The Eagles weren't exactly lighting it up back then, either. When the Phillies gathered for spring training at the Carpenter Complex in February 1987 the local NFL team was coming off its fifth straight losing season and on its way to another.
It didn't take long for that to begin to change. As the Phillies slipped into a numbing mediocrity, the Iggles began generating some excitement - and wins - behind brash head coach Buddy Ryan and electric quarterback Randall Cunningham. And even when the football team meandered gently through the Ray Rhodes and Rich Kotite eras, the Phillies were still a bad baseball team, blue snow aberration of '93 notwithstanding.
So when Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb started making the NFC Championship Game an annual stop on the Birds' schedule, one impression became firmly rooted in the civic consciousness: Philadelphia is a football town.
Which is a long wind-up to get to a throwaway line by lefthander Cole Hamels late Sunday afternoon on Comcast after the Phillies clinched their first NLCS appearance in 15 years by beating the Brewers in Milwaukee. "Hopefully it will turn the city red a little bit more than it is green," he said.
Well, then.
To this transplant, the notion that Philadelphia was not a baseball town was always overhyped twaddle. It was, and remains, a place of wonderful baseball history and tradition that had had that portion of its personality driven into hibernation by the unrelenting aura of futility that surrounded the Phillies.
