'I'm gonna vomit': Reliving the wild 2022 baseball season through my text messages

It started with a lockout. How did it end up like this?

On December 1, 2021, a few hours before Major League Baseball owners took the ball and went home, I reached for my phone to message the only person I knew who would understand. “Scherzer was spotted a couple weeks ago visiting GOP Senate offices,” I said to my dad. “I wonder if he’s doing an inside job.”

It was my first text of the 2022 baseball season. The last one came eleven months and five days later, on November 6, the day after the Philadelphia Phillies lost the World Series. 

“There is no joy in Mudville,” Dad said that morning. “But there is hope: if you are available, let’s have dinner tonight to debrief the WS and cry in our Cabernet.”

Ours that night was the one conversation last year I wish was recorded. The rest are in my phone: my lockout conspiracy theories, my free agent signings, my trying to understand Joe Girardi and bench Alec Bohm, and my meltdowns after each Phillies loss. My phone documented my soul departing my body in Philadelphia at the National League Division Series, a hopeful reunion in San Diego during the League Championship Series, and the year’s final defeat in the World Series. Should my future biographers and scholars want to understand what my life and brain were like in the year 2022, they will need not exhume my body or peruse my files. They will need the servers on which my text messages exist. 

January and February: No baseball

As it turned out, Max Scherzer emerged as the lead negotiator for the players’ union amid the lockout, and he was often photographed climbing out of his Porsche for bargaining sessions unshaven and unsmiling. He reminded me of the former varsity athlete who founded some restaurants or a construction company and never left town, knowing every year the only answer to whether he wanted to sponsor the local Little League was yes. In this light, his dramatic delivery, combative on-field persona, and petulant reactions to authority, which have so annoyed me in his years dominating the Phillies, seemed less like contrived mannerisms of a star than expressions of his commitment and obligation to a cause.

The cause at hand was getting the players back on the field under a fair labor deal. The union wanted a larger piece of the league's growing pie. The owners wanted to suppress labor costs. So it goes.

I repented my earlier breaking ranks by reading and proselytizing John Heylar’s Lords of the Realm. (Introducing the themes in the book’s epigraph, Heylar quoted media magnate and then-Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner: “Gentlemen, we have the only legal monopoly in the country and we’re fucking it up.”) After MLB sent a marketing email just after the New Year, I wanted to call the National Labor Relations Board but settled on texting my dad. “Selling tickets for a product derived entirely from the labor that the owners have locked out. Absolutely enraging.”

The lockout dragged on into February, and with little to talk about besides the worst wave of the pandemic, I asked my father to opine on some leaked deal term never enacted and long forgotten.

“Who knows, but I don’t trust the owners agreeing to it so quickly and publicly,” he said.

“Same,” I said. “Who knows with these parasites.”

“So if we buy a team, are we born parasites, or do we just become parasites?”

“Become,” I said. “Google ‘Marx’ and ‘character masks.’ No matter how much we may try, we take on the identity of our economic role.”

“That’s godless communism,” he said. “There are benevolent kings in the Bible. I want a team and I want to get into Heaven.”

“Get in line,” I said.

Literary Phillies fans, NLDS Game 3, Citizens Bank Park, October 14, 2022.

March: Baseball

The sport reactivated on March 10, ninety-nine days after I accused Max Scherzer of being a mole, when the league and union agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement. The players won increases in teams’ payroll and the league minimum wage, as well as bonuses for the best young players annually. The owners preserved the arbitration system and were able to expand the playoffs, the value of which reliever Trevor May explained on his YouTube channel.

Depending on the playoff round, players earn 50-60% of the gate receipts for the minimum number of games. In a seven-game World Series, for example, the players’ cut is 60% of the ticket revenue for the first four games. The rest goes to the league. This is on top of MLB historically not paying players for their five weeks at spring training. Professional baseball in America is brought to you by unpaid labor.

But passion thaws resentment, like it does after getting back with an ex.

“So who is the Phillies DH?” Dad asked.

“The new CBA really helps the Phillies overall, but as their roster stands, they should slide Hoskins to DH, move Bohm to 1B, and sign a third baseman.”

Instead, the Phillies added outfielders Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos to the core of right fielder Bryce Harper, first baseman Rhys Hoskins, catcher J.T. Realmuto, and second baseman Jean “Jimmy Cigs” Segura, which gave the team what I thought was “the best 1-6 batting order in the MLB behind the Dodgers” and perhaps the worst defense behind everyone. The roster construction was as exciting as it was bizarre, and my father, a Yankees fan who laments the death of the bunt, somehow understood it.

