Bryce Harper might’ve been the first to say it sometime around the middle of June. Or maybe it was Trea Turner. Either way, it became a motto amid the vomit-inducing ups and downs of the last few months.
Just get us in.
So, here were the Phillies on Sunday, at the end of a week from hell, with a nor’easter blowing through town, needing to win one stinkin’ game after losing four in a row to punch a ticket for tournament baseball and avoid entering the barroom debate over the worst collapse in franchise history.
And guess what? They got in.
Finally.
OK, now what?
“Everything resets, you know?” Harper said, as Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” kicked off a sudsy, smoky clubhouse celebration after a 7-3 victory over the Rays that felt more like a collective exhale. “You get into October, everything resets.”
Indeed, nothing that happened over the last six months matters anymore. Not the 9-19 start that got the first manager fired. Not the late-summer surge that began in an Iowa cornfield. And certainly not the 9-14 finish that threatened to unravel it all.
So, Game 1 of the best-of-three wild-card series begins at 2 p.m. Tuesday in Atlanta. And that’s just fine with the Phillies, who got showered with boos all week before finally cracking open the booze.
Make no mistake: They noticed. Just like they noticed how the mood in the ballpark turned when Bryson Stott lined a two-out RBI double in the first inning to give the Phillies their first lead since … checks notes … Tuesday — and the fans a reason to finally clap.
“That was one of our better crowds, I thought,” interim manager Don Mattingly said, beer goggles pressed to his forehead. “You don’t hear a lot of ‘Let’s Go Phillies’ at our games. It’s just waiting for things, right? And it would be great if it would be an uplifting type of scenario.
“In the Milwaukee series, somebody makes an out in the fourth with a guy on base, and it’s like a boo. And I know it’s the fans’ right to do it. But you can either lift up or you can hold down, and if you lift the team up, you’ve got a chance.”
Excuse Mattingly. He’s still new here, having just capped his first season with the Phillies. He got hired to be the bench coach and wound up replacing the fired Rob Thomson on April 28.
Mattingly is less familiar, then, with the narrative that has trailed the core of a team that has stayed largely intact since the unexpected World Series run in 2022. The Phillies backslid in each successive October, from the Game 7 loss at home in the 2023 NL Championship Series to last year’s divisional round loss to the Dodgers.
So, here’s Harper upon being asked about the Phillies making a fifth consecutive postseason appearance for only the second time in their 144-year history: “Yeah, I mean, you wouldn’t think that with everybody’s opinion of us.”
If you sense a chip on his shoulder, well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing … now that the Phillies are in, of course, after a lot of folks thought they were Dead Men Walking.
“We’re the type of team that, we don’t care the people’s opinions of us or what they think or what anybody thinks about our team,” Harper continued. “Obviously we didn’t play the best baseball we could in September. Should we have clinched two weeks ago? Probably, right? But we didn’t. We clinched today, and that’s how the story is written right now.”
They wrote a happy ending in Game 162 because …
- Zack Wheeler gave up one run in six innings after the game was moved up by a half-hour to begin in drier conditions, and Jesús Luzardo returned from the injured list and got three outs on four pitches in the eighth.
- J.T. Realmuto broke an 0-for-34 spell with an RBI double in the second inning after being dropped to ninth in the order for the first time in his career.
- Kyle Schwarber scorched a two-run double in the second inning, belly-flopped into second base and, in a rare display of on-field emotion, screamed to the dugout, “Let’s go!”
- Oh, and Harper fouled off a slider, fastball, sinker, and splitter in succession before lining a 111.6-mph missile into the right-field bleachers in the fifth inning.
Indeed, the Phillies pulled through because they were led by the stars of their $320 million roster.
“This was what it was supposed to be today,” Mattingly said. “For whatever reason, this was how it was supposed to happen for the 2026 Phillies. Again, I think just getting in is the key, right?”
And everybody exhaled. Even the owner.
“Look,” said John Middleton, who was 9 years old during the Phillies’ epic collapse in 1964, “I did know the possibility that we wouldn’t get in. But I wasn’t particularly worried about it.”
Why not?
“I still maintain we are the best pitching staff in Major League Baseball,” said Middleton, wearing the standard issue red T-shirt and shorts and holding googles just in case. “Better than the Dodgers. Better than anybody else. And that’s particularly true with Luzardo back and healthy. I think our hitting could be really good.
“We kind of snuck in in ‘22. We didn’t necessarily sneak in here. We weren’t playing well at the end. But we know how to play well, and we played really well today.”
If the Phillies play well in Atlanta, they might actually make it back home to see their fans again. The Braves won the NL East over them by six games and went 9-4 against them in the regular season.
It’s all irrelevant now. The Phillies got in. If they write their legacies over the next month, nobody will care that it took them 162 games to get there.
“Nothing that happened during the regular season matters anymore,” Harper said. “As a team, as a group, we’ve just got to go in, play the best baseball we can, get hot for the next couple weeks.
“We’ve never finished the job. So, we’ve got to do that.”
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