The longest baseball winters are the ones for teams that came the closest the season before. And even though they didn’t make it back to the World Series last October, the Phillies know how close they were before the Diamondbacks won the National League Championship Series and they did not. And even knowing how highly motivated so many other high-profile contenders are for 2024, no one will be more highly motivated than the Phillies.
They were ahead of the Diamondbacks two games to none in the NLCS, and it seemed as if somebody was hitting a home run for them every couple of innings. The Phillies were still one game away from a repeat trip to the Series after winning Game 5 in Phoenix. And were going home to Citizens Bank Park and as powerful a homefield advantage as there is in the sport.
Then they stopped hitting, as a group, at the worst possible time. It happened to the Yankees in 2017 against the Astros, when they led three games to two and then scored just one run in the last two games of that series in Houston. It happened to the Red Sox in 2021, when they’d gone home-run happy against the Astros and were two wins away from making a trip to the World Series that might have changed a lot of what has happened since in Boston.
The Phillies found out what those teams found out, that sometimes when you stopped hitting like that in the late innings of the postseason, you don’t start again until next season.