“The Phillies are in a good spot,” he said. “With expanded playoffs, they’ll get in for sure. I think it comes down to, you gotta go for the highest seed you can, but make sure you have two great starters rested and ready for the playoffs.”

Those two starters, Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola, possessed the right arms on which I rested my mental health. The Phillies hadn’t been in the playoffs since Ryan Howard tore his Achilles tendon on the final play of the 2011 National League Division Series, and the ensuing rebuild settled into purgatory:

• 2018: 80-82, and 8-20 in September to miss the playoffs

• 2019: 81-81, and 12-16 in September to miss the playoffs

• 2020: 28-32, and lost seven of their last eight games to miss the playoffs

• 2021: 82-80, and lost six of their last seven games to miss the playoffs

But in the delayed and truncated spring training, the 2022 season felt different, just as every new thing feels different. “I’ll tell ya what,” I said. “My Phils are looking good. Five homers today vs. Jays, with two from Harper. Young guys look great. It’s gonna be fun.”

April: Bohm

“My Phillies journey begins in a moment. Wish me luck,” I said on Opening Day.

“I’m watching for you,” Dad said.

“SCHWARBOMBS.”

He went deep in the first at-bat in the first game in the first win of the season. In the first inning the next day, Harper was hit by a pitch, Castellanos drove himself and his teammate in with a home run, and then Hoskins doubled. “The lineup is just too deep,” I said.

Two days later: the Alec Bohm Game.

“I’m gonna vomit. 3-0 Mets in the top of the second due in large part to two inexplicable errors by Bohm. He’s a lost cause. He simply cannot be on the field anymore.”

An inning later: “Make that three errors for Bohm. He is unplayable.”

Minutes later: “Cameras caught Bohm saying ‘I fucking hate this place’ after the crowd cheered when he made a routine play. He needs to be traded after this game. Let him try to recover his career elsewhere.”

“The root of the problem with so many teams, including Phils and Yanks,” Dad said, “is the obsession with load management.”

What my father was getting at, I had no idea, but I knew Bohm was supposed to be one of the best in the world at his job, yet in his third season playing third base he looked like a fawn stumbling across a road for the first time. The national media later spun the moment as a nadir for Bohm and an inflection point in the team’s season, but the Phillies played to an 18-28 record in their next 46 games and by many advanced statistics Bohm finished the year as the second-worst third baseman in baseball. Every year since 2018 there were supposedly breakout candidates, improved veterans, stronger lineups, smarter play: hope. At least past teams waited until September to collapse. Following the 2022 Phillies was like being in a doomed relationship: the more we told each other we’d change, the more we clung to our ways.

On the other hand, Bohm confessed after the game—just the fourth of the season—the crowd the next night gave him an ovation for his troubles, and he ultimately submitted a solid year at the plate (and inspired a wave of unlicensed t-shirts). Bohm was also just twenty-five, an age at which I had just finished back-to-back deployments and spent riding the Pacific Beach and the Gaslamp circuits. Every morning onboard the ship, I would muster my division at quarters and ask my enlisted sailors to maintain a standard I didn’t meet and complete menial tasks I didn’t care about. (One of the hardest parts about being an adult in the civilian world is, unlike in the Navy, there are no beds at work.) Bohm deserved grace; after all, he atoned for his trifecta by sparking an eighth-inning rally with a leadoff walk.

“It is absolutely unbelievable that the Phillies came back to win tonight,” I said.

May: Gray

The Phillies went 10-18 in May. They lost one game against the Mets by blowing a six-run, ninth-inning lead.

“I was watching and went to bed when it was 7-0,” my father said. “That’s a brutal, soul-crushing loss.”

Thanks, Dad.

June: Thomson

My first deployment was a six-month cruise in the boiling waters off Central America to chase fishermen conscripted by drug cartels. I imagined some admiral justifying the mission and the expense to taxpayers by saying to colleagues in the Pentagon, “Of course we’re not going to stop all contraband from getting into the country, but it can’t hurt!” The brass in the room would laugh, then that admiral would lower his voice an octave—it’s always a man—and say, “But seriously, if the United States Navy can prevent even one overdose and an American mother from shedding tears at their child’s funeral, then it’s all worth it.” Everyone would nod, and from that consensus I and 200 others would be off supporting the War on Drugs. The Phillies firing manager Joe Girardi on June 3 seemed to follow similar logic.

The team had two-and-a-half starting pitchers; a bullpen that, a year previous, was historically bad and looked incapable of improving to normally bad; four outfielders and a third baseman who, either due to injury or skill, couldn’t field their positions; and a shortstop who just didn’t have it anymore. Like how my deployment wouldn’t have ended the War on Drugs, “Firing Joe Girardi wouldn’t fix Phillies’ problems,” wrote Ken Rosenthal. It was a move to mollify the base. They had to do something. Anything.

