The Fall of the 1977 Phillies
It’s ambitious, the book — the subtitle, “How a Baseball Team’s Collapse Sank a City’s Spirit,” is indicative of the grand parallels Mitchell Nathanson intends to draw between the Phillies’ Keystone kollapse to the Dodgers in ’77 and Philadelphia’s fortunes — but it’s a failure.
I went into the narrative skeptical that Nathanson could link the relative quality of the Phillies to the self-image or civic life of Philadelphia; the thesis seems like an excuse to write about baseball while overlooking the fact that correlation is not causation. I understand the motivation, but if you can’t prove that one inspired the other, you’d better bring good baseball writing to make up the difference. Nathanson doesn’t come close to convincing me that Philadelphians invest their worldviews nearly that fully in the Phillies; the game in question may have affected the esteem in which they held the team, but it’s probably the decline and subsequent departure of the Athletics that resonated more deeply with the city’s baseball fans…a backstory Nathanson makes the mistake of cataloging at length, thus undercutting his own argument.
And good baseball writing is not in evidence. Nathanson is a professor of legal writing at Villanova, according to the back cover, but I’d expect an orderly marshalling of points from a guy who does that for a living, not the final-exam core dump in the text. I’d also expect precision. Harry Wendelstedt runs an umpiring school, and his son Hunter currently works games. Napoleon Lajoie is a Hall of Famer. Misspelling their names is not acceptable. Neither is explaining that the Miracle Braves got their name from the divine intervention required to beat the A’s in the World Series; the name comes from the Braves’ phenomenal second half, from their getting to the Series at all, not from their winning it. It sounds like a minor point, and to the casual fan, it is — but McFarland doesn’t publish for the casual fan, and if you put your book out with McFarland, you need to get that kind of thing right.
Whichever editor let that get by also has to answer for innumerable garbage sentences like this one: “Mike Garman, who was now on the mound for the Dodgers, hit him with his first pitch, demonstrating that Ozark’s foolishness in keeping him in the game for a possible game changing at-bat in the ninth would not be equaled by LA’s decision to give him the opportunity to do so.” I had to read that three times to figure out what Nathanson meant. The first “him” is Greg Luzinski, which you can get from previous sentences, but the second “him” is also Luzinski, which is not the clearest antecedent, and then he biffs a hyphen, and then…”decision to give him the opportunity to” I don’t even know. Leaving aside the crappy syntax, the premise is flawed: if the manager wanted the Bull’s bat in the line-up, it’s not “foolish” because Luzinski got hit by a pitch. It’s “foolish” in hindsight because Luzinski muffed that fly and then did nothing to help the team at the plate, but Nathanson seems to think Ozark could have predicted the HBP — or that Lasorda did it on purpose, which I don’t buy.
And then on the next page, a picture of Tim McCarver with his shirt off. COME ON.
It just doesn’t work. The concept is okay, and for those of you who enjoy reading in lovingly footnoted detail about exactly why Dick Allen is regarded as a crazy kookoopants (and that Mike Schmidt’s own wife went on the record to describe Schmidt as “easily led”), the book will have marginal value. But both the historical proofs and the game commentary arrive DOA. Also, McCarver nipples. Fail.
Tags: Athletic supporters books Danny Ozark Dick Allen Dodgers Greg Luzinski Harry Wendelstedt Hunter Wendelstedt McFarland Mike Garman Mitchell Nathanson Napoleon Lajoie Phillies Tim McCarver Tommy Lasorda
I haven’t read the book, but that’s crazy. The tendency of Philadelphia sports fans to be grouchy assholes — and if you like them, you just think they’re FUNNY grouchy assholes; nobody doesn’t think the descriptor applies — is much bigger than any one season. The fact that they booed Schmidt when he was a huge hitter, that they booed Santa, that Schmidt later said they basically made his career hell, that they chased Mitch Williams out of town…it’s much bigger than one season. The Phillies winning the World Series three years later didn’t suddenly make them cheerful and happy; this one season didn’t change the city.
And for real, that sentence about Luzinski is TERRIBLE.
Whoa, that sentence. Whoa.
