The 2025 Phillies Have No Balls
June 2, 2025
The one characteristic of the two Phillies championship teams in the modern era of baseball is something the current club sorely lacks.
In a word, it’s toughness.
The 2025 Phillies are soft.
They are softer than a newborn kitten, softer than a cotton ball, softer than the grandfatherly smile of their docile manager, Rob Thomson.
These Phillies are the exact opposite of the city they represent, a hardscrabble sports town that remains proudly blue-collar, a place that prides itself on its calloused hands and battered psyche. We take no prisoners. Dallas will always suck.
The people who live here haven’t changed, even as the sports community they inhabit has traded its grit for pacifism.
If you were watching the game on May 27 at Citizens Bank Park, you had to be infuriated when the Phillies biggest star, Bryce Harper, took a 95-mph fastball by Braves starter Spencer Strider just above his right elbow.
Harper was in agony for a couple of minutes before he left the field, not to appear there again for the next week (and counting).
I was also in agony, both at the moment of impact and in the innings that followed – innings that lacked any sign of retaliation for a pitch that could alter the team’s fate this season.
Every time Edmundo Sosa batted in Harper’s place, I was reminded that the Braves paid no price for their misdeed. Based on the flood of emails I got in the hours after the incident, so were many fans.
Rob Thomson clearly had a different reaction. When the camera panned to his face in the innings after Harper got hurt, it struck me that maybe the paint-by-numbers manager had no response because analytics doesn’t really account for human emotion.
With no statistical guidance, Thomson did what comes naturally to him – nothing.
After the game, there was no solace, either.
“I think if someone is throwing at one of our hitters, I mean, I don’t know what I’d do,” he said. “But if it’s a pitch that gets away from a pitcher, which I think it was – and which I believe everybody in that clubhouse thinks it was. . . . .
“That’s baseball. It happens.”
First of all, how does Thomson know what Strider was thinking? That errant pitch helped the struggling Braves to split the doubleheader that day, and it will continue to aid the division rivals as long as Harper is out of the lineup. It is by far the most productive pitch Strider has thrown all season.
Second, all of those Phillies players have grown up with the baseball code, unwritten laws of the game that include retaliation when a star player is injured by a mistake – intentional or not – by the opponent. My guess is, they wanted and expected to see Ronald Acuna Jr. diving into the dirt the next time the Braves’ best hitter stepped into the batter’s box.
And third, what’s going to stop the next team from taking out Harper or any other important Phillie? Everybody gets a free shot as long as they can convince mind-reader Rob Thomson that they had no evil intent?
All I could think while I watched the drama unfold last Tuesday was how the manager of the champion 1980 Phillies would have reacted if he were still alive to see it. Dallas Green might have charged the mound and pounded Strider into submission himself.
I can tell you this: Someone on the Braves would have paid a price for hurting Harper, regardless of the intent.
Actually, that’s baseball – not the soft and gentle version Thomson espouses. An eye for an eye. An elbow for an elbow. That’s the code.
Even the 2008 Phillies, at a time when there were fewer Pete Roses and Tug McGraws, would not have stood by if Jimmy Rollins or Chase Utley were victimized. They embraced their bond with Philadelphia. They were Philadelphia. Just ask anyone trying to cover second when Utley came barreling in, cleats high.
The 2025 Phillies are missing two things that those champions had. They are, by nature, soft. (In those other eras, pitchers would not have required a signal by the manager to retaliate; they would have known what to do)
And, of course, the other thing is a championship ring, despite teams with rosters every bit as talented as the two World Series winners.
I have heard all of the arguments supporting the Phillies on this issue. Yes, head-hunting is less acceptable than ever in baseball. No, not every misdeed requires a corresponding response. And it is indeed a long season. What goes around comes around. Karma is a bitch.
To all of that I reply: Nonsense!
This is Philadelphia.
Not in our house.
The 2025 Phillies need to grow a pair.