The 2023 Philadelphia Phillies Are So Weird And Stupid That They Might Just Win It All

Optimism does not come naturally to Philadelphia sports fans. I know because I have been one for my entire life. Every little sliver of hope is often dashed by a crushing defeat or bad vibes. Look at the Sixers right now, with the reigning MVP and a bouncy young emerging star both getting dragged through the muck by the James Harden fiasco. Look at the Eagles, too, who are undefeated and loaded with talent and still make every game feel as exhausting as a marathon. (Follow some Eagles fans on Twitter if you need proof of this.) It’s making this Phillies season very weird. The vibes are entirely too good. It’s all kind of unsettling.

Another thing making it weird is that the whole team is… well, weird. They’re just a collection of dinger-smashing dirtbag himbos who do things their own way, the history of baseball and general logic be damned. Start at the top. Literally. Start at the top of the lineup, in the leadoff spot, a role generally reserved for fast little slap hitters who get on base and steal bags and is filled on this squad by Kyle Schwarber, a big beefy boy who looks like a guy who drives a truck that delivers hoagies to the clubhouse and sometimes opens the game by doing stuff like this.

It’s incredible. The Marlins have a leadoff hitter, Luis Arraez, who hit about .350 this year on the back of a zillion slapped singles, and the Phillies roll out a dude who hit 47 home runs and 48 singles and whose batting average didn’t even crack .200. Pretty much all he does is draw walks, strike out, or hit home runs. Sometimes the home runs go halfway to the moon. It’s great. Look at this guy.

The whole team is like this, in a way. Just a collection of weirdo characters. There are games where Schwarber starts in left field and he isn’t even the team’s weirdest outfielder. It’s hard to take that crown when there are guys like Nick Castellanos in right field, with his shirt unbuttoned halfway to his navel doing stuff like this.

To be clear, this play was madness. Catching the ball was ill-advised at best, with a runner on third ready to tag up and score what would have been the game-winning run. The quotes about it all after the game drive this home and help convey what a collection of goofballs we have out there.

“Drop it,” manager Rob Thomson said.

“I already told him that I had to be honest,” Garrett Stubbs said. “I was screaming at the top of my lungs to drop it.”

“I saw him not get behind it,” Bryson Stott said, “and I said, ‘Oh crap.’”

There is a voice in his head, Castellanos said. “Usually he just pops up when I’m hitting. You know? Like, don’t take this 2-0 pitch.” The voice does not sound like Scooby-Doo. He heard the voice as he moved toward the foul ball with one out in the ninth inning and the winning run on third base. “Catch it,” the voice said. “Throw him out.” Castellanos did it with a flourish, a spinning motion that resulted in a perfect throw home. It was both wrong and lucky.

Two things worth noting here…

ONE: It’s delightful to picture a professional athlete making decisions from moment to moment based on what a voice in his head is telling him.

TWO: That reference to Scooby-Doo in there was not random. It’s a callback to earlier this year when Castellanos was asked who his favorite superhero is and backed up his claim like this.

I mean… he’s not wrong, right? You have to love a silly outfielder who is guided by voices and makes you rethink everything you know about possibly stoned cartoon dogs. And he’s having a great influence on the other starting outfielder, Johan Rojas, a 22-year-old defensive phenom who has also been unbuttoning his shirt like he’s in a Miami nightclub in 1986. With the blessing of Castellanos. Look at these guys.

The background here is that Castellanos told Rojas he needed to loosen up more when he got called up straight to the majors from Double-A after some injuries, and unbuttoning seems to have helped, because the kid has been setting centerfield on fire in his time in the majors. Here’s a decent rundown of what he’s accomplished out there.

Rojas is challenging how defenders are measured in modern baseball. It’s best to ignore small samples. Rojas, obviously, is a talented defender who makes it look easy. He does things others cannot. But, entering Monday’s game, he had accumulated 14 Defensive Runs Saved. That ranked 14th among all fielders this season — and Rojas had played only 310 innings in the field. It’s an astounding rate. Rojas has broken the metric.

