Inside the Phillies: These days are better than 'good, old days'

It's a hot mess down at One Citizens Bank Way these days.

As a distraction from the team that is melting away faster than the Nazi's face in the final action scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Phillies offered some blasts from the past the last few days. It started with Brad Lidge's retirement ceremony Thursday night and will culminate Sunday with the recognition of the rambunctious 1993 National League champion Phillies.

It was a lot more fun listening to Danny Jackson, Mickey Morandini, Jim Fregosi, and Lee Thomas reminisce about that enchanted season two decades ago than it was watching the 2013 Phillies play an Atlanta Braves team that has buried them in the standings.

"I just feel it was a ball club that was kind of like the city of Philadelphia," Fregosi said. "They loved the players on that team. They related to them. They liked the way they played. I thought it was just the way they went about things. They gave everything they had."

This current team could use just a sliver of the drive and desire Darren Daulton is displaying in his fight against brain cancer. It's the same drive he had as a player who maximized his ability.

"Whenever anybody talked about South Philly before I came here, they were always talking about how rough it is and everything," Jackson said. "We played rough. I think the fans really saw how we gave everything and did everything we could to really get ourselves out there."

The celebration of the '93 team is terrific and, to be fair, it was scheduled long before the 2013 Phillies took a wrong turn and ended up on a nosedive to nowhere. I could have listened all day to the stories being retold.

That team was something to watch. The '93 Phillies had six players with an on-base percentage of .363 or better and they were shut out just twice the entire season.

This year's team has two players - Kevin Frandsen and Darin Ruf - with an on-base percentage above .350, and neither has 150 at-bats. This year's team has also already been blanked nine times.

"We got off to such a great start that all those fans kind of clung on early," Morandini said. "We were in first place the whole season, I think, from day one. They got on the bandwagon early and never got disappointed."

That, of course, is a stark contrast to what has happened this season, but before we start trumpeting the good old days, it should be noted that they weren't nearly as good as they may now seem. Jackson provided a fine epilogue of the 1993 Phillies.

"We were a close team, and I hated leaving this team because from there on it was never the same," he said. "There was never a team I've been a part of that stayed in the clubhouse for as long as we did and had great times with each other. It never happened again."

The Phillies also paid tribute to the 1983 National League team before Saturday's game. They were the Wheeze Kids, a collection of aging players who made an improbable run to the World Series. Sandwiched between the '83 Wheeze Kids and '93 Wild Bunch were nine seasons of mostly atrocious baseball. After the '93 season, the Phillies went seven more years without a winning record and 14 years before they returned to the playoffs.

At a time when general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. is being ridiculed for keeping the core together too long, it's fascinating to think what Phillies alumni weekend will be like 15 years from now when the team will be celebrating the 2008 World Series title team.

Winning did happen again for this core, even if it wasn't as colorful as Daulton, Kruk, and Dykstra. This, in fact, might be the team's first losing season since 2002. There is only one other 10-year period - 1975-84 - in franchise history without a losing season.

And it's not just the five division titles, two N.L. pennants, and one World Series title that have made this most recent run something to remember. There's Roy Halladay's perfect game and postseason no-hitter, the back-to-back MVP awards for Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins, a perfect save-conversion season by Lidge, two hitting streaks of more than 30 games by Rollins and Chase Utley.

The 1993 season was followed by a black hole, and the only promise from ownership was that things would get better once the new ballpark was erected. It wasn't until 2004 that the Phillies' payroll jumped into the top 10 in baseball.

The 2008 World Series season was followed by three more division titles. Last year was bad and this year has been worse, but it's not such a bad thing to have the general manager stand up and say, "My job is to make sure we are contenders every season."

Don't be fooled by the good old days. Even in this bleak time, the 21st-century Phillies are a lot better off than the franchise was for most of the previous century.