The year was 1950. The month was September . . . or was it October? Hard to say since, for me, it was over a half-century ago. I had just reached my double digits, and as a newly minted 10-year-old I needed to have explained to me what it meant that the Phillies had just won the National League pennant. At the time I knew who the Phillies were but hadn't yet begun to follow them. And I certainly hadn't been introduced to the concept of a pennant. What 
was that?!
. . . And this pennant thing was only the beginning. I was also told (by whom, I have absolutely no recollection) that the Phillies were now about to play the famed New York Yankees in something called a World Series. Feeling acutely behind the curve (no pun intended), I became terribly interested in this curious new phenomenon--one which seemed to be making almost everyone in the city a bit crazy. So I determined to tune into this series as much as possible. And I mean "tune in" literally because TVs weren't around back then (at least not in my neighborhood). So my radio and I instantly became best buds. Identifying myself overnight as a Phillies fan, I listened to as much of the Series games as a kid in elementary school possibly could. (Note--they were all day games back then. TV prime time had yet to be born.)
So what transpired in this series of series? Well, the Phils lost game 1 . . . then game 2 . . . then game 3 . . .then game 4. Alas, this was my introduction to the Phillies--the team all-too-well known as "perennial losers"--and who, in fact, have lost more games (over 10,000 of them!) than any other professional sports team in history. That year they had gotten the people of Philadelphia pumped up--electrified, even--like nothing I had ever seen before . . . and then set about breaking their collective hearts, one game at a time.
But somehow, now that I was a self-appointed Phillies fan, I felt compelled to become a student of the game. I learned all about their esteemed center fielder Richie Ashburn and their equally popular pitcher Robin Roberts (both now in the Hall of Fame). In fact, I learned about them all, and tacked their glossy black and white photos (no color shots available back then!) on my bedroom walls. For whatever irrational reasons, I became so enamored of the team--the 1950 "Whiz Kids," they were originally called--that I can still recall most of their names: from Granny Hamner to Willie Jones, Del Ennis, Dick Sisler, Eddie Waitkus, Curt Simmons, Jim Konstanty, Andy Seminick, and Stan Lopata.
. . . Fast forward 30 years to 1980. Now a sadder but much wiser Phillies fan, I knew never to get my hopes up for 
this team. Having departed Philadelphia for good in 1962, I still (rather guardedly) followed them, employing the local newspaper to check on how they were doing but keeping myself cautiously detached from a team so proficient in the art of disappointing and dismaying their fans.
But 1980 was the year of Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton (also both now residing in the Hall of Fame). And it was the year that--at last!--everything came together for my team. I refer to them as "my team" because although I'd find myself living in several other large cities--which had their own major league teams--it was really only the kid part of me that followed the sport and I could never regard any other team with the--what?--"ambivalent affection" I'd sustained over the years for the Phils. It was almost as though my connection with the team was one way that I stayed positively attached to my inner child. As an adult, I increasingly questioned whether professional sports hadn't become totally corrupted by the ethics of capitalism. After all, the best teams typically were the most "monied," weren't they?
Consider, for instance, the present-day Yankees and their astronomical payroll. Because of their wealthy owner [a household name] and "marketing conditions," they'd regularly get the best free agents. They could compete in a way that "smaller markets" couldn't. The lucrative contracts that ball teams had with the major TV networks also seemed to compromise the innocence and integrity of the game. And free agency seemed to have destroyed all player loyalty to their teams--almost all of them willing, sometimes even eager, to jump ship for the highest bidder.
But for the kid inside me none of this has ever had the slightest significance. This is the ancient part of me that insisted on keeping daily track of Phillies' batting averages, how their pitchers' ERAs were doing, who was guilty of striking out and leaving runners on base, and all the different team statistics that the local newspaper was willing to make available to me. These were the things I was fascinated with when, as an adolescent, the Phillies indirectly taught me the concept of perennial hope. In fact, as a kid I cared so deeply about the team that I'd look up how each of their minor league teams was doing (one more way of hoping that the future Phillies would be better than the almost always below-500 ball club I seemed fated to root for).
But I digress. The main thing I wanted to mention was that in 1980 the Phillies actually won both the pennant and The World Series. It was the first World Series they had captured in their 98 years of frustrated existence. And I remember my first strangely multi-faceted reaction when their opponent, the Kansas City Royals, lost to them in the sixth and deciding game. Disbelief. Something approaching awe. Certainly, amazement. And excitement. . . . But, most of all, confusion. It all seemed surreal. These were my Phils, so this couldn't really be happening, right? My Phils could sometimes be in contention--up to a point. But sooner or later they always got eliminated--as though the only reason they had gotten this far in the first place was little more than coincidental.
The strange thing is that over the years I had trained myself to be very careful not to identify with them too closely. For it always ended up making me feel that I wasn't good enough, that there was something wrong with me--perhaps the inevitable price of identifying with a losing team. Why would I want to see myself as a loser, just because they, my Phils--no, the Phils--so consistently were? But in 1980 I had the rare opportunity to positively identify with them. . . . And I found I really didn't quite know how.
Moving beyond childhood and adolescence, I had spent too much time reminding myself of the imprudence of getting too emotionally involved with this team, so that my enthusiasm about their World Series victory was more tempered than I might have imagined. My years of seeking to cultivate precisely the right degree of detachment from them made it unexpectedly difficult for me to celebrate their victory with the sort of childhood glee I would have preferred. I guess my inner child and my adult self were obliged to wrestle with how we might respond in unison to the Phillies' remarkable feat of at last becoming World Champions. Ultimately, I think the two me's compromised and settled on a state of measured, somewhat equivocal euphoria--a kind of paradoxical state of contained jubilation.
. . . Now fast forward, if you will, another 28 years to Wednesday, October 29, 2008. Somehow, someway, the always remote possibility of the Phillies' becoming World Champions again actually did happen. This most hapless (accursed?) of teams (apologies to the Cubs and Indians) had done it again! And this time, in only 5 games, they upset those talented young upstarts, the Tampa Bay Rays, to win their 2nd World Series in their prodigiously disappointing, long-suffering, 126-year history.
