Jimmy Rollins walking it off in the bottom of the 9th with two outs in Game 4 of the NLCS was not the best thing the Phillies ever did. It wasn't like they won the World Series with that swing (they would go on to lose to the Yankees in '09); it's not even like they won the NLCS with that swing (they'd win the series the very next game in deciding fashion with me and my pops behind home plate).
But regardless of the long-term importance of that moment, Jimmy Rollins' playoff heroics here, to me, epitomize what it means to watch EXCITING BASEBALL.
And it's been a long time since we've had an extended period of exciting baseball here in Philadelphia.
It feels like a long time, anyway. We can trace the Phillies current woes to the start of the 2012 season, when Roy Halladay won a 1-0 Opening Day game, and it went downhill from there. That's seven full seasons of losing baseball. Which, true, isn't THAT long. But it's almost my entire 20s. I'm thankful for those halcyon days of Phillies in my teenage youth, but I'm growing old and gray, and I'm ready for some good baseball again.
So here we are, on the precipice of the 2019 Philadelphia Phillies Season. Game time is 3:05 PM today. I'll be leaving work at 1:30, biking home, connecting my laptop to my TV, bootlegging an MLB broadcast, and cheering on as the Phillies open their season. Hopefully their first winning season in a while?
Because, you see, the Phillies are actually expected to be good this year. This isn't a "rebuilding" team any longer. In the off-season, we got stacked with All-Stars. King Harper chose Philly as his kingdom, we traded away a bunch of youngsters for maybe the best catcher in baseball, a dude I used to hate on the Pirates is now a dude I love on the Phillies (both the hate and the love were because he was so damn good), Rhys Hoskins can move back home to 1st base, etc. etc. Pitching questions marks aside, we have a great fucking team that can actually score runs. It's really exciting, you guys!
This excites me, and it scares me too. There are expectations, and if this team fails to meet those expectations, then the pain will be far more brutal then, say, a 2018 team that overachieved and then crashed violently back down to earth in September. If we don't make the playoffs this year, it will be a colossal failure of a season. I'm nervous.
But mostly excited. Baseball is back! Let's do this shit! Go Phillies!
1 comment:
I'm not a huge fan of misspelling things on purpose, so I didn't make the title of this post "It Is Phinally Opening Day," sorry to all those disappointed.
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