I'm a sucker - I stayed up until 4:00 a.m. to watch the Phillies lose
Or: How to experience pain in Paris
It’s disputed, or at least inconclusive, whether “catching up on sleep” is real and possible. So there is little solace in my spending the last week staying up until 4:00 a.m. to watch the Philadelphia Phillies ruin my life.
Game 1 of the National League Division Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers started at 12:40 a.m. Paris time. My last text that morning, at 3:40 a.m., right after the Dodgers finalized their comeback victory, read “dumb fucking hope.”
Game 2 started just after midnight, but I called it a morning after the Phillies went down 4-0 in the seventh inning. Their comeback in the ninth fell short, thanks to a galaxy-brained bunt attempt. I missed it, mercifully, although it was kind of like sleeping on the ship on deployment. My brain and body anticipated the alarm and my next watch. I hardly rested.
I declined to watch Game 3. I was in Phoenix in 2023 when the Phillies’ most promising path to a World Series ring collapsed. Up 2-0 in the series, manager Rob Thomson called on reliever Craig Kimbrel, whose best years were in a different decade, in games 3 and 4 of the NL Championship Series. Kimbrel became the first Phillies pitcher ever to lose consecutive postseason games. The far lesser Arizona Diamondbacks went on to win the series, and they faced a meh Texas Rangers team in the final round.
Last year, the Phillies lost to the New York Mets in the NLDS so quickly and so emphatically I barely had time to form an opinion on the matter. I could not, then, watch the 2025 Philadelphia Phillies—winners of 96 regular season games, victors of the NL East by 13 games, possessors of probably the most talented Phillies roster ever—get swept in a game that started for me at 3:00 a.m.
No, what I would do instead is go to bed at a normal hour, then wake up at 4:30 a.m. by accident, check the score, think wait a minute here, and in the dark and on my phone “watch” the last four innings of their sole victory on the gamecast feature in the MLB app. I took the tried-and-true 8:30-10:00 a.m. nap, then stumbled through Paris like Will Ferrell in Old School after he got shot in the neck with a tranquilizer.
To Europeans, the Phillies and Dodgers effectively played a doubleheader, for Game 4 started at midnight the same day. I stayed up for all eleven innings. I jotted down notes for this essay past 4:00 a.m., after the Phillies’ best and highest paid hitters—Trea Turner, Kyle Schwarber, and Bryce Harper—batted a combined 1-14; after the home plate umpire missed a strike-three call for the Phillies in the eighth and may have altered the course of the game; and after Orion Kerkering, may God bless his soul, made a panicked error to allow the Dodgers to score and win and advance.
It was as if I pulled an all-nighter, or several of them, and failed the exam anyway. What was the point? I keep asking myself. I corrupted my circadian rhythm, fell behind on writing, and subscribed to something called Canal+ because MLB said they have the broadcast rights in France, only to realize I could continue watching baseball on my already-paid for MLB.tv subscription. Sports pain and economic exploitation are synonymous these days.
I keep falling back to the same answer: There is no point. My watching the Phillies does not at all affect the outcome (except if I wear this shirt and sit in that chair and standing in this location for the middle innings and wear that hat and…), and the team seems to not care that I watch. “I think that the stadium is good on both sides. When the game’s going good, it’s wind at our back. When the game’s not going good, it’s wind at our face,” outfielder Nick Castellanos said after the Phillies Game 2 loss. “So the environment can be with us and the environment can be against us.”
But maybe the point is that there is no point. That the only purpose for fandom is to believe in something, to care. The United States has extinguished that feeling. The purpose of anything anymore is to gain power or money. That’s what makes Castellanos’ comments so irritating. It’s not that he excused losing, though he did. It’s that he derided caring for caring sake, and caring because it’s a nice thing to do is what separates us from the AI search and chat bots that now run the world.
I thought, briefly, that I won’t commit to the Phillies next year in the same way, especially as I anticipate being in Europe for most of the season. But what, then, would I care about? Work? Politics? How quickly a robot can draft me an email? Sounds terrible.