Last year, the Phillies’ postseason run felt like a dream that the Houston Astros interrupted two games before its completion.
After limping into October, and then igniting a ninth inning rally in the opening Wild Card game, the team caught fire and blazed a path into the World Series with little resistance. As the sixth-seeded underdogs who effectively snuck into the tournament, the organization could still temper high expectations, knowing it had likely overperformed and ridden the good vibes to their bitter end.
That led to an ambitious offseason. The Phillies and their fans had gotten a taste of playoff baseball after 11 years of waiting and knew a few more pieces might finally let them uncork a fifth bin of champagne. Dave Dombrowski began to spend, securing shortstop Trea Turner to a long-term contract, adding starting rotation depth with Taijuan Walker, and bolstering the bullpen with veteran relievers Craig Kimbrel and Gregory Soto. The 2023 season would have much greater expectations — it wouldn’t be enough to simply make the playoffs.
Throughout the fits and starts during the first half of the season (the Phillies began the year 25-32), and for specific new players with lucrative contracts (Turner looked lost at the plate and in the field), the expectations seemed to backfire. But a familiar hot streak in June, and then a personal renaissance in early August refocused their efforts. Instead of whimpering through the backdoor of the tournament, the Phillies finished September strong (the team went 9-2 over an 11-game stretch to solidify the first Wild Card seed) — they were motivated, but most importantly, they’d experienced this path before.
It’s made all the difference in this year’s postseason. After three games in the NLCS, Phillies pitchers have produced a collective 1.47 ERA throughout the playoffs (the lowest ERA in the first nine games of the postseason since the 1983 Orioles) while the lineup had begun making history, slugging over .500 thanks to 19 home runs in just eight games. This could have been an October to tense up, to lose the vibes that had fueled them the previous season and crack under the pressures of returning to their ultimate destination. Instead, the Phillies have thrived under the spotlight. It’s become their defining trait.
How? For starters, hurdling the highs and lows of last year — not to mention playing within the exhilarating and addicting atmosphere of Citizens Bank Park — has eased any perceived adversity for the vast majority of the team’s returning players. Down the stretch, the Phillies have looked more like a himbo family than a team of baseball players, exuding an affection and love for each other that has allowed trust and confidence to flourish. Everyone picks each other up, even when things go wrong and the team struggles to replicate its offense night after night.
“I think the cool thing about our team is we all have fun,” Aaron Nola told reporters after throwing six shutout innings against the Diamondbacks in Game 2 of the NLCS. “We don’t look at super-pressure games, super-pressure situations. We like those, but the way everybody meshes with each other, I think it all takes that pressure off. We all pull for each other. Nobody is selfish, as you can probably see in the dugout. I think that’s what makes our team good.”
Nobody exemplifies the team’s calm in the height of drama more than Bryce Harper. Time and again, in the biggest and brightest moments, the newly-minted first baseman has managed to make the game look easy, starting rallies, tying games in the late innings, or providing leads at crucial moments. In these tense at-bats, it seems like everything slows down for him, like he enters another dimension of consciousness, allowing him to deliver everything he’s promised since he jumped onto the scene as a teenager.
In some ways, he’s prepared half of his life for these moments. After a prolific youth baseball career, which landed him on the cover of Sports Illustrated at 16 years old, “The Chosen One,” as the magazine dubbed him, dropped out of high school, earned his GED, and enrolled in Junior College. He was baseball’s LeBron James, and in 2010, he felt he needed to be drafted first overall. “If I’m not, I’m a failure. I’m the failure. I have to get my family out, take care of them, do the things I can to just take care of them forever,” Harper said on “The Pat McAfee Show” last week. “That’s the pressure, right? That was the pressure. ‘I have to be the No. 1 pick.”
That feeling has stayed with him, supplying him a unique perspective on the sport he loves. The playoffs might appear to have massive stakes, but Harper’s 30,000-foot view has been able to erase some of their inherent weight.
“This is cake,” he said of playing postseason baseball. “This is what it’s all about. This is the fun part of that. Going out there and playing in front of 45,000 people and harnessing that energy into hitting a baseball. Letting the game come to me and not worrying about anything else, not worried about the outside or the inside, just worried about what I can control.
“The pressure is all behind me. This is what I love to do.”
Of course, this no-pressure mentality will be tested ahead of Game 4, as the Phillies attempt to recover from their ninth-inning loss in Arizona. But based on the way they fought back against the Braves after losing a game they let slip away, this team seems up for the challenge. Consider Rob Thompson, whose unexpected thrust into the manager’s seat in the middle of last season revitalized the Phillies, mostly by extending his even-keeled nature throughout the clubhouse.
“I was going to retire a couple years ago,” Thompson said in a recent press conference. “So there’s really not much pressure on me right now.”
