Charting the Phillies’ Course Amid the Swirling Trade Winds (Again)

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STOP ME IF you’ve heard this before, but has there ever been a more frustrating good baseball team than the current Phillies?

Granted, it’s a question that could have been asked for the last five seasons or so: A highly paid, very talented, seemingly well-balanced — and, it must be said, mostly likable — club wins a fair number more games than it loses, yet still sits on the periphery of the sport’s elite. There are the Dodgers, and then there’s everyone else. Or so it seems.

The Phillies are, as they’ve been for a few years now, what they are: A streaky offensive team that, when they’re swinging the bats well, can rack up impressive strings of high-scoring wins. An uncommonly sharp collection of starting pitchers capable of seven innings or so of dazzling stuff that gives even the slumpiest of offenses a puncher’s chance. A whole whose admirable chemistry makes it greater than the sum of its parts.

The flip side is equally true. When the offense — a collection of gifted but uneven hitters — goes cold, low-scoring one-run losses pile up. The bullpen is hair-pullingly hit or miss, as capable of striking out the side as they are of walking the bases loaded. (Sometimes in the same inning.)

In first place at the All-Star Break, the Phils started the second half of the season by wasting two dingers by Bryce Harper and another from Kyle Schwarber. A wobbly start from Jesús Luzardo and (repeat after me) a bullpen failure cost the club in a 6-5 loss to the Angels.

And so with less than two weeks until the trade deadline, the Phillies face what seems to be their perennial question: How much of the future to swap for the present?

It’s easy to squint your eyes and envision Justin Crawford filling a gap that has existed for too long – an outfielder who can hit with consistency. Scrunch them up a little more and there’s Aidan Miller at third, the solid but hardly spectacular Alec Bohm having been flipped for relief help or prospects or both. In the distance is Andrew Painter working through his Triple A woes and stepping in to fill the post-Zack Wheeler void.

Young players offer payroll flexibility and new energy. They are also unproven, as likely to discover that The Show is a hell of a lot harder than it looks on MLB Network as they are to shine.

And that’s what makes all of this such a crapshoot. It’s why Dave Dombrowski and Preston Mattingly have the jobs they do, and we don’t.

Good luck, gentlemen. | DL

Checking in on Philadelphia’s Boys of Winter

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WHILE THE EAGLES, midway through their season, appear to have righted the ship, their South Philly neighbors in the Wells Fargo Center are very much works in progress as their campaigns unfold.

What’s fascinating is how they’re trending.

The 76ers endured their time as basketball exiles, tanking for multiple seasons, drafting high-level first-rounders, and proceeding along what they smugly referred to as The Process. Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey developed into legitimate stars, but their supporting cast was a revolving door of studs who either didn’t fit in or were allowed to walk, and role players whom the front office prayed, futilely, could be more than their prior careers indicated. A string of early playoff exits brought us to this season, with Paul George the latest hoped-for complement. Injuries have taken their toll; Embiid, Maxey, and George have yet to be on the court at the same time, and the Sixers are a last-place 2-11. 

The news that Maxey called out Embiid in a team meeting for being late “for everything” is both encouraging and troubling. Encouraging because Maxey is likely to be in Philadelphia for longer than Embiid or George, and the team will need his leadership in the coming years. Troubling because Embiid has almost 200 million reasons to show up for work on time – to say nothing of showing up in shape to play.

No one expected anything much from the Flyers, and thus far they haven’t been disappointed. That said, while the Orange and Black are a mediocre 8-9-2, the vibe is thoroughly different. After years and years of signing aging, high-priced band-aids, the front office seems committed to a bottom-up rebuilding based on nurturing young talent and compiling a roster that can grow together into something sustainable. The team has been upfront about doing things the right way, a welcome transparency after decades of fruitless coasting on a pair of Stanley Cups fifty years ago. Whether they accomplish anything before the roster inevitably tunes out perpetually acerbic head coach John Tortorella remains to be seen.

At this point, the 76ers are struggling to make a whole out of their parts. The Flyers look to be on their way to a future whole that is more than the sum of theirs. | DL

Shy, Eagles, Shy: Don’t Look Now, But the Eagles Are an Understated First-Place Team

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WE’RE FAR ENOUGH into the Eagles’ season to draw some conclusions.

The Birds aren’t as bad as those wobbly first four games indicated. And they’re not as good as the recent demolitions of the Cowboys, Bengals, and Giants suggest.

Chalk up the unimpressive 2-2 start to new game plans on both offense and defense. The Eagles changed coordinators in the off-season, with Kellen Moore and Vic Fangio brought in to clear the rubble from last year’s collapse. But Nick Sirianni didn’t play any of his starters during the preseason, so there was no chance for either side of the ball to gain in-game experience with their overhauled schemes until Week 1 of the regular season. The rust was evident. 

