During the research and the subsequent debates that were a part of doing our “Greatest Philadelphia Athlete” podcast, I repeatedly came across a common storyline, that we as fans turn on our superstar athletes and run them out of town. Its uncanny how many times the fan base here in Philadelphia have found something wrong with a premiere athlete and how often popular opinion has swung against a player whose performance should grant them some sort of immunity from that type of uprising. Successful or not, over time it seems as if Philly fans just get sick of the same players being the focal point of their teams.
If you try to hypothesize why this is the case, your first instinct would be to say it’s because the fan base demands a winner, and unless you win it all you get the label of a failure. This isn’t actually the case when you look further into this behavior. Mike Schmidt, for example, had a very vocal crowd of detractors throughout the ‘80s despite being a World Series champion, MVP of that World Series, a 12-time all-star, a 10-time gold glove winner, and a 3-time NL MVP. Schmidt was the greatest player of his time, yet still faced the wrath of the Philly crowds. They claimed he didn’t hustle and that he seemed nonchalant in the field, despite his records for fielding. At the time Schmidt grew frustrated with the crowds, calling them a mob scene and saying they were beyond help. Well, 25 years later not much has changed, a new generation of fans has come to be, and they are just as tough as their predecessors. 25 years later, I wonder if the great Michael Jack Schmidt was right, are we beyond help?
I’m not sure if we’re beyond help, but Michael Jack has nothing on today’s superstars. Today we live in a world with a television channel and two radio stations that are dedicated to covering Philadelphia sports exclusively. You think we used to nitpick in the ‘80s Mike? You ain’t seen nothing. Today every facet of professional sports is picked apart and criticized as a part of an endless 24-hour news cycle. Nobody feels this scorn and criticism any harsher than Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb. This pair represents the best the Philadelphia Eagles organization has ever put on the field, the winningest coach and the best quarterback. So why do we as fans do nothing but rip these two apart day in and day out. I often criticize McNabb for things not related to his play, and I claim to know better. Who am I to say that he isn’t a leader, or that he doesn’t command respect like other quarterbacks? Why do fans think that Andy Reid is a smug, arrogant bastard even though all he ever does is win football games and take all criticism on himself. That’s what a real man is supposed to do, chin up, don’t complain, just continue doing what you feel in your heart is right. Andy Reid is a very good coach (although a flawed one), and Andy deserves to get better treatment from Eagles “fans”. If you raise this point to an Eagles fan, they’ll tell you it’s because he has never won a Super Bowl, but ask Mike Schmidt how long the bloom stays on that rose, and he’ll tell you not very long. Once Philly decides your aren’t a “Philly guy”, the chances of escaping that determination are slim to none.
Just ask Scott Rolen. Rolen came up to the big leagues at the end of 1996 and showed flashes of greatness, those flashes materialized into a rookie of the year award in 1997 and Scott was on his way to becoming a Phillies legend. Then something odd happened, Scott won a few gold gloves and blossomed into one of the best young third basemen in baseball when the fans started saying that he wasn’t hard-nosed enough. After time Rolen began to bristle at this distinction and that was a huge mistake. It’s all well and good for the fans to slander you, but if you dare even hint that you resent their opinion, then you’re dead to them. It got to be so bad, that when Rolen started to question the team’s commitment to winning the fans took THE TEAM’S SIDE! So Rolen decided he wanted out, and he got a crybaby label for it. The label was further cemented by his feud with fiery manager Larry Bowa, who had never been a successful manager, yet is still loved by Phillies fans due to his passing the feisty personality litmus test with flying colors.
Scotty Rolen was just the tip of the iceberg. Remember Eagles’ star Randall Cunningham, who went from MVP to pariah in about three years. What about Eric Lindros? He went from hockey god to pansy-ass Daddy’s boy in about three years. You only need to look at The Answer himself. We named Allen Iverson the greatest athlete of the last 20 years, yet he was exiled too. He was labeled lazy for not making a handful of practices, yet all anyone talks about when he’s mentioned is how hard he played and how much effort he gave night in and night out. So what gives? Why do we continue to vilify our stars? Who is next to face the wrath of the infamous Philly backlash?
