Let's Lift Our Glass to Charlie, He's the One Who Brought Us Here

On Friday, Charlie Manuel ceased to be the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies.

He didn’t quit. For damn sure he didn’t quit. “I never quit nothin’. And I didn't resign,” the folksy skipper insisted during his farewell press conference Friday afternoon. Not his farewell game, mind you, nor his farewell address to the fans before his last home game, neither of which he was afforded. His farewell address to local baseball scribes and camera crews.

Beside him sat the man responsible for ending arguably the most successful managerial tenure in franchise history, Ruben Amaro Jr., who shed a tear while announcing the coaching change, insisting this was the hardest decision of his time as general manager. This is true in the sense that blaming someone else for your own failings is probably at least marginally more difficult than tossing a Koosh ball at an office door basketball hoop and signing Ryan Howard’s biweekly paychecks that would bankrupt most small African nations, activities that take up a majority of Ruben’s time.

I could use this space to mention how the team has taken a step back in terms of playoff performance (or lack thereof) every year since Ruben assumed the role Pat Gillick abdicated following the team’s 2008 World Series win, but I won’t. I could talk about how Ruben hanging the millstone known as the Ryan Howard contract around the team’s neck, backing up a Brinks truck to Jonathan Papelbon’s house, or trying to fix an old, bad team by adding more old, bad players hamstrung the team’s success for years to come, but I won’t. I could mention that the Phillies are the only team in Major League Baseball that doesn’t employ a single analytical statistician, and how Ruben throwing just one college dropout with a working knowledge of Excel and a general understanding of how to navigate baseball-reference.com a bone could have kept him from (or at least slowed him down before) making most of these decisions…but I won’t. (Michael Baumann already handled the more rational take on this anyway)

Instead, I want to talk about October 29, 2008.

I was in my friend Kevin and Stanczak’s dorm room with three or four other friends of ours, fixated on a small television set showing Brad Lidge warming up in the ninth inning of the fifth game of the World Series. As it was with your standard college dorm, any gathering consisting of three or more people was standing room only, but by that point, everyone was on their feet anyway.

This was Night 2 of Game 5, because the first six innings were all the Phillies and Rays could get in on Monday night before Citizens Bank Park turned into a Vietnam jungle.

So there were three innings between the Phillies, currently up 3-1 in the series, and a World Series crown. By the ninth inning, we'd seen Geoff Jenkins and Jayson Werth come up with huge hits, Rocco Baldelli equalizing the game with a solo home run, Chase Utley throwing out Jason Bartlett at home on a beautiful fake-out move, Pat Burrell earning his first World Series hit, and Pedro Feliz inexplicably knocking in a go-ahead run in just two and a half innings – not inexplicable because it was a particularly difficult pitch to hit, but because it was Pedro friggin’ Feliz who hit it.

Now Lidge was preparing to lock down a 4-3 Phillies lead. In pretty much every game since this one, a Phillies closer entering a game with a one-run lead usually meant fans were going to head home later that night ready to pound a fifth of Jack or strangle their dog or something. But in 2008, a one-run lead in the ninth inning was about as sure a thing as you could get in baseball when Brad Lidge was tossing his worm-killing slider. Lidge was 47-for-47 in save chances to that point this year, counting the postseason, and the Phillies had yet to lose a game that year when taking a lead into the ninth inning.

After Dioner Navarro fought off a one-out, two-strike pitch with a single to right, though, and after Fernando Perez came in to run for him and promptly stole second off Carlos Ruiz, the inner Philadelphian was coming out in those of us in Kevin and Stanczak’s room. Oh hell no. This is how it’s gonna happen. This is how we start to unravel and the friggin’ Rays scrap their way back and win this in seven games. First it was the rain thing, and now this. This is it. Where’s my dog? Where’s the Jack?

