Phillies open what may be a long season

If Major League Baseball had a sense of humor, it would declare that opening day will forever be known as Joaquin Andujar Day.

Andujar, for the younger generation, is a native of the Dominican Republic who spent 13 seasons (1976-88) in the big leagues with Houston, St. Louis and Oakland. He was really good for a lot of those years, including 1982 when he helped the Cardinals beat Milwaukee in a seven-game World Series. He was the winning pitcher in two of those games, including Game 7.

"I win or I die," he said beforehand.

His greatest contribution to the game, however, was one word that remains in the baseball lexicon: Youneverknow.

Now you may think that is three words condensed into one, but Andujar, who also gave us such classic lines as "I throw the ball 92 miles an hour, but they hit it back just as hard" and "it wasn't my arm (that was injured), it was my forearm," thought it was one.

"My favorite word in English," Andujar once said, "is youneverknow."

This is the year when youneverknow is the one word for the Phillies and their fans to grasp a hold of as another 162-game marathon begins Monday afternoon against the Boston Red Sox at Citizens Bank Park.

Las Vegas had three teams – the Phillies, Arizona and Minnesota – as the longest shots on the board to win the World Series when spring training opened. By the time it ended, the Phillies held that lone dubious distinction. One online book – vegasinsider.com – lists the Phillies at 500-1. The second longest shot was the Diamondbacks at 125-1.

This might be a good time to tell you the story about the 1984 Chicago Cubs, a team with the double-play combination of Larry Bowa at shortstop and Ryne Sandberg at second base.

Manager Jim Frey's Cubs arrived for spring training in Arizona as a team that had not had a winning record since 1972. They had gone 71-91 the year before and their general manager – a guy named Dallas Green – was more than a little concerned when the '84 team lost 15 of its first 18 spring-training games.

"They kept asking Jim Frey, 'What's wrong with your team?' " Bowa recalled one day during this year's spring training. "He kept saying, 'I got a plan.' He kept telling Dallas, 'I got a plan.' I remember Dallas saying, 'When's that plan going into effect?' We couldn't win a game in spring training. We were terrible. We had an older team, so Jim took that into consideration that it took a little longer for us to get ready."

The Cubs, with the help of a late spring training trade that pried Gary Matthews and Bob Dernier away from the Phillies, won 96 games and reached the postseason for the first time since 1945. Sandberg was the National League MVP.

Youneverknow.

"Stuff just started falling in and we started getting momentum," Bowa said. "You just don't know."

With apologies to Andujar, Bowa and those Cubs from three decades ago, we think we know this time. Vegas has it right. One-hundred-sixty-two games is a long season and this Phillies campaign is going to feel like an ultra marathon.

Even if the forecast for six months of bad baseball is correct, however, the Phillies have to show up for work Monday and every day believing otherwise.

"I think you read about (the rebuilding) philosophy, but you're just competitive," Bowa said. "It doesn't matter who you have out there. It might relax your mind because your expectations are low, so you just say, 'I'm just going to play and whatever happens happens because no one expects us to win.' But I think as an individual you don't go in there saying, 'Oh, we're going to get the (stuffing) knocked out of us.' You're competitive. That's any athlete."

In baseball, you can say youneverknow every day and even the worst of teams will be right on occasion.

bbrookover@phillynews.com

@brookob