When Nature Calls, Phillies Relievers Have a Place to Go (Published 2022)
HATBORO, Pa. — It’s the highest of the ninth inning at Citizens Bank Park, and the Philadelphia Phillies’ relievers are at it once more. They have already blown one lead, with Jeurys Familia and Seranthony Domínguez giving up homers within the seventh. Now after a comeback, the sport has unraveled with nearer Corey Knebel on the mound.
The Miami Marlins win it, 11-9, and from his lounge sofa within the suburbs right here, Matt Edwards sighs.
“Celebrating some of these guys is really hard,” he stated.
Indeed it’s: The Phillies are the one National League workforce and not using a playoff look within the final 10 years, and their bullpen is an annual journey. Nostalgia could be an attractive escape (beer helps, too), and no one celebrates the previous fairly like Edwards, a 45-year-old telecommunications salesman with a spouse, Cheryl, two younger sons, a Great Dane — and a shrine in his downstairs lavatory to retired Phillies reduction pitchers.
“We’re highly aware that we weren’t one of the five starters or any of the guys on the field,” stated Chad Durbin, who spent 4 seasons as a Phillies reliever. “But, you know, we had our moments. So when we’re remembered, we embrace it.”
Durbin logged 225 video games for the Phillies, postseason included, with a 4.07 earned run common. He pitched for 5 different groups, however so far as he is aware of, none of their followers have his image of their lavatory. As you may guess, Durbin doesn’t have a presence on the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., both.
“Absolutely not,” he stated. “But I do in the Relief Room.”
The Relief Room is what Edwards calls his lavatory, as a result of that’s the place one goes to alleviate oneself. That’s the joke.
Edwards performed third base in Little League and left discipline in males’s softball. His sons will not be pitchers. His favourite energetic participant is a primary baseman, the Phillies’ Rhys Hoskins. But like a comic who finds limitless materials by staying dedicated to the bit, Edwards has crafted a model round gamers who get no respect, no respect in any respect.
“I remember opening packs of cards, and you’d see a mustache and think, ‘Oh, that’s Mike Schmidt’ — and no, it’s Dan Schatzeder,” he stated in his dwelling workplace, which overflows with artifacts that don’t fairly match within the 3 ft by 8 ft museum across the nook.
“But that was the joy of going through cards, trying to find that guy. Well, now I don’t want the Mike Schmidts or the Bryce Harpers. I want to champion the guys like Schatzeder and Andy Carter and Amalio Carreño, because nobody does. Celebrating the little guy that nobody remembers is more memorable than talking about the stars, because everybody knows about them.
“Nobody knows about Tyson Brummett. He’s one of the cup-of-coffee guys. That’s why this was made into a cup of coffee — enjoy a cup of coffee with Erskine Thomason.”
Edwards reaches for a custom-made mug with the black-and-white visage of Thomason, who pitched the ninth inning of a loss on Sept. 18, 1974, in his solely main league look. The definitive statistical web site, Baseball Reference, makes use of a clean headshot with a query mark subsequent to Thomason’s identify. That could be blasphemy to Edwards.
He is aware of that Thomason was the topic of an NFL Films documentary and that the filmmakers, who adopted him all season, by some means missed his solely recreation and needed to restage the footage. He additionally is aware of that Brummett pitched one recreation in 2012 and later died in a aircraft crash. He is aware of that Carter was ejected from his first main league recreation, and Carreño from his final.
And, in fact, he is aware of that Schatzeder spent a few years as a highschool bodily schooling teacher in Illinois.
“If you look at that guy, you can totally envision him in a sweatsuit with a whistle around his neck,” Edwards stated. “That’s awesome. Who’s going to sing his song from the top of a mountain? If not me, then who?”
For Edwards, there’s sincerity within the satire. He remembers when a highschool classmate obtained drafted by the Mets, how thrilling it was {that a} main league workforce needed somebody he knew. Fewer than 23,000 individuals have ever performed a recreation within the majors; you can put all of them into previous Veterans Stadium, with greater than 40,000 seats to spare.
They all have tales, and in the event that they occurred to have pitched in reduction for the Phillies, Edwards considers it’s his mission to inform them. An English main on the University of New Hampshire, Edwards reads extensively on his topics, plucking enjoyable info on every and organizing them by date on his laptop. He sends a number of tweets a day to a modest group of followers with just a few well-known names — well-known to Edwards, a minimum of.
“He loves Tom Hume,” stated Scott Eyre, a lefty specialist from the late 2000s, referring to a bespectacled righty of the Nineteen Eighties. “He would probably pass out if Tom Hume went to the Relief Room.”
