Dear Phillies: You're It

A city turns its championship-starved eyes to you.

by David Faris

A s soon as the champagne was dry on the Superdome floor after the Eagles playoff loss to the Saints, it dawned on us: The only thing that stands between Philadelphia and another year without a title is a baseball team with about 10,000 losses and a bullpen with more leaks than the vice president's office. The Phillies are It.

Philadelphia, as you may have heard 1,000 or 2,000 times, has the longest championship drought of any city with four major sports teams. The confetti last dropped on Broad Street in 1983, when the Sixers swept the Lakers for the NBA title. Since then, we've been treated to losses in the Super Bowl, NHL and NBA Finals, and the World Series.

We've lost in mundane and predictable ways, like when the 2001 Lakers manhandled the Sixers, and painful ones, like when Jim Fregosi left Mitch Williams in to face Joe Carter in a very winnable Game Six of the '93 World Series. But mostly, we've just lost.

The future does not look much brighter.

The Flyers are by far the worst team in the NHL. (Also, no one has really cared about hockey since they took away a bunch of NHL teams from all those snow-bunny towns in Canada and stuck them in places like Phoenix, where no one has seen natural ice since the Pleistocene.) The Sixers may be in even worse shape; they're wretched but just close enough to mediocrity to lose their chance at salvation in the form of a high lottery pick.

And while the Eagles made it to the second round of the playoffs last year, they'd need major changes to be considered a Super Bowl contender. Don't forget that A.J. "Touchy" Feeley may be our Week One quarterback if Donovan McNabb can't come back in time. Even if they improve, they wouldn't bring home a trophy until 2008. By then, Philadelphia may have drunk itself to death.

That leaves the Phillies. With a core of talented young players, including franchise cornerstones Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Cole Hamels and Brett Myers, the Phils are arguably one of the two or three best teams in the league. They won more games last year than the world champs, though that's kind of like saying you've shot fewer people than Dick Cheney.

The window of opportunity for this bunch is not particularly wide. The closing days of the former-GM Ed Wade era witnessed the systematic looting and starvation of the team's farm system. When guys weren't getting dealt away in deals for people like Cory Lidle and Todd Jones, they weren't getting picked up at all because the team lost draft picks for signing the likes of since-departed third baseman David Bell.

Consequently, the Phillies have one of the worst farm systems in all of baseball, highlighted by a near-total lack of position-player prospects. And don't tell me speedster Michael Bourn is a position prospect. As they say, you can't steal first base.

In other words, another Phillies dark age looms on the horizon if they don't get some serious prospects into the pipeline. And that makes winning now all the more important. The news out of spring training has not been good. The team compiled a miserable record; superstars barely hit their weight; and the relief pitching looked like an impending catastrophe.

On the bright side, at least we're past the lonely years of the late '90s, when people like Midre Cummings and Kevin Sefcik took up space in the outfield and the rotation featured such immortals as David West and Chad Ogea. There was a time, you'll recall, when finishing over .500 seemed like a big accomplishment for this franchise. So, progress has been made. At least expectations are high.

But Philadelphia is in dire need of something to celebrate. Ideally, that celebration would involve something weightier than the exploits of a sports team, but with the murder rate soaring and the population base shrinking, we'll take what we can get. And the Phillies are going to have to deal with being the last levee preventing another flood of sporting heartache.

David Faris is a frequent Slant contributor.