they may still have yet to hit. I was scanning the Mets' lineup last night and they didn't have a single player who was over-achieving for the season, a single guy who was obviously better than he was last year. That's when sports really gets to be a drag, when your present isn't quite good enough and you have no real reason to assume your future won't be worse. For the Phils, to get to mix in rising talents with our established All-Stars is an absolute blessing. 

And then there's Nick Castellanos. Maybe no player better demonstrates the inherent difference between the Phils and the Sixers than Casty. By now, he should really be on his way to being the Phils' Tobias Harris: He signed a five-year deal, disappointed right away, occasionally gets blazing but never stays that way long, and has cold spells brutal enough to more than compensate for his hot streaks (including in the playoffs). At the moment, he's got an OPS under .600 for the season, and he needed a nine-game hit streak to even get within striking distance of that number. But even with the occasional CBP boos, he's still among the most beloved guys on this team, and an essential part of their larger personality. As bad as he gets, I would never consider clamoring for his benching or trading; Castellanos is occasionally just useless for months at a time and that's fine. Unlike Tobias, his finest moments will always endure as his most memorable, and everything else we just kinda accept, like a friend who's annoying a lot of the time but you would still never dream of not inviting along whenever the rest of your group is going out. I would be heartbroken to see him playing anywhere else. 

Is Maxing Out a Guy in His Mid-to-Late 30s Really the Answer?

In general, you just kinda trust that everything will be fine with this Phillies team. Easier to say when you're 30-13, of course, but even when the Phillies were limping along at 8-8 in mid-April, it didn't seem like anything to actually worry about. Stott and Harper were slumping to start the year? they'll be fine. The bullpen blew a couple games early and had a muddy overall hierarchy? It'll be fine. Trea Turner has now lost six weeks to a hamstring injury? His backup replacements will be fine. Partly that's credit earned by two straight playoff runs that have lasted longer and gone farther than any the Process Sixers have managed, despite both eventually ending sub-optimally. And partly that's just a team that's a fundamentally good hang, a team that never seems to be in crisis, a team that knows who it is.

Partly it's also just baseball. It's harder for the regular season to get overwhelmed by the playoffs in baseball, just because there's so damn much of it, and because everyone sorta acknowledges by now that postseason baseball is mostly just a crapshoot anyway. The Diamondbacks weren't really the best team in the NL last year, just like the 88-74 Phillies that snuck into the 2022 wild card weren't actually a stealth juggernaut just waiting to be unleashed. In basketball, if you lose one too many times in the playoffs, it really says something about you. In baseball, if you keep losing, most often it just means that you've got to do another 162 games of work to give yourself another shot to get hot again next postseason. And just because the Phillies are starting the season off like the best team in baseball doesn't make me any more confident that things will end better in the playoffs this year; if anything, the post-2008 World Fucking Champs Phillies conditioned me to believe that the more dominant a team is in the regular season, the more likely it is they'll flame out in October. That's just how it is in the sport: Get in, and anything can happen. Some years that works in your favor, sometimes it goes the other way, but neither direction is ultimately that meaningful. It takes a lot of losing in the MLB playoffs to actually get branded a loser. 

It's also a structural thing within the teams. Aside from the occasional Mitch Williams (or I guess now  Craig Kimbrel), in baseball, the responsibilities of failure never fall to just one or two guys; it gets shouldered pretty equally among all 25 dudes, so none of them have to really wear too much of it around their own neck. Harper is really the only guy who feels at any level of risk of developing a rep for Never Winning the Big One, of having to answer to more than just It's Baseball, Shit Happens. But will it ever be as bad as it is with Embiid currently -- where everything he does now, no matter how spectacular, is refracted through the lens of but can he do it in the playoffs? It's hard to picture it.

Does that mean that this team can keep losing in the playoffs indefinitely and still remain just as cheek-pinchable the next regular season? Maybe not. You'd hate to see this team turn into a punchline, which enough consecutive playoff exits can eventually turn you into. The Braves were at worst the second-most-successful franchise in baseball from 1990 to 2005, and even won a World Series in '96, but when you think of that period of Braves baseball you mostly think of how they went 15 years without missing the playoffs and still only went all the way once. You think about all the times they've lost in the NLDS, right up to present day, even with a second championship added to the mix. The Phils could start to get to that territory in a few years, and eventually it may start to wear on them. Maybe it starts to wear on us. Maybe management starts to think the team needs some changes. Maybe the vibe shifts. Nothing lasts forever in sports. 

The Best Moment for Every Sixers Player This Season

But will the stakes for postseason success ever be as high as they currently are for the Sixers, and the regular season as consequently in its shadow? I sorta doubt it. They're just not playing for the same things. Joel Embiid is not only playing for his legacy every playoffs, he's playing for Sam Hinkie's, for that of the whole Process. He's playing to prove that the years we invested in getting him here and building a team around him -- one that's shape-shifted countless times already, but one that still can largely be traced back to the assets and players we acquired through the earliest tanking years -- were not for naught. He's playing for an entire era of Sixers basketball, to show that it wasn't all just a waste of time. He's playing for us being right, y'all, even when it spends a decade going wrong. 

The Phillies, on the other hand, are mostly just playing for each other, and for us. Because they like each other and they like playing with each other and they like doing so in front of us. They've already given us more than we really ever asked of them; hell, just making the playoffs in 2022 was a massive unburdening after a whole decade without postseason baseball. As disappointing as it will be if this core never wins it all, just because we love them and we want the best for them, it can't really feel like a failure because we never really demanded or expected that level of greatness from them in the first place. Of course, that also means that if the Phils ever do win it all. it won't be nearly as rapturous, as eternal, as entire-existence-validating as a potential Sixers championship. It'll probably be more like  Oh word, the Phillies won the World Series? Sick. And like this 30-13 start to the season, that'll be fun too. 

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Andrew Unterberger 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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