There was big buzz before the '76 Phillies season. The '75 club had contended into September. When the season began, the Flyers were two-time defending champions. The Sixers were good again and the Eagles had just hired Dick Vermeil. The Phillies were loaded - Schmidt, Bowa, Luzinski, Allen (Crash was back), Cash, Maddox, Boone, Carlton, Christenson, Tolan, a deep bench and bullpen. They won 101 games and probably should have won 105. Then they ran into The Big Red Machine, a Cincinnati team that was one of the best of all time, and were swept in the best-of-five NLCS.
Bill Conlin | An old adage: Don't count on Phillies
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The Phils won 101 more in 1977 but all the euphoria and pent-up joy rushed out of town with the speed of a tsunami wave after the 10-Minute Collapse. With a 5-3 lead on the Dodgers and one out needed to go up 2-1 in the NLCS with Carlton pitching Game 4, the Phillies imploded. I still get weak-kneed and nauseous remembering the nightmare sequence of the Dodgers scoring three runs in an Academy Award-level comedy of errors and omissions. The most egregious was defensive outfield whiz Jerry Martin spectating from the bench while The Bull trundled to left for a close encounter of the two-out kind, Manny Mota's catchchable, flyball to the warning track.
I asked ESPN.com's Jayson Stark, a veteran Phillies watcher, which upcoming season filled him with the most hope. We agreed: 1981, coming off the franchise's one world title. The 1979 Pete Rose acquisition had raised the hope and hype to the levels of an HGH cheater's testosterone. When two-thirds of Danny Ozark's rotation blew out in July, however, an era appeared to be whining to an end. The 1980 season was going to be the last chance everybody - even underachieving baseball teams - deserves. Even Bowa underscored the absence of enthusiasm after emerging from a fiery Dallas Green first day of spring training peroration and growling, "Where are the bleeping pompom girls?''
"The 1981 season for me,'' Jayson said. "The Phillies were the best team in baseball going into the strike.''
The strike lasted 50 days, but might as well have been 50 years. The Phillies went into the second half of Green's
detested "split-fluffing-season'' flatter than Iowa. An inferior Expos team handled them easily in the mini division series.
So here we are once again, ready to slobber all over a team that treated spring training with either indifference or disdain, maybe both.
Will the slogan be "Win Phillies Win!?"
Or just another weary chant of "When Phillies When?'' *
Send e-mail to bill1chair@aol.com. For recent columns, go to
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