Since then, things have looked a lot more cohesive. Saquon Barkley has been as good as advertised – and often better. A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert have, when healthy, shone. Jalen Hurts, like the team he quarterbacks, regained his equilibrium after those first four games and has performed reliably, if not at the elite level of a couple seasons ago. Both lines have been solid. The defensive secondary, boosted by impressive play from rookies Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean, looks better than it has in years, and DeJean has breathed new life into the punt-return game.

At the same time, even in the blowout wins, there have been signs of trouble. Hurts still has a tendency to hold onto the ball for too long, and he remains turnover-prone, though he has tightened that up. The D has gotten some lucky breaks, most notably at the end of the Jacksonville game, when a last-minute interception in the Eagles’ own end zone helped prevent an embarrassing upset at the hands of the Jaguars. And Sirianni and his coordinators can get too cute at times with their play-calling, as if seeking to demonstrate their own cleverness instead of taking the sure out.

The Chiefs are undefeated, the Bills, Steelers, and Ravens are acquitting themselves well, the Lions are the NFC’s darlings, and the Commanders are the surprise of the league. At 7-2, the Eagles feel like the NFL’s quietest first-place team. After that start, I’ll take it. | DL

Fact-Checking My Response to the Election

~ Tom ~ 1 Comment

He won. Fair and square.

Well, maybe not fair. Vladimir Putin and his red army of bots had a thumb on the scales. Elon Musk offered to pay people to vote for him. And the media ignored his obvious cognitive implosion while spending weeks eviscerating President Biden for far, far less.

Regardless, he won. And there will be no insurrection in January when Congress convenes to certify the election results, because Democrats believe in the rule of law. Unlike the other party.

I’m not a political scientist, and I don’t have the stomach for endless hot takes about Joe Sixpack’s heartland authenticity.

I want to stick to facts. And the facts are these:

He is a convicted felon.

He is an adjudicated rapist.

He is a self-admitted sexual abuser.

He incited a murderous mob to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

He admires dictators and autocrats.

He trivialized a catastrophically infectious illness that killed more than a million of the citizens whom he had sworn an oath to protect.

He mocks people with disabilities.

He insults soldiers, sailors, and marines who have died for their — for our — country. He insults their grieving families.

He is a tax cheat.

He stiffs contractors.

These are not opinions. These are facts.

If you voted for him, you decided that none of the above points — to say nothing of the sad, damning entirety of them — was a dealbreaker.

This, too, is a fact.

In voting for him, you made a transactional choice. You chose what you think will be a healthier paycheck over morality and decency.

Again, a fact.

So don’t you dare lecture me about character or values or virtue. With your vote, you told the world that those things don’t matter to you. 

I’ll leave it to the economists to sort out over the next several years whether your transaction has paid off. I get that lots of people are hurting economically. I get that it’s a hell of a lot easier to vote for the guy who tells you it’s not your fault. It’s those other people who are to blame, the ones “coming to steal your jobs,” as if you ever had any intention of doing those backbreaking, low-paying jobs in the first place, as if the inflation that drove up prices wasn’t the direct result of the guy’s utter and indifferent failure to deal with that illness I mentioned above with even a modicum of competence.

But the political is the personal, right? And here’s where it gets personal to me.

That guy, the one you’re putting back in the Oval Office, and the people aligned with him politically who will hold the majority in the House and Senate, and the Supreme Court justices in the ideological majority? 

The policies they intend to enact, uphold, and enforce will put the health, wellbeing, and safety of my daughters and nieces at risk. 

They will cause immense suffering to people whose only transgression is to look different, to speak different, to worship different, or to love different.

They will hasten the environmental decline of a planet whose rapid, human-caused climate changes are destroying lives and property with increasing, explosive, savage regularity.

They will widen what is already a morally corrupt gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Those are dealbreakers for me.

And that’s a fact. | DL

… Aaaaaaand We’re Back

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IN THE TWO YEARS, nine months, and twenty-one days since new pixels last appeared here, the Phillies lost a World Series, a League Championship Series, and a League Division Series, the Eagles lost two wild-card games and a Super Bowl, and the Flyers and 76ers just … lost. 

One of my daughters spent a semester in Ireland and returned to earn her bachelor’s degree; the other visited Paris for a couple of summer weeks and started her senior year of high school. 

The country readied itself, once again, for an election between an eminently qualified, mentally balanced, service-oriented candidate and a monstrously cruel, laughably uninterested, demonstrably fascist one.

I started a new job and began writing a new novel. 

And on and on and on.

Through all of it, a couple of constants: First, I’m at my best when I’m creating – whether here or in the notebook in which I’m writing longhand fiction or in the gorgeously papered journal where I process my shit. Second, I’ve neglected this most important part of myself of late – and I need to get it back.

