Citizens Bank Park (Boo for Philadelphia fans)

 

Many teams’ fans are largely indistinguishable except for the jerseys they wear, but some fan bases have distinct reputations. For my lifetime, Philadelphia fans have been known for their primary cheer: “BOOOO!!” And it isn’t just the opposing team that they boo – that’s fairly standard.

I was once talking to a Phillies fan I had just met, and the topic turned to booing the hometown players, and he explained to me that the players liked the fans booing, because they (the players) knew that it just meant that the fans cared. I didn’t argue the point, but I think that no franchise has the history of chasing away good players the way the Phillies do. Five cases in point:

First, Dick Allen was Rookie of the Year for the Phillies in 1964. I remember that season well, because I had just started to understand baseball the year before, and had chosen the Phillies as my team because their young manager, Gene Mauch, was born in Salina, Kansas, the town I was living in. The 1964 Phillies are best remembered for having a  6½-game lead with 12 to go, and blowing it. The Phillies fans booed “Richie” Allen early and often (the team’s upper management decided that the name he’d always gone by was somehow not appropriate). But during that September collapse, Allen had an 11-game hitting streak. He was definitely a temperamental player, and had run-ins with more than one manager (I didn’t realize until years later that he basically got my hero, Mauch, fired in 1968), but I can’t help but wonder if things might have turned out differently if he had started his MLB career in front of friendlier fans.

At the end of his Philadelphia tenure, he was quoted as saying, “I'll play first, third, left. I'll play anywhere — except Philadelphia.” He once famously scratched out “BOO” with his spikes near first base. After being traded from the Phillies, he won a Most Valuable Player award for the Chicago White Sox, was voted (by the fans) as a starter for the All-Star Game three times (it only happened twice while he was in Phildaelphia, although most of his best seasons were there), and will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame posthumously this year. I pulled the “BOO” photo (above) from Allen’s Hall of Fame page.

Second, Curt Flood was the premier defensive centerfielder of the 1960s. He had won 7 straight Gold Gloves at the time St. Louis Cardinals tried to trade him to Philadelphia for Allen after the 1969 season. He refused to go. Flood challenged the trade, in a lawsuit that changed baseball forever. The heart of the case was the “reserve clause,” instituted in 1879, which said that players were bound to the team that owned them. Although a series of somewhat ambiguous court rulings, including a 1921 ruling that MLB wasn’t subject to federal antitrust laws because it wasn’t interstate commerce, had left the reserve clause tenuously hanging on, Flood, with the backing of the director of the relatively new union, the Major League Baseball Players Association, Marvin Miller, challenged that. He sat out the 1970 as the case wound its way through the courts (with Flood consistently losing), then agreed to a trade to the Washington Senators before the 1971 season, ultimately playing in just 13 games for them before retiring. In 1972, the Supreme Court found against Flood, but the stage had been set for free agency, which started in the mid-1970s. While I find the history of the legality of the reserve clause to be fascinating reading, the popular version of Flood’s case is that he sacrificed his career to bring free agency to others. While it’s a great story, I’m not sure Curt Flood’s name would have been the one associated with it if the Cardinals had tried to trade him somewhere other than Philadelphia, since he reportedly viewed the city as racist. I suspect the union would have eventually found some other star willing to go to court rather than prolong a career on the downward side, but it might have been a few more years, and Reggie Jackson might still have been winning World Series games for the Oakland A’s in the late 1970s.

Third, Jimmy Rollins won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 2007, but didn’t do as well in 2008, and ended up getting booed regularly that year. Of course, it’s understandable that the fans were unhappy. He wasn’t playing as well, and I guess the rest of the team wasn’t playing up to the fans’ expectations either (although they did win the World Series that fall, one of two times in the franchise’s lackluster 140-year history that that has happened). Rollins complained about the booing, and said that while he could tolerate it, he couldn’t convince potential free agent signees to come to Philadelphia.