“If I was GM...” I said, before proposing a bulleted list of improbable roster moves. “They could still steal a wild card spot, but at minimum you’re getting reps for young guys, clearing salary, and setting yourself up to reload in ‘23.”

“I agree with your plan,” Dad said. “You have to do something. Anything.”

The Phillies listened to none of my advice, replaced Girardi with assistant coach Rob Thomson, and won the first eight games of Thomson’s tenure. Rosenthal was subsequently shamed by the Philly fanbase, and then again when the team finished 19-8 in June, and then again after they went 33-21 in July and August, and then again after they were on the precipice of a playoff berth. Rosenthal relented on September 22. “OK, Phillies fans, I will say it—I was wrong!” 

Thomson settled on a consistent lineup. He used his best relievers in critical moments. He entrenched young players like Bohm and top prospect Bryson Stott at their positions, struggles be damned. These and other tactical decisions flowed from a coherent strategy: trust the players and their talents. The media couldn’t get enough of the contrast in style between Girardi and Thomson. The former was reportedly rigid in his game-planning and brusque with the players, while the latter was responsive and communicative. It is apparently rocket science that making sound decisions on the field and being likable off it can lead to success in baseball.

There also exists luck. When asked to explain the team’s midseason turnaround, Thomson usually started with the fact that the schedule lightened in June. Beginning on May 5, the Phillies played in succession the Mets, Mariners, Dodgers, Padres, Dodgers, Braves, and Mets. Each team eventually won at least 89 games and made the playoffs. The Phillies went 10-12 in that stretch. They played no eventual playoff teams from June 1-22, when they went 15-5. 

Scheduling is one of the countless chance occurrences that impact a team’s success. Another is when you fly your brother–inexplicably, a Padres fan–from South Jersey to San Diego for the annual Phils-Pads series and for the June 25 game you splurge for seats behind the plate and a good pitcher like Blake Snell tosses his best start of the year until a pitch high and hard and out of control smashes Bryce Harper’s left thumb and the sound of ball on bone leaves you sick, sick for Harper, who writhes on the ground; sick for the season, whose emergent magic evaporates with Snell’s 97-miles-per-hour fastball; and sick for yourself for spending hundreds of dollars to witness this unfold in person.

“There goes my season.”

“Snell drilled Harper. No doubt broke his wrist or thumb.”

“Heard it from up here. Crumbled to the ground immediately.”

“Screaming.”

“I’m sick.”

“What a disgrace.”

“I’m sitting here in disbelief that the Phillies season is tanked yet again.”

“Confirmed. Harper broke his thumb.”

The Phillies would need good luck to ride out Harper’s absence, just as my crew’s 30-year-old, single-screwed frigate needed luck to stay afloat, let alone to catch pangas stuffed with cocaine going 45 knots.

July-August: Anxiety

“My Phillies are about to get swept by the lowly Cubs. It’s the dog days.”

I don’t remember sending that text or anything about that series. On some days, I existed within a somewhat productive mania. On others, I laid on the ground. At all times I expected a reckoning. The trap door would release whenever.

Over the summer, my routine of “finishing the day at home” for the 4:05 p.m. game times out West was disrupted. I needed to cover three jobs at work, and I was managing an important project. I also invented in my mind lingering effects of Covid, which I contracted in June for the second time, and was convinced they would impede my long-scheduled trip to Europe. I had told my boss during the previous December that I needed two weeks’ leave in August. She pointed out that that was nine months away and asked if everything was okay.

I had spent peak-Covid in a small studio apartment and became obsessed with YouTube channels about sustainable development and bike- and pedestrian-friendly cities. Going to Amsterdam, etc. wasn’t just for fun. It became necessary, then it became a personality trait. Yes: I, me, the guy who chooses to not own a car in Southern California, am going to Italy and the Netherlands and Germany can’t you believe it haha it’s the only thing keeping me going haha.

Leading up to the trip, my baseball fandom devolved into refreshing MLB Trade Rumors and responding to my dad’s texts about his Yankees and Aaron Judge’s home run chase. At different points, Nick Castellanos argued with a popular Phillies beat writer for some reason and the team made several roster moves that, in hindsight, kept them afloat in Harper’s absence and contributed to their World Series run. On August 2, MLB’s trade deadline, I left work for the airport and boarded the first of two red-eye flights to Naples.

