The Philadelphia Phillies have made the playoffs.
The Phillies Clinch A Playoff Spot: What Now?
Insert a pause here for dramatic effect and to allow the reader to gather his or her thoughts at this stunning development.
The Phillies have made the playoffs for the fifth straight season. Even if they lose sixteen straight games, they’ll squeak in with a Wild Card berth and 74,208 articles about what the 16-game losing streak means for their playoff chances. It probably won’t come to that. The Phillies were supposed to be very good, and have been even better than expected.
So what do the Phillies do with the remaining two weeks? Plenty. Here are three things that Phillies fans can root for in that calm dispassionate Phillies-fan kind of way.
Home-field advantage
Despite Bruce Bochy's best attempt to sabotage the Phillies by pitching Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay more than one inning each (!!!) in the All-Star Game, that actually helped the Phillies get home-field advantage in the World Series..
But they have to get there first, and home-field advantage in the NLDS and NLCS would help, which means that they’ll have to finish with the best record in the National League. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, they have a 99.999999999999% chance of doing just that. You can add a few nines if you like. Still, they haven’t clinched it just yet, so that at least gives some meaning to the rest of the season.
Health
Chase Utley is taking it easy after being hit in the helmet with a pitch. Jimmy Rollins is off the disabled list and starting again, but he can afford to rest some more with the Phillies clinching. While it seems like it was a fait accompli for the Phillies to make the playoffs, they did go through quite a bit of adversity this year -- Utley and Rollins missed substantial time this season, as did Roy Oswalt. Now they have the luxury of giving guys as much time as they need to get as healthy as possible.
Completely burying the rest of the National League
Bingo. This is the real reason to watch, the real thing for Phillies fans to root for. They have a chance to blow past 100 wins and put the team on a short list of the greatest teams in league history. They’re on pace for 105 wins, which would be the most in the National League since the the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals. I’m not a psychologist, and even though I’ve listened to several ex-players provide color commentary on baseball games, I don’t know what it really means to go into the playoffs with momentum. It could provide some sort of advantage; it could be completely meaningless.
But it should certainly be something for Phillies fans to root for. For all of the talk about the 2001 Seattle Mariners being the best team to never win the World Series, there's no shame in remembering the 2001 Mariners as a special team. The Phillies aren't especially close to that sort of record, but with each win, they'll climb further and further up the list of all-time National League teams. If you're a Phillies fan, that'd be kind of cool.
And, hey, it beats sitting around, waiting for a short playoff series where all sorts of fluky things can happen. The heightened expectations for the Phillies this season means that a playoff appearance isn’t going to be satisfy anyone. But until the playoffs get here, there are still a couple of things for Philadelphia partisans to root for.
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