Some of my earliest childhood memories are of sitting at the kitchen table with my mother and grandmother listening to the Philadelphia Phillies on the radio. And more often than not, listening to the Philadelphia Phillies lose.
My love of baseball was nurtured on these spring and summer evenings while my father was on shift work, and I had learned the finer points of the game — from the suicide squeeze play to the art of bunting to when to intentionally walk a batter — before I could read and write. I also learned that baseball “is only a game,” as my mother would say with varying degrees of conviction, which was a damned good thing because the Phillies lost a lot, most famously in 1964 when they led the National League by six and a half games with 12 to play but managed to blow it.
In fact, the franchise made such a habit out of losing that it notched an American professional sports record 10,000 losses last year, which makes it all the more fitting that a year later my beloved Phillies are in the World Series for only the fourth time in their 125-year history and for the first time since 1993.
The opening game against the Tampa Bay [Devil] Rays is tonight in St. Petersburg.
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