Categories: Opinion

The Phillies have lost our trust, and there’s only one way they can ever get it back

Bryce Harper went 0-for-7 in the final two games of the NLCS. (Photo by Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire)

“Two more wins” was the mantra the Phillies clung to all season. It was their North Star, their 11th commandment, and as the team grew more and more into its Team of Destiny stature, its realization felt increasingly inevitable.

It’s a mantra that hindsight now deems painfully ironic, because “two more wins” is precisely the point in the NLCS at which the Phillies disappeared.

The Phillies have lost our trust. They deserved it up until the very end because of what had taken place the previous two Octobers, up to and including three days before the first Game 7 in franchise history. With the series already having spiraled from a 2-0 bloodbath into a 2-2 chess match, the Phillies decided on Saturday that enough was enough. They took care of business in convincing fashion, moving one win away from the World Series and resuscitating the feeling of inevitability that had dried up across two games in Phoenix’s desert heat. It was a moment in which the Phillies’ far superior talent seemed to insist on the difference between true World Series contenders and Cinderellas.

There was a feeling they’d do something similar in Game 7. Even after the Phillies lost Game 6, their third loss in the past four games, a disheartening no-show that was about as convincing as Game 5 was the other direction, the Phillies deserved our trust.

They were winners. They became winners during last year’s postseason run, which ended in disappointment not because the Phillies “choked” away a 2-1 World Series lead, but because they were simply overmatched by the Houston Astros. They’d done enough before that series to establish themselves as winners, a descriptor that previously could only have been applied to the organization satirically from October 2011 through September 2022. And they continued being winners this postseason, making quick work of the Miami Marlins and 104-win Atlanta Braves before rising to the occasion — dicey though the series had become — in Game 5.

Were. They were winners.

Now? It’s hard to justify that term anymore. The NLCS was a matchup of two teams on different tiers in both talent and postseason experience. The team of the higher tier led 2-0, then 3-2 with two chances at home to win their second straight pennant.

Any path from 2-0 or 3-2 lead to NLCS defeat would, unambiguously, represent a collapse.

So the Phillies collapsed. And if history — last year’s postseason run, plus the two series of magic they manufactured this October — was a valid reason to trust them in Game 7, the same logic must apply moving forward. The next time the Phillies seem to be coasting toward another alcohol-infused clubhouse party, it’ll be hard not to look back on the 2023 NLCS, hard to ignore the sense of dread

the memory conjures up.

The Phillies have had two straight golden opportunities to reach the promised land and have failed to capitalize on either. Even if last year’s improbable run out of nowhere was always just the appetizer, the Phillies were supposed to follow through this year with the main course. They were past the honeymoon phase, the days of “just happy to be here.”

At some point, the job must be finished.

Maybe next year, the mantra grows by three. “Five more wins.” But until Rob Thomson asks J.T. Realmuto how many victories remain in the Phillies’ ultimate countdown and the answer is zero, there’s no longer any reason to trust it ever will be.