I struggled to contain the anxiety that the trip was meant to alleviate. I barely slept. I tried watching the Phillies in the middle of the night, but the stream lagged. I didn’t tell my buddy who I traveled with. We were having fun, remember :). I returned to the States in mid-August and on the 20th I sent Dad my first baseball-related message in three weeks, a snapshot of a cartoon in the previous week’s New Yorker. In it, a ballplayer slides under the tag at home plate and looks up at the umpire, who signals “safe.” Sprawled on the ground, the player mutters, “But I don’t feel safe.”

Me in Amsterdam, August 2022.

September: Clinch

September 3: “My Phillies are cratering.”

September 8: “My Phillies blew this game so fast I didn’t even have time to get mad.”

September 20: “The Phillies are collapsing.”

September 21: “Utterly collapsing.”

September 25: “I’m sick.”

September 29: “Stick a fork in my Phillies. I don’t care about the standings. They are done. Getting swept by the Cubs in this biggest series in 11 years is beyond an embarrassment. They are collapsing and quitting when it matters most. It’s time to dissociate myself from them.”

September 29 (again): “The Phillies don’t have it. They’ve lost it. I divorced them. I’ll talk to them in April.”

October 1: “This Phillies team is revolting. Just a disgustingly embarrassing group of lifeless players who don’t give a damn whether they get in the playoffs or not. They’re defeated. I’ve watched almost every game since March. It’s a totally different team this month. They don’t believe. They’re not focused. And Thomson is becoming Girardi. He’s riding ‘his guys’ regardless of the situation. Gibson has been atrocious for a month, yet he’s kept with him today for six innings to the tune of seven runs. He went to his long man who can’t throw a strike today and is leaving him in bases loaded one out. They have five games left after this one. I don’t care if it’s a doubleheader. It’s do or die. There’s no saving arms or matchups anymore. It’s can you get it done, yes or no. And Thomson isn’t ‘listening’ to the situation.”

October 3: “We’re in.”

October: Playoffs

It was cute beating the St. Louis Cardinals in a best-of-three Wild Card series. It was fun to win Game 1 of the National League Division Series against the Braves. I was not prepared for what I experienced at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia for NLDS Games 3. In my first essay, I suggested it was a religious experience, a congregation of acolytes attending mass then partying in the church hall. A month prior, I committed myself to flying home when a buddy, a Phillies season ticket holder, told me the team had released playoff tickets.

“Dude I’m flying home if they get to the NLDS,” I said.

“Looking at a cool $85 for 1st level outfield of the NLDS. Not bad. Will buy,” he said.

“That’s not actually bad. And I’m rich,” I said.

“Cool then you should Venmo me for 1 of the NLDS seats as a retainer.”

And I did. I kept my main group chat apprised during the game.

“Bill. Bill. Bill. I am not the same person.”

“I am the walrus. You don’t understand. That’s your problem.”

“Brian. Have you experienced love? Have you experienced life? I have today.”

“With Yuengling.”

“Bill. Are the Phils a team of destiny pls advise.”

Not a literary Phillies fan, NLDS Game 4, Citizens Bank Park, October 15, 2022.

After the victory, my friend and I floated across the acres of parking at the Sports Complex and across Broad Street and under an overpass and arrived at Chickie’s and Pete’s. The Philly accents were as thick as the FAMOUS CRABFRIESⓇ cheese sauce. It reminded me of when a friend and I drove from South Jersey to Windsor, Canada, when we were nineteen to legally drink and gamble. A waitress in a pizza shop noticed our exaggerated and distorted vowels and asked if we were from Oklahoma. 

“You must be going crazy!” Dad said, checking in. “Did you catch Harper’s homer?”

I told him: “​​The people we were sitting next to just sent me two tix for tomorrow’s game. They don’t want money. This city is the best.”

The Phillies closed out the NLDS in Game 4 in a romp, and my friend and I dragged our bodies back to Chickie’s. The following day, I woke up on my brother’s half-deflated air mattress in Jersey to a text from a San Diegan.

“OMMMMMG BRENDAN NOW WERE PLAYING YOOOOUYYY!!!! Can we watch it togeth ???????”

Overnight, the Padres had beaten the Dodgers to advance to the National League Championship Series, the Brendan Dentino Series.

---

On gameday, my friend asked what she could bring.

“The totality of things I have in my apt that are ingestible: cheese, crackers, olives, peanuts, two lemons, beer (light), rye whiskey, a red blend wine that’s decent I think, soda water, regular water.”

“We gotta get you some veggies sir,” she said.

We had met in San Diego during Covid and dated for a few months. Then she moved to Los Angeles and that was that. We caught up a couple times after she returned home to San Diego just as the 2022 regular season was ending, but coming to my apartment—my new apartment, one with the luxury of a bedroom—to watch the Phillies felt like it should Mean Something.