Allen, Flood, and Rollins were all Black, and race certainly played a part in Allen’s troubles. The Phillies are often portrayed as some of the worst villians in the story of Jackie Robinson, and with reason. It was 10 years after Robinson before the Phillies had their first Black player, and that player, one John Kennedy, had a career that consisted of appearances in a grand total of five games. Allen was the first great Black player they had, but they didn’t handle the situation well. Inexplicably, the Phillies sent the 21-year-old Allen to be the first Black player for the Little Rock minor league team a little more than five years after the contentious integration of Little Rock’s public schools, and without the support system around him that Robinson had in 1947. But it’s not just Black players who have fled (or failed to entertain free agent offers) from the Phillies.

Fourth and fifth: in the late 1990s, two of the team’s best players (both White) were pitching ace Curt Schilling and third baseman Scott Rolen. Two years apart, both demanded to be traded: Schilling went to the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2000, Rolen to the St. Louis Cardinals two years later. Each said they wanted to play for a contender, and in fairness to Schilling, they had only had one winning season in their last 15 when he was traded. But they did have a winning season the next year, and offered Rolen a lucrative contract, which he turned down. Schilling was co-Most Valuable Player for the Diamondbacks’ World Series winners in 2001, and then played a key role in the Red Sox winning their first World Series in 86 years in 2004. Rolen, meanwhile, was a starter for the Cardinal team that lost to the Red Sox in 2004, then won the World Series in 2006.

Incidentally, it should be noted that Philadelphia fans are noted for more than just the Phillies boo-birds. Perhaps the best-known Philly fan incident was at a late-season Philadelphia Eagles football game, when fans booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs.

Knowing all this, I expected the worst when we came to Philadelphia. But we’ve enjoyed the games here, and in the two games we went to, the fans didn’t boo their players, not during Monday’s game, when Philadelphia runners kept getting thrown out on the bases, not during Tuesday’s game, when their pitchers gave up four home runs (although I sensed the crowd getting a little restless when it looked like a pitcher might walk in a run). The booing was reserved for umpires’ calls and occasionally the opposition, and even that booing was no more than I’d expect. And after the Phillies lost last night, the fans weren’t in a surly mood, even toward Cubs fans who were gloating and holding up victory banners (standard boorish behavior of a certain type of visiting fan from every team, I think).

Maybe the tide has turned. Philadelphia has recently acquired some very talented big-name players, most notably Bryce Harper and Trea Turner, but also Zack Wheeler, Nick Castellanos, and Kyle Schwarber, all of whom are key reasons why the Phillies have been in the post-season three years in a row (before a similar run 1976-1978, they’d only been to the post-season twice in 95 years). And the Santa Claus incident was in the 1960s, and lately, the Eagles have won a couple of Super Bowls, something they avoided for the first 51 years of the football extravaganza.  Moreover, these are not the same people who were booing Dick Allen, and not just because time has passed. The Phillies’ attendance averaged just over 41,000 per game last year, compared to 6500 in 1969. Even in 2000, when Schilling and Rolen were leaving, attendance averaged under 20,000. So they’ve brought in lots of new fans, many of whom may not have bought into that venerable tradition of abusing their own players.

In fact, I can’t find any stories about Phillie fans lustily booing their own team since … last year’s postseason. We’ll see.

The game:

The Cubs beat the Philllies 8-4. We knew early on that this was not going to be the pitching duel we saw the previous night, when it was 2-2 after 10 innings. Our first clue was when the Phillies’ Max Kepler hit a towering fly ball, and the Cubs' rightfielder and centerfielder converged, then started drifting back toward the ball, and kept drifting, and finally watched it land in the second row of seats for a home run. If you watch enough games, you can tell whether a ball has a chance of being caught by the stride of the fielders. On this one, not one, but two, outfielders were in that loping gait that looked like they knew they could catch it, so what happened?

On the scoreboard before the game started, the weather report said the wind was 18 mph at gametime. We were in the top row of the upper deck behind home plate, so we knew we had a solid wind at our backs. And it was at our backs, so it was blowing fly balls toward the fence.

The wind ultimately died down, but the Cubs hit four home runs by the sixth inning. I think some of them would have gone out even without the breeze, but not all.