By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/04/22/the-philth-and-the-furies/The early-to-mid 1970s Athletics and the 1986 Mets were seminarians in comparison. Meet, or re-meet, the 1993 Phillies, the zoo
in which the animals held the keys, thanks to William C. Kashatus’s
Macho Row: The 1993 Phillies and Baseball’s Unwritten Code.
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press; 343 p.; $27.95.)
They were the Philthy Phillies who won a pennant dramatically enough and lost a World Series even more dramatically. Carrying
themselves like old schoolers while, somehow, organised and managed like a sort-of school of tomorrow, the 1993 Phillies were the
Hell’s Angels without motorcycles but on actual or alleged performance-enhancing laughing gas.
They were also a
Moneyball team before anyone ever heard of
Moneyball in Oakland and elsewhere. Don’t laugh. Billy Beane himself
credited them. “Those ’93 Phillies took a ton of pitches, walked a ton, and scored a ton of runs,” he
told a 2012 Moneyball seminar at
the Philadelphia Inquirer. “That’s when it hit me.”
The bad news is that they weren’t always very funny. In fact, as Kashatus reminds us, it may almost be a wonder that they didn’t get
someone dead, particularly any of their own. , Blue collar Philadelphia took to them as blue collar types, but not all blue collar people
swear by one code of ethics and live by shattering a few others while they’re at it.
This isn’t the first time Kashatus turned his eye or his pen (well, his computer) to a memorable Phillies team. But the Phillies of
September
Swoon: Richie Allen, the ’64 Phillies, and Racial Integration were buffeted by furies not quite of their own making. They may have suffered
from the racial growing pains accompanying Dick Allen’s emergence and survived the infamous pennant collapse, but at least you wouldn’t
risk the neighbourhood if you had them for dinner.
The ’93 Phillies were liable to turn dinner into a food fight. And it wouldn’t have been half as hilarious as the one Bluto instigated in
National
Lampoon’s Animal House.
“Like the old-time players,” Kashatus writes, “the 1993 Phillies played hard and partied hard. That kind of lifestyle took an unforgiving toll.
Cancer, alcoholism, drug abuse, bankruptcy, and jail time were among the reality checks for some of the key members of the team after their
playing careers ended.” The cancer excepted, that covers center fielder Lenny Dykstra alone.
Dykstra, catcher Darren Daulton, first baseman John Kruk, infielder Dave Hollins, outfielder Pete Incaviglia, and relief pitcher Mitch Williams
are Kashatus’s primary subjects. ("Macho Row" was the name the six gave their corner of the clubhouse.) But others such as starting pitcher
Curt Schilling are close enough secondaries.
Of the first six, it’s fair to say that swagger and trash talk were probably among their virtues. They lockered together, held court together,
practised vulgarity with surgical precision together, and talked baseball together. Compared to them, Bluto, Otter, Boone, Flounder, and Pinto
were the Yale Glee Club.
Most of the Philthy Phillies were assembled from other organisations’ discards; Daulton was their only Philadelphia lifer to that point. “The flush
of success,”
Sports Illustrated‘s Leigh Montville once wrote, in a passage quoted by Kashatus, “is muted by their memories of failure, adding a
quality of vulnerability to winning that doesn’t exist in most places.”
That may help explain both the Philthy Phillies’ take-no-prisoners play on the field and the
whatsit-to-you attitudes and lifestyles enough led
off it. Daulton and to a lesser extent Schilling proved their public relations saviours, intriguing to think now, considering the crises of their post-
baseball lives. Philadelphia’s baseball press was notorious long enough for “intrusive, if not arrogant work”; Macho Row merely led the Phillies in
picking and choosing carefully when it came to figuring who would or wouldn’t be fair with them.
In fairness, of course, being fair to a team reveling in unapologetic philistinism couldn’t have been simple business. Even when they began
winning at a clip that had no less than Braves manager Bobby Cox admitting he picked them the previous winter to win the National League
East. Falling oddly in love with the Philthy Phillies proved simpler, at home and on the road. ”We didn’t know we were so popular,” Kruk told
Kashatus, referring to road trips on which the opposing fans razzed as often as ravished them.
Dykstra reveled in his lack of interest in reading and his shameless hunts for every little advantage on and off the field. Schilling, a kind of
outside even among those not members of Macho Row, loved to read as much as he loved to pitch. Both have had spectacular public collapses
since their careers ended, but Dykstra’s has been particularly damning. In Kashatus’s telling, the only thing shocking about it is that Dykstra’s
deflation should have shocked anyone who knew him well.
The former Met was a fan and clubhouse favourite who proved duplicitous and reckless. The latter only began with a taste for high stakes poker,
enough to compel then-commissioner Fay Vincent to investigate him quietly. It merely continued with the night he drove Daulton home from
Kruk’s bachelor party and almost killed both of them when he wrapped his car around a tree.
More disturbing, perhaps, than even his taste for actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances, is both Dykstra’s admission and
Kashatus’s re-revealing that the center fielder paid private investigators to dig up enough dirt on major league umpires that he could think
about blackmailing them into friendlier strike zones when he was at the plate. If that’s even partially true, Dykstra should consider himself
fortunate that high-stakes poker was the only thing compelling Vincent to keep a close eye on him.