This is how Philly sports fans operated before Charlie Manuel, before 2008. We were bested perhaps only by Cleveland and Seattle in the “Murphy’s Law Sports City” contest. If the Phillies, Eagles, Flyers or Sixers had a chance to blow a big game, chances are, they’d search high and low to find a way to do it. We almost prided ourselves in our masochistic devotion to teams destined to break our hearts.

Particularly in this showdown between Manuel, a simple “players’ manager” whose familiarity with “strategy” was likely limited to “that weird ol board game Grampa had in his storage shed next ta tha buckshot and fertilizer,” and Joe Maddon, considered the most progressive and strategically savvy managers in baseball, it seemed likely Maddon was going to will his team to victory on the basis of his many lineup and defensive changes, as he swapped out the next batter, Baldelli (who, again, already had a homer that night) for Ben Zobrist, who had better success against pitchers like Lidge.

But Manuel, like he did so many times the following year (to the detriment in the team in many circumstances), stuck with Lidge. And two batters later, after Zobrist lined out to right and Eric Hinskie struck out on three pitches, the Phillies were, to put it colloquially, world f***ing champions.

And we went ballistic. We ran up and down the halls of our dorm in celebration. I called my friend Vince and screamed at him while he was at work. I called my dad and screamed at him. I called my girlfriend and screamed at her. We sprayed champagne anywhere that had a rug we could ruin and drank the rest.

We'd won for the triumvirate of Utley, Howard and Rollins, for career journeyman Matt Stairs, for the long-maligned Pat the Bat and the resurgent Jayson Werth, for ace Cole Hamels. And we'd won for Charlie, who, having lost his mother just a few weeks prior, added another layer of humanity to the celebration.

At that point in my life, Philadelphia major sports teams had one a total of…*recounts in head*…one championship. That one. And it came at a time when my devotion to sports was at an all time high.

I still love sports, still love watching my teams, but things have changed just a bit. With my entry into the so called rat race, I don’t have as much time to look up every news story on every team and keep up with every stat for every player like I did when I was in school. I was talking football with my pal and podcast co-host David Bennett a few nights ago and claimed Cary Williams, new starting cornerback for the Eagles, had one career interception to his name, which is unequivocally wrong. Nowadays, while I still strive for a career in sports media at some point, keeping up with sports is already becoming…well…like actual work.

And things are only going to progress further in that direction. Bills have to be paid. Families will have to be started. Homes will have to be purchased, and settled on, and closed upon, and refinanced, and sold. I’ll know more about my son’s OPS on his Little League team than I’ll know about the starting shortstop for the Phillies in a few years.

Even if no Philadelphia sports teams win another title as long as I live, though, I’ll always have 2008. We’ll always have 2008. I realize I don’t recall the 2008 Series fondly simply because my team won the whole damn thing or because the guys on the team were likable or fun to watch, but because I loved the people around me at the time, and I loved the celebration.

So thanks, Charlie. You made that happen. You were never the most brilliant tactician, and many of your bullpen moves the past several years made about as much sense as an MGMT music video, but when you had the right guys around you, you made sure they were happy and made sure they knew you had their back, which, for teams as talented as the Phillies had in 2007-2011, was as important as knowing when to bring in your lefty specialist or make a double switch (or when to bring in your backup infielder as a reliever)

Now, the longest-tenured coach in Philadelphia is Flyers walking orange tie Peter Laviolette, who’s been with the team for all of three-and-a-half years and could very easily be on his way out with another poor showing this coming year. Andy Reid, who was coach of the Eagles for more than half my life, is gone, and with it memories of my dad and I watching games in our den at my old house on Township Line Road with equal parts joy and horror at what we were witnessing. (The day Matt Bryant kicked a record-tying 63-yard field goal to reverse a Donovan McNabb-led comeback left the two of us speechless for 25 minutes)

Gone is Sixers coach Doug Collins, who was here three years but at least made the team interesting for two of them. Gone is Charlie, manager for a third of my life. Holy hell.

But  I can say this at least without fear of contradiction: Charlie, you will never buy another drink in this city as long as you live. It's the least we can do.