So let’s get it back. | DL

Wake Me When an Owner Goes Yard

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WITH MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL’S most recent collective bargaining agreement having expired, and negotiations on a new CBA stalled, the league’s owners have imposed a lockout on its players. Instead of an off-season filled with trade rumors and free-agent signings, we are forced to read about revenue sharing, minimum salaries, luxury taxes, and the like. MLB has even taken the absurd and childish step of scrubbing all references to current players from its and its teams’ websites.

The knee-jerk reaction, and one I freely indulged in when the players went on strike during the 1981 season, is predictable: “These men get paid truckloads of money to play a kids’ game, and they have the temerity to demand more? How dare they!”

An important stipulation here: Yes, compared to other, more essential professions, many (most?) professional athletes are wildly overpaid. Cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers — teachers especially — are among those whose responsibility for the well being and health of a functioning society demands that we pay them more. The grotesque absurdity of a ballplayer raking in tens of millions of dollars a year while teachers have to reach into their own pockets to provide basic supplies for their students is a searing indictment of our society’s prioritization. Obscene doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Here’s the thing, though. The bigger obscenity, by far — and that’s saying something — is sports owners’ unbridled greed. They attempt to squeeze every last penny out of every last player, not caring or even noticing that their wallets grow ever fatter by the year. And you want to talk about a failsafe investment?

In 2000, David Glass purchased the Kansas City Royals for $96 million dollars. Over the next 20 seasons, the Royals were among the worst teams in baseball, making the playoffs just twice, losing 100 games or more six times, and finishing last in their division seven times. Yet just over two years ago, Glass sold the Royals for a reported $1 billion. That is a one-thousand-percent markup if you’re keeping score at home. I’m neither a sports economist nor a labor expert, but if you ask whether it’s the owners or the players whom baseball’s money structure benefits more, the answer is inarguable. And it’s not just baseball.

Baseball is my first and best sporting love. I have watched it literally for as long as I can remember. I have gone to countless games, worn the t-shirts and caps, contributed mightily to the owners’ coffers with many, many purchases of laughably overpriced beer and tepid hot dogs. And in precisely zero instances have I parted with my heart or my cash because of who owns the team.

Ruly Carpenter, Bill Giles, and John Middleton are the names at the top of the Phillies’ org charts over the years, and bully for them. But my allegiance and love belong to Mike Schmidt, Greg Luzinski, Steve Carlton, Larry Bowa, Tug McGraw, Garry Maddox, Pete Rose (I know, I know), Gary Matthews, Al Holland, Sixto Lezcano, John Kruk, Darren Daulton, Curt Schilling (I KNOW, I KNOW), Jim Eisenreich, Terry Mulholland, Mitch Williams, Scott Rolen, Mike Lieberthal, Jim Thome, Aaron Rowand, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Cole Hamels, Carlos Ruiz, Brad Lidge, Roy Halladay, Rhys Hoskins, Aaron Nola, J.T. Realmuto, and Bryce Harper. They belong as well to every last fringe player, every utility infielder, fifth outfielder, left-handed relief specialist, and set-up man, every guy who had the smallest cup of coffee in red pinstripes.

They’re the ones I’ve lived and died with. They’re the ones I’ll always live and die with. So more power to them. Spare me the tears for the miserly, rapacious sharks who sign their checks through gritted teeth with one hand while counting their towering piles of dough with the other. | DL

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Blurbers

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WITH RAVES FROM OUTLETS ranging from The New York Times and The Guardian to The New Yorker and NPR, I expected to be wowed by Rachel Cusk’s trilogy-opening novel Outline. I knew going in that this is an unconventional book, and I’m not huge into experimental(ish) fiction, but the wide-ranging praise convinced me to give it a try.

Cusk’s work follows a novelist traveling from London to Athens to lead a weeklong writing workshop. Beginning with the protagonist’s interaction with a seatmate on the flight to Greece, we get ten chapters’ worth of conversations between her and others she encounters. A colleague; her students; the seatmate again; and so on. The writing is compelling, and Cusk’s observations frequently piercing and incisive, but there is barely a plot and no conflict to speak of. I kept waiting for something, anything, to happen to make me interested in the characters. It never did.

With so much applause directed its way, I readily acknowledge that Outline may be a book that is simply over my head. More discerning readers than I called it among the best novels of the year it was published. Regardless, I found it more peculiar and frustrating than trenchant, and I am content to pass on Transit and Kudos, the second and third books in the trilogy, while I read other books more to my liking. | DL

Wake Me When It’s Over

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EARLY ON IN these pandemic days of ours, I wrote about how crushingly tired I felt all. the. time.