Kashatus writes that Kruk was the smartest player on the Philthy Phillies despite cultivating a hillbilly-possessed image. (Kruk has long since
made a second career as an ESPN analyst.) He also seems to have been one of the most generous, in hand with Williams. Kruk was known for
springing for new clothing for the Phillies’ clubhouse people; Williams developed the habit of leaving large currency in his uniform pockets
and orders that anything the clubhouse people found in those pockets they could keep.
Dykstra’s copious use of actual or alleged PEDs wasn’t the only thing that unnerved other players while compelling them to their own
omerta,
part of the Code as Kashatus observes but no less disturbing. Knowing Dykstra wasn’t the only such indulger on the team, Kashatus wonders
aloud whether baseball’s coming smothering in actual or alleged PEDs might have been stanched if even one of the players thought to break
the silence about it.
But Schilling’s running gag of wearing a towel over his head whenever Williams came into a game for one of his once-patented performances of
pitching his way into and out of deep trouble (think of a man hurtling himself out over the middle of a canyon bottomed with an acid bath and
then somehow finding a flying carpet aboard which to escape) infuriated the otherwise freewheeling reliever and unnerved other teammates.
Indeed, the Macho Row contingent weren’t averse to breaking their Code, with a little help from a sometime friend, sometime foe, when it came
time to throw one of their own under the proverbial bus after their final humiliation.
Williams earned the admiration of both Philadelphia’s notoriously brutal fans and much of the nation when he faced the press for hours, refusing to
dodge responsibility, admitting how low he felt but knowing how small it would be in the larger scheme of life, after—thinking he could throw a
fastball away to Joe Carter, who might have flailed at it or made an out on such a pitch—his fastball tailed instead to just the right spot from which
Carter could launch a World Series-winning three-run homer.
But both Dykstra (a Macho Row member in good standing) and Schilling (who wasn’t a Macho Row member) each suggested in subsequent interviews
that Williams might be better off if he was moved to another club. They may have had in mind the death threats Williams received after his blown Game
Four save, too. But it didn’t seem to come out that way to Williams. He felt betrayed that Dykstra and Schilling hadn’t said such things to his face
first.
Williams was dealt to the Astros not long after the Series ended. He’d never again be close to a top of the line closer; he’d never escape a sense that
his Phillies mates and maybe others underestimated his fortitude. In time he became a Philadelphia radio sports analyst, later holding a similar job for
the MLB Network. (He was fired over an incident involving his children’s youth baseball team, compelling him to sue for breach of contract. The suit
remains active at this writing.)
Schilling, of course, went on to a Hall of Fame-worthy career, helping pitch the 2002 Diamondbacks (he was co-Series MVP with Randy Johnson), the
2004 Red Sox (in two gutsy performances with a radical ankle tendon sheath patch-up), and the 2007 Red Sox to World Series rings before he retired.
He also established a respected foundation dedicated to finding a cure for Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS.
But his post-baseball life hasn’t been stress free, alas. Schilling lost his shirt and slacks in his failed 38 Studios video gaming venture; his outspoken
objection to North Carolina’s transgender bathroom law cost him his second career as an ESPN analyst last year. He is also in remission from mouth
cancer.
Dykstra’s spectacular financial collapse and subsequent prison time as a result is only too well documented otherwise; Kashatus reviews it tastefully
if disdainfully. Daulton suffered trouble with alcohol and, perhaps, medications applied to his numerous baseball injuries, not to mention two divorces
(including a domestic violence arrest in 2003) and a battle with brain cancer, though he’s since remarried happily and been declared cancer free.
“Anything I did in the past,” Daulton said in recent years, “is my fault. Not my ex-wives’ fault, not any of my kids’ faults, not baseball, not the media
—me, my fault, I did the damage.”
Incaviglia, who had a kind of career year as a Philthy Phillie, eventually became an independent league manager and a batting instructor in the Tigers’
system. Hollins, who turned out to be diabetic as well as an actual-or-alleged-PED dabbler, went from the Philthy Phillies to a couple of respectable
seasons with the Twins before a journeyman continuation ending with the 2002 Phillies. He’s since worked as a professional baseball scout.
Kashatus admits to a lingering admiration for the better sides of Macho Row: Dykstra’s tenacity, Williams’s “moral courage, refusing to make excuses
when he performed poorly,” Kruk’s humour, Hollins and Incaviglia’s willingness to play hurt, Daulton’s field leadership and “minimis[ing] the factions
and jealousies that often crop up off it.”
But that’s as far as he goes in his admiration. “I certainly would not want my sons to pattern their lives after any one of them,” he writes. “Nor do
I believe that they ever wanted to be role models for the young fans.” He cites a passage from Kruk’s memoir: “A role model is someone you pattern
your life after, right? Well, how can you pattern your life after someone you don’t know? It’s impossible.”
“Impossible.” That word may apply to the Philthy Phillies in too many other ways. And they might be among the first to tell you those ways wouldn’t be
within a thousand nautical miles of pretty.