Good to know this one is skippable. As an A’s fan who is pretty interested in the peripatetic ways of my team, I had a sort of passing desire for the book. Now I’ll just re-read Crazy ’08 and watch my Cubs fan husband for signs of imminent heartattack, in this year that might finally…
Well, we don’t finish that sentence at my house.
I’d like a ruling on this, Sars: Can we get a moratorium on the “they booed Santa” thing? It happened in 1960, for Pete’s sake; the Santa who was supposed to come never showed; they pulled a replacement out of the stands who was falling-down drunk. No other town has ever booed poor halftime entertainment? Nobody’s ever booed a wacky bat race or t-shirt cannon? Ever?
I was at the Phillies game yesterday, and I found the crowd to be nothing but cordial and polite. Maybe we were all half-dead because of the heat, but I didn’t see any grouchy assholes. I suggest that Philly fans’ nasty reputation should be buried with Veterans Stadium — every game I’ve been to in the new facilities (Phillies or Eagles), the fans have been nothing but courteous.
Oh…as for Mitch Williams, hell yes we chased him out of town, and I was right there with the bucket of tar and feathers. I never liked the guy, and he lost a World Series that Schilling had in the bag. I don’t see why I should forgive him.
@ Linda,
Schmidt’s autobiography makes pains to note that the fans who made his life hell were a minority of less than a hundred. They were a bunch of regulars who sat behind homeplate. When Schmidt mouthed off to a reporter while on a roadtrip to Montreal about said fans, he didn’t make it clear (or the reported didn’t) he was talking about a smaller group of fans, not the Phillies’ fans en masse. As a result, ALL of the Phillies’ fans were loaded for bear the next home game. Schmidt knew he was in for it, so he went over to Larry Andersen’s locker and borrowed a long haired wig to wear under his cap when he went out for fielding practice. From what I have heard, there was a selection of wigs to choose from (Andersen was weird even by relief pitcher standards). Schmitty was also sporting shades to go with the wig, and looked truly ridiculous. Philly fans stopped booing & started cheering as if to say, “You screwed up, you know you screwed up, apology accepted”. Later in the game, Schmidt struck out (natch – longball hitters strike out a lot) and the Philly fans booed him all over again. I loved it.
I don’t buy the author’s premise, anyway – 3 years later, the Phils won their first and only World Series (after 98 years – take that Cubs!), and this came during Philly’s only true embarrassment of riches: Flyers won Stanley Cups in ’74 & 75, the Phils had won the division the year before & the year after said collapse, the Eagles went to the Super Bowl at the end of the 80-81 season, and the Sixers won the NBA title in ’83 & the Phils would take the Wheeze Kids to the ’83 World Series before losing to Baltimore.
I’d be more inclined to believe that Philadelphia’s collective sports fatalism had more to do with the Eagles, anyway. Also, I’d go with mostly funny grouchy assholes – I will never condone the battery-throwing or flare gun firing.
I find the “booed Santa” thing hilarious; it’s branding at this point. Some of the “Philly fans are brutal” stuff is apocryphal now, but I like that about it.
(Especially the legendary ration Del Ennis took, which my father witnessed firsthand while in the company of my Sunday-hatted grandmother…this is a woman who referred to farts as “pussycats,” and I am not kidding, until the last day of her life, and two rows down, a guy with a foam cooler and more back hair than a Baldwin is running through every curse word and epithet in two languages, and my dad and uncles are LOVING IT, and everyone around them is trying to get the dude to shut up, but he won’t…until he runs out of beer and goes home. Classic.)
I also enjoyed the Philly fans’ work whenever Barry Bonds came to town. No other fans in the league were that bitchy.
…I don’t know. The actual battery-throwing I do not approve of, but 1) Philadelphia does not have the corner on that market, and 2) the number of running gags you can get out of it in the stands is brilliant. After one customarily horrendous Heredia outing, some guy next to us got up all, “Fuck this, I’m goin’ to the car. TO GET THE BATTERY.” I mean, he’s not going to really do it, but it’s funny. The whole Lord of the Ph(il)lies aspect of it amuses me.
@ Sars,
I think we’re on the same page – ACTUAL battery-throwing BAD. Joking about battery chucking (without follow through) AWESOME.
