There Can Be No True Hope Without Despair

It’s not just that Rhys Hoskins spiked his bat on the ground. It’s that Rhys Hoskins spiked his bat on the ground. Rhys Hoskins would’ve spiked his bat through the ground if he were able.

“I didn’t know what I did until a couple innings later,” Hoskins said after the game. “It’s just something that came out, just raw. But God, it was fun.”

A celebration that emphatic isn’t about happiness, or excitement, or even a desire to get one over on one’s opponent. It’s about catharsis — for Hoskins, his teammates — now a game from the Phillies’ first NLCS since 2010 — and many thousands of their most ardent, and nervous, admirers.

There’s an iron law of Philadelphia sports, little known outside the region but cited frequently within it. As articulated by Twitter user @historiancole: “Philadelphia only has two speeds: cocky or distraught.” This postulate is the Tungsten Arm O’Doyle tweet of Hoagieland; it comes up whenever the lead changes in a Phillies game, the Sixers update their injury report, or the Eagles do anything at any time. It captures the duality of the high-leverage sports experience: exuberance when things are going well, counterbalanced by abject terror that everything will fall apart.

For 11 years, Phillies fans have felt little but pessimism; long gone are the days when they dominated the National League the way the Dodgers do now. In between the team has suffered the slow recognition that a rebuild was necessary, the utter failure to execute that rebuild, and years of futile attempts to patch the wreckage into a playoff team. The 45,538 unfortunates who packed themselves into Citizens Bank Park on Friday afternoon know every contour of this story, and from it they’ve learned to expect the worst.

A playoff drought of that length causes a sizeable backlog of feelings, which were on display long before first pitch. During batting practice, a few fans in left field booed Braves players as they were shagging flies. Hours later, the crowd went ballistic for one-time postseason hero Shane Victorino as he threw out the first pitch. For the first time in a decade, the Phillies aren’t playing like they offended some little-known but powerful deity. They’re getting breaks. They’re capitalizing on other teams’ mistakes. The vibes are good.

But they’re fragile. After a split in Georgia, a spark of optimism started to flicker across the region, based partially on the belief that Braves wunderkind Spencer Strider would either be excluded or diminished through injury. When he not only started Game 3 but also looked dominant as ever in the early innings, that optimism began to sputter. Had the Braves scored first, as they threatened to in their first chance at bat, the ferocious noise that accompanied the game’s middle innings might have been stifled.

On Thursday, Braves manager Brian Snitker, in the midst of a pretty anodyne quote about responding to an unfriendly crowd, referred to the “so-called hostile atmosphere” of the Phillies’ home crowd. That comment got some traction among Phillies fans who thought Snitker doubted their ability to cheer and boo, but the truth is this environment can be hostile to anyone.

Hoskins entered Friday night’s game with one hit in nine postseason at-bats. In the sixth inning of Game 2, he muffed a ball on a play he probably should’ve made, even though Matt Olson was ultimately credited with a hit, that led to Atlanta’s first run of the night. Since the play came with two outs, it technically led to every run in a 3–0 loss.

Despite his best efforts, Hoskins has always had a complicated relationship with a sector of the Phillies’ fan base. After he posted a .396 OBP and hit 18 home runs in 50 games as a rookie, a noisy minority has been frustrated that he’s merely been a good hitter since, and not a great one. When he struck out in the first inning, they let him hear it. Two innings later, Alec Bohm shorted a throw across the diamond that drew Hoskins off the bag and into the path of an oncoming Ronald Acuña Jr. — a literal (if accidental) kick to the head, to go with the boos.

Game 3 in a tied series is by its very nature a turning point, and until it became clear which way this series had turned, everyone involved could be forgiven for feeling anxiety. Strider, having only been in the Braves’ rotation since May, is still not a household name. Phillies fans who know him well knew to fear him. Those who didn’t know him expected a wounded rookie and instead watched the youngster scythe through the Phillies’ lineup at 99 mph. Nola and his defense, meanwhile, looked vulnerable; just as memorable as the roar of the crowd after Hoskins’ home run was the silence that fell over the stadium in the first inning, between the instant Olson pulled an 0–2 curveball down the line and the instant it landed in foul territory.

Just as things started to look truly bad for the home team, the Phillies’ fortunes reversed. Brandon Marsh worked a walk to start the third, as Strider began to tire and his velocity and command started to waver. When Bryson Stott doubled Marsh in two batters later to open the scoring, and again when Hoskins swatted Strider’s worst pitch of the night into the left field seats, it was clear not only that the game was breaking the right way, but also that the expected communal heartbreak had been postponed.

“Baseball is such a game of failure in every aspect,” Nick Castellanos said after the game. “So when you have that support and that momentum behind you, and you hear the energy of the crowd, it uplifts you. It can definitely bring the game to a new level.”

I’ve been in the building for plenty of loud sports moments before, but Stott’s double and Hoskins’ home run brought on a physical sensation I’ve only felt at the peak of SEC football games and pivotal moments of the World Series. The ball bearings-on-a-glass table percussion of tens of thousands of people clapping and the disunified contralto roar of cheering became so intense, even from the relative remove of the press box, that I could distinctly feel my eardrums vibrating from the noise.

“When you’re running in the outfield or on the bases and you just hear, ‘Whompf, whompf, whompf,’ that’s when you know it’s loud,” Marsh said.

That specific sensation — painful in the refreshing way a much-needed stretch or a mouthful of habanero pepper is — is the audible equivalent of Hoskins’ bat spike. It’s not just the emotional release of joy, but the end of fear, frustration, anxiety. Not just feeling good, but just as importantly, no longer feeling bad.

“[Hoskins has] hit a lot of big homers here and he’s taken a lot of grief since the last game we played just because of the error,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. “I’m so happy for him.”

Hoskins’ entire career has been building either toward a moment like this to hang his hat on, or toward leaving Philadelphia having never experienced it. Given how the team has performed the past few seasons, you’d be forgiven for expecting the latter. But where failure had previously led to an early offseason, this month the Phillies are powering through the kind of minor obstacles that would’ve sent them home in any other year. And the fans are not only internalizing that, but also reflecting it back to the team.

“It was a huge part of the victory because as stuff starts to snowball and they get louder, more good things happen and they get [even] louder,” Hoskins said. “So we’ll see if we can continue that tomorrow… Energy, energy, energy. God, it was loud.”

Loud in a way that can only be earned by forgetting a decade of frustration and disappointment. Loud from the hope that the worst is over.