If I had to guess, the next in line is World Series MVP Cole Hamels. I vividly recall the fans declaring that Hamels wasn’t a big game pitcher, and that he was a pansy and cowardly for not pitching a day early last season, a move that would have matched him up against the Mets instead of the Marlins. That’s right, Cole Hamels had his heart and big-game ability questioned a mere weeks before he carried the Phillies to a World Series title. I remember arguing that if the kid isn’t comfortable pitching early, then respect that he has the maturity to recognize his limitations. Cole didn’t want to risk messing up his routine, and I think that decision worked out pretty well. Brett Myers, meanwhile, returned to the big-league roster after being sent to AAA to straighten out a horrible season as popular as ever, despite having a terrible season and recent legal troubles of a disturbing nature. Part of that was us fans knowing that Myers needed to perform well down the stretch for the Phillies to have a chance to win the East, and we decided that we were going to be behind Brett all the way for the good of the team. Then again, how often are we positive for positivity’s sake, I think as big a part of his maintained popularity is that Brett Myers always had that feisty demeanor on the field, and Philly fans respond to that.
The scary part is that those toughness related criticisms probably aren’t behind Cole. If Cole only makes 50 starts over the next two season, and the Phillies don’t win the East in those two years. I would not be at all surprised if the questions of his toughness crept back onto barstools and into the radio waves of the sports talk world. I heard Ike Reese on Monday evening say that Hamels is “overly cautious” when it comes to his body. This is before he’s thrown a single regular season pitch after a dominating World Series run that you’d think would have granted the kid some sort of a pass. If Cole isn’t currently immune, then is anybody in the Philadelphia sports scene ever going to be safe? After a few seasons without repeating as NL East champions, I could easily see the current group of Phillies falling out of favor. It won’t take much for Manuel to return to being Charlie from Mayberry, and Ryan Howard’s giant strikeout totals could very easily become a reflection of how he doesn’t work hard enough to get better, rather than a natural byproduct of a non-steroid era slugger.
So I ask, are we wrong? Are we hurting our teams more than we help with the way obsess like we do? As much as I love my teams, and as much as I love dissecting every move and game, maybe I’m not helping either. Should I restrict my opinion making data to what happens between the white lines? To answer this questions let’s consider the end of Andy Reid. I feel like when/if Reid is ever released by the Eagles, it will be due in part to the large, vocal group of fans who don’t like Reid because they find him arrogant and condescending. Odds say that our next coach will not be as good as Andy, since he is the winningest coach in team history; in fact odds are the next five coaches won’t be as good. So when Andy goes, if public opinion based on his personality is a factor in that decision, then we as fans will have chosen to have an inferior coach who is a better interview or who is a fierier guy on the sidelines, than a winner who is stone faced and boring. How insane is that? How insane are we?
Well, insane enough to spend countless hours picking apart every angle of the Eagles offseason, insane enough to pack Lehigh every year at mini-camps, insane enough to sell out every game for an entire 81 home game schedule despite a collapsing economy, and insane enough that three guys with full time jobs spend most of their free time building a website about Philly sports. We are very dedicated, is that so wrong? Is it wrong for fans of Lost to pack message boards and go over every frame of every episode? Absolutely not. The only thing that would be wrong is if the producers of Lost read those message board postings and make knee-jerk reactions to the feedback. It’s also wrong if the show’s producers completely ignore what those message boards say, not acknowledging what the show’s most hardcore fans believe.
In the end when you commit to following a team on a daily basis, you are also deciding that the team will be your primary entertainment source. Fans want a payoff for their time, money, and troubles. That is why we dislike boring Andy Reid, we want entertainment, and while the game day on-the-field product may usually be a quality one, what about our entertainment on the other 349 days of the year? If we aren’t working towards a title, the triumph of which is our ultimate payoff from this entertainment, then we need to be getting something else for our commitment, namely drama. The drama of the big game, the drama of the offseason where characters are added or removed from the roster, and sometimes we just need to add the drama ourselves. Drama, after all is second to triumph in what we hope to experience from watching sports to begin with.
That’s really the answer, I think, that when triumph isn’t an option, we want drama, and we are willing to create it ourselves as necessary. When that drama is created it is a pretty basic idea that the bigger the star involved, the bigger the drama. It works in Hollywood, it works on television and it works in Philadelphia sports. That why Scott Rolen was a superstar in the making who got the boot, but Pedro Feliz is a huge underachiever who gets a pass, because one was a leading man, and the other is playing a bit part. I think it really is that simple: we want drama, so we create it, and when we create it, we create it around our biggest stars. So when Philly’s brightest stars find themselves knee-deep in the quicksand of public opinion, don’t blame their downfall on us. After all, it’s our job as fans to follow along with the drama and even to embrace it. It is our right as fans to start the drama when it looks like that triumph we long for isn’t coming anytime soon, or when things are getting boring.
