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2023 NLCS Dbacks vs Phillies

WBT

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JoePos:

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We haven’t talked enough here about the lovely, awe-inspiring “Why We Love Baseball” story surrounding Trea Turner this year. The story goes a little something like and there’s a drive into deep left field by Castellanos, it will be a home run, the story goes a little something like this.

Trea Turner was a full-blown disaster for the first four months of the season. It wasn’t just a slump. It was like he had forgotten how to play baseball. On Aug. 2 in a game against the Marlins, Turner went 0-for-5, hit into a double play, and in the 11th with the Phillies an out away from victory, he let Josh Bell’s ground ball go right through him to score the tying run. The Marlins won in the next inning. Turner was despondent. After the game ended, even though the time was approaching midnight, he went into the batting cage to try and find himself.

“Obviously, I’m the reason we lost the game,” he said, and nobody disagreed. The Phillies were running out of ideas. Manager Rob Thomson rested him on consecutive days, just hoping the break might clear his head. Thomson then dropped him down to seventh in the lineup in the hope that would help. But nothing was helping. Turner, who won the batting title in 2021 and was a lifetime .300 hitter coming into the season, was hitting .237 with a .291 on-base percentage. This was lower than rock-bottom; it was subterranean. Nobody thought it was even possible for Trea Turner to play this badly.

Now, Philadelphia fans have a reputation. It is one that, having numerous friends who are Phillies/Eagles/Sixers/Flyers fans, I sense they carry with both pride and scorn. That reputation is they are the meanest, foulest, nastiest, toughest and most vicious fans in American sports, the fans who famously booed (and threw snowballs) at Santa Claus, the fans who never warmed to their greatest player, Mike Schmidt, the fans who got into a huge parking lot fight in the movie “Silver Linings Playbook.”

When I say that Philadelphia fans, at least the ones I know, are somewhat ambivalent about this reputation, I mean that they think it’s wildly exaggerated (I’ve heard numerous times about how the Santa Claus story was entirely overblown and the Schmidt feud was not nearly as big a deal as people made it) but I also think, yeah, Philly fans will carry some pride being considered the toughest. Nobody wants to be the SECOND-TOUGHEST fan base. In any case, they had been booing Turner mercilessly — boos that, honestly, he would have heard no matter where he signed for $300 million — but after the Miami fiasco, something changed, and that something seems to be the brainchild of a Philadelphia social media guy who goes by the name The Philly Captain.

“Hi,” he says as he introduces his YouTube channel. “I’m the Philly Captain. … I go into the neighborhoods, I tell you all the good things and the bad things about the city I love, Philadelphia.”

I mean — I like him already. He’s got a great Philadelphia accent. He loves his town. He would undoubtedly tell you where to go for the best cheesesteak, and he wouldn’t let you go to some tourist trap. I want The Philly Captain to be my friend.


Anyway, after that Miami game, The Philly Captain put out a 37-second plea to fans from his car that went like this:

 

Now, I don’t know the full reach of The Philly Captain, but he wasn’t alone … various Phillies fans donated money to the V Foundation on Turner’s behalf, and other social media influencers got on the idea of giving Turner a standing ovation. Sure enough, the day after the Miami game, fans did cheer him every time he came up in a 7-5 loss against the Royals. Turner got an RBI single in the game.

The next day, more Turner cheering, and he got two hits, including a double and a homer, and he drove in four runs as the Phillies beat the Royals 9-6. He was so touched by the crowd’s support that he all but teared up, and he got a hit the next day, and the next, and the next, and two hits following that and two more hits following that, and he homered the day after that and he got three hits the day after that and three more hits the day after that and …

“Thank you, Philly,” Turner said on a dozen billboards that suddenly popped up around town.

From Aug. 4 to the end of the season, Turner hit .337/.389/.669 with 16 homers and 9 steals in 48 games. In the six postseason games this year and there’s a drive into deep left field by Castellanos, it will be a home run, Turner is 12 of 24 with four stolen bases and two home runs, one of those on Thursday in the game that knocked out the Braves once and for all.

It’s the stuff of movies, right?

 

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