And then on the next page, a picture of Tim McCarver with his shirt off.
Wow, thanks in advance for a week’s worth of screaming nightmares!
Aww! (That’s an expression of heartfelt nostalgia, btw.) I’m half-tempted to read this howler anyway, duly warned. (Plus the Schmidt autobio, mentioned above.) I was a HUGE Phillies fan from ’73-’80 (age 5-12, basically). Schmitty and Bull and Bowa and Boone, etc., those were *my guys*. But the view I had of it at the time really was a child’s view, not very knowledgeable, and sheltered from how adults saw the game. I have no sense of how the rest of the world saw the team or the games. I remember being terribly excited by them making the World Series, and then winning, in ’80 (I was allowed to stay up way past my bedtime to see them win), but to be honest, I don’t really remember being all that cognizant of their losing ways before that. I have absolutely no memory of this Big Collapse, even though it was at the height of my following of them.
I don’t know — maybe it would be a big mistake to go and find out about what the adult perspective on that era was. I don’t think it would help me remember any more about it. Maybe I’m just better off with my Magical Childhood Memories of that team.
For that reason, I guess I don’t really have any perspective on this guy’s thesis. It *sounds* far-fetched to me, too. But clearly my awareness of what was happening with the team or what the greater fanbase was thinking/doing had very little to do with, oh, say, reality.
(I never liked McCarver. Why? Because Bob Boone was my favorite player. Remember: age 5! Not very discriminating! But McCarver catching invariably meant that Boone wasn’t, therefore I disliked him for that purely childish reason. I do NOT need to see him shirtless… WHY? Why would you even put that in your book?)
Good thing I’m seven books behind, otherwise I might have bought that one already.
I finished Searching for Bobby Orr today (so I was eight books behind) and there’s a bit in it about the 1973-74 Philadelphia Flyers. If any team embodies the reputation — deserved or not — that Philly sports fans have, it’s those ’70s Flyers teams. There’s a nice tie-in with how the dismantling of the Big Bad Bruins was almost immediately followed by the rise of the Broad Street Bullies, and how the two collided in the ’74 Cup Finals.
And you know, I was hoping I’d find something to erase the sad image I had in my head of Bobby Orr in a Black Hawks uniform, but shirtless McCarver? Not the answer I was looking for. Someone pass the brain bleach.
I grew up as a Phillies fan. It’s not an attack; there’s no need for negotiating rulings.
I think it’s pretty widely understood that Schmidt was widely booed by a LOT of fans during a time when he was a power hitter. My recollection is that he made it clear at the time he was inducted into the Hall of Fame that that kind of fan behavior, which he felt was specific to Philadelphia to some degree, had detracted from his enjoyment of the game quite a bit. But I’ll never find the quote, so you can take my word for it or not.
To me, arguing that it’s all made up — that Philadelphia fans aren’t really like that; it’s all myth — is beside the point. I don’t mind that they’re like that. I stick by the statement that on the whole, Philadelphia fans are assholes. But that’s the way the sports culture is. The ballplayers have an unusually large quantity of tobacco juice dripping down their jerseys, and it’s supposed to be like that. It doesn’t mean other cities have never booed the halftime entertainment, but come on! Booing Santa is funny. Not horrible; FUNNY. I’m not mad at them. Those are my people. But it would be a very, very difficult place to be a player.
I fully embrace my grouchy assholeness. But seriously, the Santa that got booed was a skinny, drunk, poor excuse for a Santa, not jolly old Saint Nick. Booing was fully justified.
…honestly, booing is almost always justified.
I’m not 100% sure, but I believe that you can blame the battery-throwing incident on WIP Sports Talk Radio, specifically the morning show. Half of the dumb-ass things that Philly sports fans have done in the last 20 years can be traced back to WIP, mostly because they never realize that when they suggest things, some idiot fans will actually do them. Throwing snowballs at the Cowboys, OK, fine (the mayor started it!), but batteries, or any other object with intent to injure is not cool, and most fans know that. And I suggest that most of those yahoos are gone now, because the Vet and its 700-level cheap seats no longer exist, and they can’t afford seats at the new venues.
