The silence started in the stands, an all-consuming quiet that seemed to swallow everything. As a pile of tangled bodies formed on the third base side of the field, tens of thousands of fans stood in the stands at Citizens Bank Park and stared into the cold October night. An hour later, the silence had enveloped the Phillies clubhouse. As a throng of media members shuffled from locker to locker, a 33-year-old pitcher sat slumped in an office chair, a blank expression on his face.
It was last Oct. 7, a Friday, and for the second straight year, the Phillies' season had ended on a night when I did not have a sports section to write for. Working for a newspaper that does not publish a daily paper on Saturday or Sunday has its disadvantages. But it also affords you the ability to move at your own pace. As the rest of the reporters grab their sound bites and scramble back to the press box to file a story on deadline, you have the rare opportunity to stop and process and wonder. And on this particular night, as the Phillies prepared for another offseason of discontent, I wondered about the silence.
I thought about the silence emanating from the locker in the corner of the clubhouse, about the thoughts and emotions that had to be running through the mind of the future Hall of Famer who sat there alone. If the gods had granted Sisyphus a few moments to pause and reflect after each trip back to the bottom of the hill, I imagine they would have seen a person who looked a lot like Roy Halladay, eight months of sweat and ache suddenly erased.
But even more than that, I wondered about the silence in the stands, about the thoughts and emotions that had to be running through the minds of the sell-out crowd that stood there and watched the Phillies 1-0 loss in Game 5 of the National League Division Series, eight months of anticipation suddenly rendered moot.
And I wondered: How long will this last? Throughout the regular season, I had noticed a different level of energy among the fans at Citizens Bank Park. On several occasions, I had discussed this change with ticket-holders who had followed this Phillies team from its formative years through its World Series berths to its current elite status. And the majority of them agreed: something was different. They would look around the stands at first pitch and see plenty of vacant blue seats. They would do the same in the ninth inning of games, even some games in which the outcome was in doubt. The crowd was arriving later and leaving earlier, and never really reaching the fevered pitch that accompanied each pitch when the Phillies were a team on the rise.
Without a doubt, the economics of success bear some of the blame. What at first is a product for true aficionados eventually becomes a product for those who want to be associated with the aficionados, until one day you wake up to see your father wearing skinny jeans and your grandmother attempting to figure out how to change the screen saves on her MacBook. Demand drives prices sky-ward, until even the truest of aficionados wonder whether another Sunday afternoon at the ballpark is really worth sacrificing the $80 that their tickets can fetch on StubHub.
The economics of success are the reason that Phillies pitchers and catchers reported to Clearwater today with two of the pitchers making more than $20 million - and a third on his way. But I believe the economics of success are far less interesting than the psychology of success, about the impact of five division titles and three league championship series and two World Series and a regular season win total that has increased every year since 2007.
When Brad Lidge's slider and Eric Hinske's feeble swing sent Citizens Bank Park into bedlam in October 2008, it brought to an end an almost-three-decade trek, one that was supposed to satisfy once and for all the insatiable appetite of a city that had spent 28 years waiting for its name to be called. But the top of the mountain is a cold and unforgiving place, a reminder not only of the heights we can reach, but also of the limits we face. We are a city that glorifies underdogs, from Rocky Balboa to Vince Papale, a city whose most famous landmark has a crack running down its side. We are not used to success, and part of me thinks that we are happiest when expectations are lowest, when victory is accompanied by the satisfaction of kicking dirt in the faces of all those who doubted us. All of which leads one to an honest question: Do you, the Philadelphia sports fan, still enjoy the games like you did in 2007 and 2008 and 2009? Do you cheer like you did before the Phillies had the second-highest payroll in the sport? Do you savor every moment like you did before they became every pundit's preseason pick to win the World Series?
Maybe you do. But it is fair to at least wonder which side will struggle most to reset itself for another six months of pre-postseason baseball: the team itself - or its fans.
As much as this city craves another baseball championship and the affirmation it brings, there is no sport less suited for the "second place is the first level of hell" mind-set of the Philadelphia sports fan.
Football is a war, a series of campaigns to be plotted and executed a celebrated en route to the ultimate goal. You can lose yourself in the battle. Baseball? Baseball is an expedition, a slog. And as we have learned over the past two seasons, it can be a crushing one if your sole fixation is the ultimate goal.
If the last four years have taught us a little something about success, it's that no matter how much we swore we'd live in the moment, the only real constant is the need to do it all again. And it's not a stretch to wonder if the optimism of 2007 and the unbridled joy of 2008 has transformed into something else, a sort of fear. Maybe that is what winning has become for us, not the noble objective of yesteryear but a screaming desire that we need instead of something for which we hope. Maybe that is why, after a Game 2 loss to the Cardinals in the NLDS, short stop Jimmy Rollins shared his opinion that the crowd was "too quiet."
Even on the eve of the six most optimistic weeks of any team's season, fans still can't turn their attention from the shadows to the sun. The perception of the Phillies is that it is a team on the decline, and if that is an accurate diagnosis, then it is fair to wonder whether the front office really did much to reverse the natural order of things this offseason. A leftfielder with a .289 on-base percentage has been replaced by a left fielder with a .299 on-base percentage. An elite reliever has been replaced by an elite reliever. A lefthanded pinch-hitter whose body prevented him from playing much at first base has been replaced by a lefthanded pinch-hitter whose body might require a golf cart just to get him there.
If you are looking for justification for your trepidation, there is plenty to find. In leftfield is John Mayberry Jr., who at 28 has yet to log more than 300 plate appearances in a season. At second base is Chase Utley, who has missed 106 games over the last two years, and whose production has dropped steadily since 2009. At third base is 36-year-old Placido Polanco, he of the surgically repaired abdomen, and surgically repaired elbow, and troublesome back. And at first? Who knows, at least for the first two months, the minimum amount of time Ryan Howard is expected to miss while recovering from surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles tendon.
And yet, for all the shadows, there is still plenty of sunlight. Since 2007, every Phillies season has featured more wins than the previous one, from 85 to 89 to 92 to 93 to 97 to a major-league best and team-record 102 in 2011. Few teams have managed over the past two years to match the accomplishment of the front office, which has rebuilt the roster from a group of young mashers to a group of dominant pitchers without a pause in the team's ascent to the top of the league.
Maybe there's no joy in the journey when you've already reached the promised land. Maybe the road is paved in peril, not gold, the comforting warmth of possibility replaced by the all-consuming dread of unrealized expectations.
Then again, maybe the challenge is on us. Can we enjoy it? Can we take pleasure in simply going to the ballpark on a pleasant May afternoon, even while knowing that whatever happens that day will have a chance to be rendered meaningless in a five-game series four months later?
Can baseball still be that six-month case of summer love, when every moment is new and exciting and accompanied by the feel of imminent discovery? Or are we so fixated on the summit that we have lost some appreciation for the journey? "One always finds ones burden again," Camus wrote of Sisyphus. "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."
The greatest era of baseball in Philadelphia is still upon us. In a little over one month, the struggle will again begin.
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