Phillies win the Pennant!

Am I allowed to be excited about the Phillies being in the World Series? I’ve been following the Nationals for some time now, so I feel sort of, not divided exactly, but certainly conflicted. My dad grew up in Eastern PA, so I grew up rooting for the Phillies, until about the time I was living in DC and the Nationals came to town, liberated, one might say, from their Canadian Purgatorio as the expos. They were an exciting team, until they stopped being, and I went to a bunch of really fun games, for the first time rooting for the home team, that was my home. So I am not, in the parlance of our times, a “fan” of the phillies, unless one is allowed to be a fan of two teams, which one is not (Of course, the question of whether the Nationals are actually a major league baseball team is debatable. I will not debate it.)

Still. I can name most of the starting lineup of the 1993 Phillies, and I still loathe Joe Carter and his dastardly Canadian Blue Jays for stealing — stealing! — both the world series and my childhood. The infield was gutsy young Keving Stocker at short, Mickey Morandini at second (I think he platooned with someone? Maybe named Dejesus?), John Kruk (“I’m not an athlete, I’m a baseball player”) at first, and David Hollins at third. Darren “career year” Daulton was the catcher and the outfield was Lenny Dykstra surrounded by some combination of Jim Eisenreich, Pete Incaviglia, and Wes Chamberlin. The pitchers were Curt Schilling (who was awesome against the braves in the NLCS) and Terry Mulholland. Some other guys too, who I used to remember better; I can still, though, feel who they were, even if I can’t remember their names. I even saw “Gentle” Ben Rivera pitch once, against the Reds when I for some reason made a pilgrimage to Cincinnati. Go Phils!

But it’s funny going back to that; I’ll be turning thirty soon-ish, and my memory of being fifteen is both fuzzy and yet incredibly intimate, incredibly present. It’s almost as if the past is never passed. Someone should write a serious of novels based on a set of interlocking families and histories in an invented county in reconstruction era Mississippi and then, when they give that person a nobel prize, he should say lots of things that would either be influential for writers across the global south or would simply be much appreciated by them. That would be good; someone get on that.