Baseball season is in full swing. You can tell because if you listen closely, you will hear me cursing the ownership of my favorite team for not spending enough in the offseason. Freaking John Middleton. My beloved Philadelphia Phillies hold a less than sterling 13-15 record. In their last two games video review robbed them of potential wins. A bright light exists for them, however, just as it did for the Eagles last year. The NL East has underachieved leaving the Phils one game out of first place in the underachieving NL East. If they management had shelled out for a half-way decent outfielder, a good fourth pitcher and a big name in the bullpen I could only imagine that they’d hold in first place by a country mile. But these complaints fall on deaf ears to all but the most loyal of homers, someone who spends too much time thinking about spin rates, OPS+, and how my boy Scott Kingery saw his potential destroyed through bad coaching.
Of course, most people reading this do not count themselves part of the Phillies’ fanbase, or if I had to wager, fans of baseball in general. So, let me explain the most basic aspect of being a fan of the Phillies. They usually suck. As in they often play very bad baseball and lose a lot of games. In fact, they have lost more games than any sports team in any of the American Big Four: hockey, basketball, football, and baseball. Part of that comes from the fact that they have existed as a team for a while. They hold the record for longest tenured same city/same name team in American professional sports. They beat out every other American sports team in the race to lose 10,000 games. Of the original sixteen teams that made up Major League every other team won a World Series before the Phillies. They have also never made it to the playoffs via the Wild Card, unlike every other team in the MLB, even the freaking Marlins have done it. They have a long history of suckitude is what I’m saying.
I didn’t know all this when I first became a fan. I don’t think it would have stopped me from following the Phils. I spent most of my pre-middle school years in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an area firmly in the grasp of the Philly sports media. The news inundated me with information about the Phillies, the 76ers, the Eagles, the Flyers. Sisyphus himself would have an easier time rolling his stone than turning me against those teams. Neither of my parents had a team to foist upon me so the Phils stood alone. The power of the sports page turned me into a Phillies fan. Noam Chomsky was right about manufactured consent. The long history of Phillies losing would not have been a deterrent. Stories and pictures of the exploits of guys like Mike Lieberthal, Doug Glanville, and Scott Rolen held more sway to an 8-year-old kid than talk about a bunch of losses that happened back in 1904.
I was actually lucky in that I came into my maturity as a Phillies fan when experienced a pretty remarkable streak of good luck. My senior year of high school saw them win their second World Series. They almost repeated the next year, barely losing out to the Yankees. The years before that had seen multiple MVPs, Cy Young winners, huge wins, fun players, and lots of playoff games. The Phils rode a hot streak. They had drafted well, paid the right free agents at the right time, and now reaped the rewards. Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Cole Hamels, Pat “The Bat” Burrell, Shane Victorino, all these guys and more played fun, exciting baseball. Roy Halliday, Roy Oswalt, Cliff Lee all became household names for me. I started to expect the Phillies to compete for the chip every year, or at least make the playoffs. This expectant attitude did not last. The Phillies, once so dominant that Sports Illustrated gave them multiple covers a year, fell apart. The stars that once led the team found new contracts elsewhere or started to find that they couldn’t keep up the production of earlier years. The organization stopped getting lucky in the draft, started getting the wrong free agents at the wrong time. Stopped spending money on good players. They haven’t reached the playoffs since 2011.
Despite all that, despite mismanagement by the various GMs, despite incompetent coaches, despite ownership determined to treat the Phillies as an investment vehicle ripe for arbitrage rather than a team focused on winning, I’ve stuck with the Phillies. This doesn’t really say anything good about me. There exists a strain of thought in sports fandom that people should pick one team and stick with them no matter what. I think that’s stupid. If your team sucks or does something bad or won’t get rid of their racist mascot stop following that team. Pick a new one. Plenty of teams play in the MLB, and with the internet watching whatever game you want doesn’t present a challenge. So, my refusal to become a fan of a fun a team like the Dodgers is more an issue of my own bone headedness than a virtue like loyalty.
I guess here is where I would usually opine about the benefits of being a fan of a team that loses a bunch. How it prepares you to deal with loss in your personal life or how it makes the victories that much sweeter. That’d be pure Grade-A bullshit however. Having your favorite team lose a bunch sucks. Every spring I get far too excited for the potential of the season. I have delusions of grandeur about a prospect who is about to be called up, or a pitcher looking to make a comeback, or the possibility of a slugger returning to form. It never really happens. Even when they do win, a rare enough case, the first thought is always “well why couldn’t you do that every other night?” No, having to watch your favorite team lose a bunch isn’t a good thing.
So why do I keep coming back? Well, you do grow attached to your favorite players. Watching Bryce Harper throw out a guy at home from right field, or Rhys Hoskins hit a bomb is a pleasure no matter whether they win or lose. Seeing Zach Eflin figure out his sinker and make a name for himself is awesome. It’s those little things that keep me coming back. Just how baseball is a game of centimeters, being a Phillies fan is a matter of little pleasures. And there’s nothing wrong with that.