There was also a chance she would think I was demented. Alone watching baseball I yell, I pout, I cheer, I whine, I sit, I stand, I clean, and I often rage quit. About one game last season I told the group: “I went on my balcony to pensively look into the distance in response to another inevitable and brutal loss but then I checked the score and they were tied so I decided I couldn’t move cuz I was good luck on the balcony so I was out there for two hours sitting in the dark watching the game on my phone.” 

Looking back, I don’t remember watching Harper’s home run or Schwarber’s or sending her the photo of Manny Machado wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” t-shirt despite her sitting two feet to my right (but there it is, the frustrating pic, in my archives). What I remember is us chatting for a few hours and sharing Chinese takeout, and my making her listen to the Phillies’ dumb victory song and walking her down to her car without incident. Back in my apartment, I put on Robyn’s superior version of “Dancing On My Own,” watched highlights, then went to bed.

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The Phillies led the series three-to-one heading into a potentially decisive Game 5 on Sunday, October 23 in Philadelphia. The game started at 11:30 a.m. out West, so I worked the lines early.

“ARE YOU WITH ME?” I asked one buddy.

“Yes.” 

“Ok.”

I told my dad I couldn’t sleep that night. “Woke up at 2a thinking it was game time. Woke up at 5:30a thinking it was game time.”

And I updated the main group. “Hold on to your loins, I’m gonna vomit.”

The game went like this: Rhys Hoskins homered in the third to make it 2-0 Phillies. Juan Soto made it a one-run game in the next frame. It started raining in Philly. Yu Darvish and Zack Wheeler, the game’s starters and each team’s ace, dominated the next few innings. Puddles started forming on the field. In the seventh, Josh Bell tied the game with an RBI double. The Phillies brought in Seranthony Dominguez, their best reliever, who threw wet baseballs in the vicinity of home plate. The Padres took a 3-2 lead on a wild pitch. The Phillies threatened in the bottom half of the seventh but didn’t score. Reliever Jose Alvarado blanked the Padres in the eighth. J.T. Realmuto started off the bottom half with a single to left. Then Bryce Harper, with “the swing of his life,” sent the Phillies to the World Series.

Heading into the NLCS, I told one friend, “The vibes are so fucking high.”

After the Phillies won Game 4, I told my dad, “I’ve watched 130ish games. What I’m witnessing is a team and a brand of baseball that is magical. There’s no explanation. I’m truly at a loss. I really don’t know what I’m watching and what to say about it.”

And when the Phillies trailed the Padres in Game 5, I told one group chat three times, “We’re not losing this game.”

Months later, the optimism of that week and in that moment feels foreign and a little juvenile. The man rallying the troops in October was the same one who wanted to trade the Phillies’ young, promising third baseman in April, the same man who grasped at sanity during all of Q3. By NLCS Game 5, everyone had reached out—tertiary friends, an aunt I see once a year, an ex’s brother-in-law. I was everybody’s Designated Phillies Fan, and I felt like the class clown who’s appointed line leader to shut him up. I’m shy about it now, embarrassed, even, but I know I shouldn’t feel shame over a week in which I felt plugged into a dimension I forgot existed, one typically reserved for kids: where it’s okay to love and care about something that doesn’t really matter, because experiencing and sharing that love and caring is the point. After the Phillies closed out Game 5, I sent everyone the same message.

“I’m sitting on the floor and I can’t stop laughing/crying.”

November: World Series

The Phillies stole the first game of the World Series against the Houston Astros, and they also won Game 3. I sent a lot of texts that week, but there is not much to say about the series now, considering the outcome. I had braced for impact by the middle of Game 4 when the Astros pitching depth began suffocating my team. I watched the last out of the series in a packed bar, a long way from where and how the 2022 season started.

“Why is my life only pain,” I said to my main group.

“Through pain comes triumph,” a buddy said.

“No,” I said.

“Hilar,” he said.

In the morning, my dad said he could drive down from Orange County for dinner. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, but he had recently moved back to Southern California, his longtime home, after a decade back East following an unwanted and swift divorce from my then-stepmom. He was also managing the decline of his 94-year old father. 

“What time?” I said.

Like a dad, he didn’t inform me when he had left or if he was close. “I’m inside your building and coming up,” he sent me at 4:15 p.m. The next message came in at 7:38 p.m. “Home. Great to see you. See you Thanksgiving.”

I got back to him the following day. “I think I’m emotionally stable on the Phillies again. Debrief helped with closure. Thanks for coming down.”