Eyre did, in early 2020, after an autograph look close by. (Edwards wore his Hume T-shirt for the event.) Eyre, who solely knew Edwards from Twitter, turned the primary reliever to really relieve himself within the Relief Room. That was pure, since he frolicked with Edwards for hours, effectively previous 1 a.m., ingesting beers, opening previous packs of playing cards and telling tales of Chuck McElroy, Dan Plesac and different honorees he knew.
A pilgrimage to see a Phillies fan’s lavatory, it’s secure to say, is nothing Eyre ever anticipated to do. A California native now residing in North Carolina, Eyre as soon as had a no-trade clause to Philadelphia. When the Cubs despatched him there in 2008, he requested Jon Lieber, a teammate who had performed for the Phillies, what to anticipate.
“He goes, ‘Dude, you’ll love it there, and they’ll love you,’” Eyre stated. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You’re a stand-up guy and you are who you are.’ And that was exactly right. If you go out and do your job and own up to the mistakes you make, they’ll still love you. They just want to yell at you for a little bit, and that’s fine.”
Eyre got here to grasp the essence of the Philadelphia followers: They all the time anticipate to win, irrespective of the circumstances, and so they additionally wish to be heard. Failure then seems like a private affront and provides the followers license to boo. But they embrace gamers who make no excuses and genuinely present that they care.
Take Mitch Williams, the one man alive to surrender a walk-off homer to lose the World Series, to Toronto’s Joe Carter in 1993. Williams, generally known as the Wild Thing, is a folks hero to Phillies followers and duly honored within the Relief Room.
“On an easy level, it’s the mullet and the headband and stuff like that, but he busted it every single time out there,” Edwards stated. “His bravado, his machismo, the way he strutted around. You could tell he didn’t want to walk anybody, he wanted to just fire strikes and get everybody out. But he was accountable, and that’s huge.”
Williams is among the many few well-known relievers in Edwards’s gallery. Most made a smaller influence, like Kyle Abbott, Josh Lindblom and Wally Ritchie, who all observe Edwards on Twitter. They are among the many 300 or so faces lining the partitions of the lavatory, totally on baseball playing cards however dozens on bigger images, just like the one in all Renie Martin above the mirror.
“There’s something new in there,” Edwards’s mom, Joann, informed him when she observed it. “He’s looking right at me, and I don’t like his face.”
Martin pitched solely briefly for the Phillies, however Edwards loves that he appeared for Kansas City within the clincher of the 1980 World Series, when Tug McGraw closed out the Phillies’ first championship. After the second, in 2008, Edwards’s father, Jim, hung two images above the bathroom: one in all McGraw and the opposite of Brad Lidge, each celebrating in October.
Edwards purchased the home from his father just a few years later, saved the McGraw and Lidge images and added all the pieces else — the bar of cleaning soap depicting Sparky Lyle, the commemorative Ron Reed soda can, the four-sided Kleenex dispenser with Porfi Altamirano, Warren Brusstar, Tom Hilgendorf and Barry Jones.
The deal with on the cupboard is the barrel of a Don Carman damaged bat; a retired Phillies groundskeeper despatched it to Edwards. Greg Harris, an ambidextrous reliever, inscribed his picture: “Using both hands in the Relief Room.” The artist Dick Perez, as soon as the official artist of the Hall of Fame, donated an authentic portrait of Hilgendorf — a hero of Edwards’s for as soon as saving a drowning boy from a swimming pool.
“And then that whole ‘10 cent beer night’ thing in Cleveland,” Edwards stated. “He’s brained with a chair, gushing blood — and the next game, he faces six batters and gets six outs!”
If you want a while within the Relief Room, there’s a basket with problems with classic magazines like “Phillies Today,” with Steve Bedrosian and Jeff Parrett in firefighter gear on the entrance. There’s a set of McGraw’s comedian strips from the Nineteen Seventies and a Guess-The-Mustache flip ebook. (Failure to acknowledge Altamirano leads to the automated lack of a full letter grade.)
There are tentative plans for Relief Room growth, Edwards stated, if he and Cheryl can transfer the washer-dryer out of the adjoining mudroom. For now, although, Edwards wants a spot for his latest treasure: the game-worn cleats of Toby Borland, a slender sidearmer from the Nineteen Nineties. His buddies, Brian and Mike Carroll, purchased them for $30 on eBay.
The cleats may match simply on the wall above the bathroom, which is generally clean area. But that part is sacred, Edwards stated, reserved strictly for relievers from the championship groups. The Phillies have improved these days however are nonetheless recovering from a sluggish begin. They may must summon the spirit of McGraw to make this their 12 months.
“Cheryl’s like, ‘There’s so much space there, do something else with it,’” Edwards stated. “I’m waiting. That’s the point. That’s the optimist in me: I’m going to fill this wall.”
