Being a helpless fan in the world of the Philadelphia Phillies offseason remains the most constant struggle with reality and dreams. You hear upper management preach every October about how they will do whatever they can to make their team better for the following year. You listen with hope, a former lights-out Houston Astros closer is traded for, and they tell you they will do “whatever it takes” to resign their best free-agents-to-be.
And then you wait.
And you wait some more, but you hold out this belief that this will be the year that they actually go out and do it.
Phillies GM Pat Gillick failed to get anything done at the Winter Meetings in Nashville this past week. Maybe what he meant to say a few months ago was that he was going to retire after the '07 season, and not '08.
Maybe it is the constant mudslinging campaigns seen on television which coincide with the end of the World Series that make you noddingly approve at the television screen when Pat Gillick and Dave Montgomery look you in the eye and say, “We have no budget restrictions on who we can go out and sign.”
Or, maybe the “Gang of Six” ownership really is that invisible because an hour or two later, you hear that they will not go over $100 million in payroll but you never know exactly who it is coming from.
But why do we do it to ourselves? Why do we allow ourselves to be suckered in by these people every year with the hope that they will actually pull something out of their hat? Why do 40,000 people walk through the turnstiles every season when we despise the ownership?
Maybe Philadelphia really is a passionate baseball town after all. That is no surprise, since the Eagles are going south and we all know as soon as that happens, everyone flies out of the nest until they are good again.
It has to be our passion. There can be no other explanation. No other town can sit through what we sit through every winter, as Rule 5 after Rule 5 player are signed; old, broken-down bullpen “help” is scrapped off of the heap; and six starters sounds like a good idea.
That is right, six starters, because even the ownership knows that the five they start with never make it to the end. Ownership never does their homework (see: Freddy Garcia, Jon Lieber, and about 300 others).
All of this hope and hurt is nothing new either. The 1993 Phillies went out and did the same exact thing after their half-hearted attempts to sign Kirby Puckett past his prime (another shocking courtship), and David Cone in the preceding offseason. Instead, they treated us to throwback players as is their custom and they just so happened to get away with it because of the players will to succeed.
Unfortunately, we, the fans, are forced to sit idly by on our hands knowing that there is no way Aaron Rowand will be in centerfield next season for this team. We sit knowing that a trade for Johan Santana just does not happen around here. We sit knowing that Alex Rodriguez would be our every day third baseman…if his name were Alex J. Rodriguez instead of Alex E. Rodriguez.
And I’m sure we will hear how the team just made another $15 million+ profit this season.
Harry Kalas has it correct whenever he says that the Phillies have the best fans in baseball. To fathom and swallow what this organization does every year to win in spite of themselves is gut-wrenching and disheartening. I do not care to hear about sticking by your team through Billy Goat curses, Bambino curses, or anything else. At least those teams go out and say they will sign as many great players as they can no matter what the cost is and they go out and do it.
In Philadelphia, not only do they lie to you, but sometimes, they get to pop champagne while they do it.
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