@ Linda,
Actually, I did know you were “one of us” – I’d only wanted to clarify the point on Schmidt – and you are right, he did make a statement at the induction ceremony as well. I don’t think he fully understood the Philly fan until after he retired. It’s more of a “tough love” type thing. If he’d only understood at the time that Phillies fans actually revered him, but probably expected too much of him. As I said earlier, longball hitters (except Barry Bonds) strike out a lot. We see it with Ryan Howard today. We love Howard, but boo him when he strikes out. John Kruk, however, understood them immediately, which is a large part of the reason he’s still thought of fondly in Philly. I agree with everything else you said about the assholic nature of the Philly fan.
However, I must admit I was impressed with the Phillies fans when I went to the first playoff game against Colorado last year.
@ Holly,
The Schmidt bio is a little light. There’s not a whole going on there, other than him repeating his position on steroids (I never took them, but I might have considered them if I were in these guys’ positions) FOUR times.
Sorry, my earlier comment got cut off:
The Schmidt bio is only about 200 or so pages, and he does gloss over his playing days a little to talk about his Christian faith, which – great for him, but it didn’t make entertaining reading. He did clarify the comments he’d made in the story I related above, and the other nugget I found interesting was that he wasn’t the only Hall of Fame third baseman to suffer from hemorrhoids during the 1980 World Series. I picked up Bowa’s autobiography for 50 cents at a yard sale this weekend. It was written before he was shown his walking papers by the Phils, so I’m curious about the book as well.
What I meant to say about what I liked about the Philly fans at the playoff game last year, is it wasn’t the usual riff-raff. Those who went to the playoff game were the real die-hard fans, not the casual drunken battery throwers. Probably the most knowledgable crowd I’d ever seen at a ball game. We all knew exactly what type of sucker pitch Howard was likely to swing at, that Rollins was hitting better since he moved his stance up to the plate, and what to expect of our pitching.
Now if only Luzinski could act like he appreciates the fans who pay too much for his crappy barbecue in Ashburn Alley….. he always seems like he doesn’t want to be there.
“the other nugget I found interesting was that he wasn’t the only Hall of Fame third baseman to suffer from hemorrhoids during the 1980 World Series”
I love my readers.
Mitch Williams didn’t just get chased out of town. His career was effectively finished after that pitch to Carter. Yeah, he foundered about in Houston and KC for a few years, but his stats for those seasons were horrific, unlike anything in either his Philly or pre-Philly career. I don’t think his crash and burn can be laid on the Philadelphia fans, cruel though they were in the immediate aftermath. (I’m a Red Sox man, and we have things we are or should be ashamed of in similar circumstances. Buckner, obviously.) I just think of the guy as a slightly above-average reliever who had a good three-year run as a Phil, set a personal best for saves in 1993, pitched exceptionally well in the NLCS, and then came unglued in the World Series (against, it must be said, a pretty damn fearsome line-up). He ended up on the losing end of a “great Series moments” clip we’ll never stop seeing, you can tell from his body language that he knew it the instant it happened, and he never could get his head unscrambled. It’s sad, but it happens sometimes when one of these guys fails spectacularly at the worst possible time. (See also Mark Wohlers [the initials!], who had much better stuff than Williams. Didn’t that poor guy actually end up in an institution for a time, or is that apocryphal?)
I disagree that Williams blew a World Series that Cutr Schilling had in the bag. Williams was awful in that series, but Schilling didn’t exactly set things sailing with distinction when he was pounded for 6 ER in as many innings in the Game One loss. Yes, he was brilliant in the Game Five shutout, but that hardly put the Phils on the precipice of victory; it just got the series back to Toronto. They still needed to do on the road something they had failed to do at home: win two consecutive games against a heavily favored team. Had Williams saved Game Six, setting Schilling up to start a Game Seven, Schilling would have had to face that Henderson/White/Molitor/Carter/Olerud/et al lineup again on short rest. His opponent would have been the young Pat Hentgen, who had had his way with the Phils once already and would have been coming back fresher.
Keeping with the Phils-Blue Jays theme, Philly fans showed a lot of class when they gave Joe Carter a standing O when he hit his 2000th hit in Philly during interleague play, despite his WS moment against them. (Of course they booed him every other plate appearance that series, but still…)