The hourly fluidity of the situation is terribly draining. And even if you try to consume it in small doses, the relentless torrent of pandemic-related news gives rise to an ever-present nervousness that buzzes quietly in the background. Keeping the buzz at bay requires mental bandwidth, and expending bandwidth seeps energy. I feel exhausted just about all day long.

Then came the summer of 2020, when we were able to get outside and see friends. We gained a greater sense of risk management — of knowing which activities were more dangerous than others. By the end of that year, vaccines were being distributed — an astonishing scientific and public-health feat. Last spring my family and I got our shots, and by early summer, infection numbers were plunging.

The delta variant squashed our optimism for a while. Again, though, the caseload eased. The finish line was in sight.

Cue omicron.

Graphs of infection rates show a near-vertical line over the last couple of weeks. Event cancelations are rampant. Like many others, I’m back to fully remote work for now. For the first time, people I know (and care about) have tested positive (despite being fully vaccinated). As in those first several months, I am venturing out only when I absolutely have to.

And the exhaustion has returned. All day long, I am utterly, hopelessly, helplessly consumed by fatigue, both mental and physical. I can’t concentrate or focus. My mood alternates among sadness, fear, and rage.

And I know I’m not alone. Usually that helps me. Now … not so much.

Are we ever going to get this right? | DL

With a Mid-Season Change in Approach and a Late-Season Kiss from the Football Gods, the Eagles Are In

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Credit: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

SHOW OF HANDS: Who had the Eagles in the playoffs when the season began?

Okay, all of you with your hands in the air, put ’em down. We all know you’re lying.

With a rookie head coach, a new coaching staff, an untested second-year quarterback, and the frenzied turmoil that came with the firing of the franchise’s only Super Bowl winner and the trade of its disgruntled shoulda-been franchise QB, the Birds were a mess before a down had even been played. Things only got worse as the team nose-dived to a 2-5 start that included much-derided remarks by the new coach that compared his players to … plants.

Give Nick Sirianni credit, though. He held onto his locker room during those dark days and, just as important, was willing to change his gameplans to play to the team’s strengths. Out went the throw-at-all-costs scheme and in came a run-the-ball-down-your throat approach that paid huge dividends. The Eagles pounded and pounded and pounded the ball for several games, giving their defense a break and opening up more space for Jalen Hurts to take advantage of run-pass opportunities. Over the last few games, Hurts, hobbled by an ankle sprain, has thrown more, and has looked better doing it. Even then, the run game has been solid, despite Miles Sanders’s absence.

The Eagles have won seven of their last nine and, thanks to help from the 49ers and Packers, clinched a wild-card spot without even having to defeat the hated Cowboys this weekend. Has it helped that the Birds’ second-half schedule has been cotton-candy soft? Of course. But how many Eagles teams have we seen over the years roll over on cupcakes they should have devoured? Sirianni’s club is taking care of business, and that’s no small thing.

Even the news that the news that a dozen players were placed in the NFL’s COVID-19 protocol earlier today lacks its expected sting. With the playoffs a lock, it’s hardly the worst situation for the likes of Jason Kelce, Dallas Goedert, Fletcher Cox, and Rodney McLeod to get a week’s rest ahead of the postseason. Sure, they and the others could be back in time for Saturday night’s tilt against Dallas, but if not, no biggie.

Surprise successes are the sweetest kind, and this Eagles season is ending like a brownie sundae. Yes, a loss in the wild-card round is likely. Spotting good teams 10 first-quarter points is not how you win playoff games, and whatever QB the Eagles’ soft-coverage defense faces will be exponentially better than the second- and third-stringers it has feasted on recently. No matter. The Eagles are a playoff team in a year when no one thought they had a chance.

No, not even you. | DL

A Great Book About Mars NOT Written by Andy Weir

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THE FIRST CLUE that Sarah Stewart Johnson’s 2020 science memoir, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, is something special is right there on its cover. Above the matter-of-fact subtitle, “Searching for Life on Another World,” sits the work’s evocative, lyrical title: The Sirens of Mars.

The pages that follow bear witness to the title’s poignancy. In prose that is both poetic and clear-eyed, Stewart Johnson intertwines her journey from Kentucky schoolkid to Ph.D. planetary scientist with the history of the pursuit of evidence of life on the Red Planet. These chronicles are necessarily connected; Stewart Johnson began contributing to NASA’s Martian missions while she was a grad student and hasn’t stopped since.

From the debunked canals to failed launches to the dazzling success of the recent rovers, she lays out where we’ve been, where we are, and where we might be going. Stewart Johnson also shares about her experiences as a woman in a male-dominated field, and of how she immersed herself so deeply in another world that she sometimes lost her place in this one. She writes all of it with language as lucid and beautiful as the Martian vistas we have been privileged to glimpse in recent years. | DL