Or not.

“No,” Marsh said, “I don’t think it’s crazy. I mean, the dude had 11 Defensive Runs Saved in August. Right? You don’t see that.”

Marsh had the number right.

And here’s the best part of that blockquote: Brandon Marsh, who said those glowing things about Rojas, is the guy who basically lost his job to the new guy. Marsh went from starting centerfielder to platooning out in left because Rojas has been so damn good, and he seems actually kind of thrilled about it. This is what I mean about the vibes. They’re borderline immaculate. Here’s what Marsh did the night the Phillies clinched a playoff berth on a walkoff single by Rojas.

I mean… come on. How can you not root for these guys? What are you, some kind of Mets fan? Be serious.

The weirdness doesn’t stop in the outfield either. The team’s $300 million shortstop, Trea Turner, started out the year with a five-month slump before getting an extended “we got your back” standing ovation from notoriously fickle Philly fans and then hit about .350 with 16 home runs over the next two months. Their first baseman, Rhys Hoskins, last season’s bat-spiking playoff hero, tore his ACL in spring training and has been replaced by Bryce Harper, who returned from Tommy John surgery faster than anyone in history and learned a new position with no rehab stint in the minors and promptly returned to smashing game-winning home runs in the playoff push. The catcher, JT Realmuto, hits 100 points higher on the road with no good explanation why. The second baseman, Bryson Stott, moved there from shortstop without complaint when the team signed Turner and looks like Dax Shepard and showed up to the Little League Classic with a bat designed to look like a number two pencil. I love him very much.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, as if all the weird and positive energy in Eastern Pennsylvania weren’t firing itself like a laser beam into Citizens Bank Park, we also had this happen in the last week of the regular season.

What we have here, via bullet point:

• Phillies rookie reliever and minor league pitcher of the year Orion Kerkering making his major league debut
• Striking dudes out like freaking Mariano Rivera
• While his dad, a former Marine, drops tears and snot out of his face about it in the stands

It was the cutest damn thing I’ve ever seen. As was the article about it the next day.

“I guess it was just seeing the kid,” Todd, who is 59, said Monday morning. “I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of good things. I’ve seen a lot of ugly things in my life. I guess maybe it’s a culmination of all those things through life and, you finally reach a point when you get to something that is just unbelievable. I mean, there are 900 guys roughly in the MLB right now at that level. And he’s one of them. You know? I mean, I don’t know. It’s just what came out.”

He scanned the text messages from his Marine friends. They know Todd and some of them know Orion. They understood.

“I got tears in my eyes, too,” one told him. “Don’t worry.”

And so, again, the optimism. It’s an odd feeling. Especially since the team refuses to be normal. No lead is safe, for any team, when the Phillies are on the field. This season alone they’ve blown an 8-1 lead and come back from an 8-1 deficit. I’m actually more comfortable when they’re losing, sometimes, because I have more confidence in them making a comeback than holding a lead. I am equally as sure they are going to win the World Series as I am they are going to blow the next two games by a combined score of 24-3. Anything can happen. It’s… I mean, it’s nerve-wracking and it’s exhausting but it’s also a great time. I love my bomb-blasting boys. I love my tear-stained dads. I love my…

Wait.

Alligators?

This is real. His name is Wally. Yes, I researched this.

Wally, who will be 4 in July, was rescued from just outside Orlando when he was 14 months old. Henney said Wally could grow anywhere from 14 to 16 feet long and weigh 900 to 1,100 pounds. Wally eats chicken wings and shares a 300-gallon plastic pond, indoors, with Scrappy, a smaller, younger alligator the family has also rescued. Wally’s favorite programs to watch on television, of course, are Gator Boys and Swamp People. He also likes to watch The Lion King.

Scrappy watches what Wally watches.

What I’m getting at here is that there is a non-zero chance we are screaming toward a scenario where Kyle Schwarber holds an emotional support alligator named Wally as the Phillies World Series parade makes its way down Broad Street.

I deserve this.

Wally deserves this.

We all deserve this.

Go Phillies.