It's Hard to Not Be Crazy About Sixers Stuff When the Phillies Are Also This Bad
Philly sports and our brain functionality: When it goes, it goes.
It's tough times for Sixers sickos when we can't get either Mike or Spike to humor our lunacy. Joel Embiid's subpar play and needlessly shitty media behavior in the Olympics and its preceding exhibition period has basically had me spiraling for weeks, but on the Ricky our two co-hosts have espoused an unusually unified stance of not giving a shit about it, while also launching an informal AU Just Stay Off Twitter campaign in response to my down-badness. This is of course ridiculous for three reasons:
Me staying off Twitter is obviously both professionally and personally impossible.
I don't need Twitter to be absolutely insane about the Sixers (and it's a little insulting to suggest I do).
Embiid doing bad both on and off the court in the Olympics is a real thing, not just a social media invention of bored Celtics and Lakers fans.
Of course, I couldn't deny that being on the Internet has made this Team USA experience much more of an existential crisis for me than it would have been otherwise -- seeing Joel actively feeding his loudest and most annoying critics (and converting more haters with each subsequent performance) at an already-precarious career moment is hardly doing wonders for my mental health. But it's just one of many contributing factors to my general Philly Sports unwellness this summer. A bigger one is the only team actually still playing in Philadelphia right now.
The Phillies, all told, have done a remarkably consistent job during the Joel Embiid era of giving us the breather we need from the stomach-wrenching misery of an inevitably brutal Sixers postseason collapse. From 2018 to 2021, they were the most committedly mediocre baseball team on the planet; you could watch them every night not really caring whether they won or lost because they would inevitably do the other one the next night anyway. There were a couple late-season meltdowns in there, but you couldn't really get mad about them; the gravitational pull of .500 baseball was just too strong for those teams to ever really escape it. Then in 2022 and 2023, they got just good enough at just the right time; that was a little more stressful but it was also pretty exciting, particularly as we fell in love with the team's myriad personalities and the prospect of more exhilarating times to come in Red October. It was all great cover for Embiid and the Sixers, better than we probably even realized as it was happening.
But this year -- or this past month, anyway -- their cover's blown. The Phils are 4-10 in their last 14 games, having lost each of their last five series, capped by a sweep at home at the hands of the Yankees (the Phils' first time being swept at home in two years, which is pretty crazy). I'd say the manner in which the Phillies lost those games was particularly painful and frustrating, but every baseball loss kinda feels that way for one reason or another, especially when you're watching a team that actually feels like it should win pretty much every night. And that was both the gift and the curse of the team the Phillies gave us for the first three months of the season: a team that actually won 2/3 of its games on average, with a lineup that always had a couple of guys who were tearing the cover off and a pitching staff that went 7IP, 1R, 4H, 2BB 8K pretty much every night, and had you believing that that was all a normal and sustainable state of affairs.
Turns out: It wasn't. Now, we're being hit with a regression to the mean -- Taylor Swift-level emphasis on that mean -- that's starting to make checking in for 2h40 of nightly duty on NBC Sports Philadelphia as much of a dreadful slog as it was a lighthearted joy in the simpler times of May and June. Maybe we're in the thick of the worst of it right now, and the team will revert back to more like Normal Good when their schedule lightens up a little, their pitching staff gets healthier and Bryce Harper remembers how to do anything at the plate besides hit sharp grounders directly to first or second base. Or maybe we just have to drudge through the rest of the regular season and hope that things turn back around in the playoffs (which, remarkably, Baseball-Reference still gives the Fightins a 99.4% chance of making). And that certainly could happen; the MLB postseason is random as shit and momentum routinely materializes out of nowhere (and/or disappears just as unpredictably).
In the meantime, though, we're left caring about a Phillies regular-season team that keeps losing when we actually expect them to win, and subsequently amassing a whole heap of Bad Philly Sports Feelings that is not helping (or being helped by) Joel Embiid looking and acting busted in the Olympics. On Wednesday, I was watching the capper of the Yankees series in my New York office, and the only thing that made me feel worse than yet another insurmountable eighth-inning one-run deficit -- plus the taunting from the office Yanks fans that I knew was coming the second the game ended (it did) -- was looking at my computer clock and knowing I was only minutes away from having to watch Embiid flounder for Team USA again. When I saw on Twitter that he was benched for the game, it was dispiriting but merciful, probably about as close as to not wanting Joel Embiid play basketball as I'll ever get. (I didn't watch a second of the game; based on Bam Adebayo's box score line it seems like I probably made the right call.)
Both teams had the day off on Thursday, but they're back this weekend -- and of course, so am I. As discouraging and soul-deadening as both the Phillies and Team USA have been for me as a Philly sports fan these past few weeks, I still can't do a summer without sports -- and no, temporarily getting really into swimming or fencing or breakdancing or whatever other olympic events are on at the moment isn't an acceptable substitute, and no, Eagles preseason doesn't mean shit to me. So I'm stuck with tethering my emotional well-being to Embiid and to the Phillies, and if the former is gonna continue playing like he's really fixated on the baguette he's gonna eat after the game, then I'm really gonna need the latter to just help take the edge off a little bit. C'mon, Bryce. Try swinging the bat up instead of down maybe.
Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
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