There seems to be a little bit of a narrative developing around Shane Victorino.

I would go with the same identity that the city has nationally (it seems to me). An afterthought. Philadelphia has, what, the 6th largest population in America, but when the major cities are mentioned smaller populated places get more recognition. In the playoffs the phillies were an after thought because there was no story. Cubs had their curse, Dodgers had their “post Manny awesomeness” AND Joe Torre, I mean Joe Friggin Torre manages the Dodgers. The Brewers, CC Sabathia was awesomeness and should be MVP not to mention the ‘radical’ move of firing their manager with only a couple weeks left in the season. The Angels had a 100 wins this year, they were just awesome and unbeatable, the red sox, well they’re the red sox, everyone loves or hates them. The Rays, from the basement to the penthouse with 9=8 and all those young guys doing it the right way…and of course the white sox, with ozzie guillen over coming obstacles, and all those extra games and everything.

The phillies…well the phillies just went out every day, took care of business, and they won…they won the division for the second year in a row without having to make a huge splash (I mean come on, Joe Blanton isn’t a name you crow about in trades)…they don’t make splashy headlines by being petulant children…sure Ryan Howard strikes out a lot and got some press early for that and Chase Utley will probably be the best second baseman of all time in baseball once it’s done, but the phillies just go out and get the job done.

I’m hesitant to use the word ‘blue collar’ because i HATE the blue-collar appellation to Philadlephia…I feel it demeans the importance significance and size of the city, but they just go out there and do the job…not sexy or flashy or loud or ‘gritty’ (at least like the white sox), they just go out there, they do their work, and they move on, they put up with an extremely loud knowledgable and often times overly sensitive fan base, but they do it with aplomb.

The Phillies have no national identity, much like the city, and you know what, take pride in that, just keep on keeping on like the Phillies do and enjoy the success without having to have the acknolwedgement as much as the other teams seem to crave it or need it.

It’s not blue collar to me, but I think many would call it that

http://www.thegoodphight.com/2008/10/8/630821/disgusted-by-lack-of-natio

I wrote a post about this last week. I do think the Phils are starting to get the attention they deserve. The media has no choice but to grant them respect at this point. One win away from the world series and I believe the national identity is as follows. The Phillies are a team that is never out of it until the last pitch. Not only that but, on the opposite end of the spectrum, if the Phils get through 7 or 8 innings with a lead the other team shouldn’t even bother coming out and finishing the game. The Phils are now 85-0 with a lead after 8!! The national media brings that to attention now after most wins as well as the announcers doing so during the game.

Hey Joe Morgan wants Shane Victorino in a fox hole with him – how about them apples

Joe Morgan loves him some Shane Victorino in a way that reminds me of the slobbering love of David Eckstein

Though if the phillies keep this up Shane Victorino will be a mega star – jeez – ESPN LOVES HIM

What would be really funny—and I write this in the absolute certainty that I’ll sprout wings and found the Loyal Order of Mitt Romney Voters before it happens—would be to see the Phillies get an identity as the Accidental Moneyballers.

The lineup works because so many of the hitters bring patience and power to the table: Burrell, Utley to an extent (and certainly in the postseason), Howard when he’s going good—and Werth, the scrapheap superstar of the last two seasons. Matt freakin’ Stairs, for that matter. Dobbs, though he’s not always so much with the patience. It’s a tougher, but not impossible, case to make on the pitching side: they have some big strikeout arms, and Gillick seems to grasp the fungible-reliever dynamic (Romero, Durbin, arguably Condrey) in a way that Wade certainly never did. And he found undervalued, somewhat misfit-ish guys like Moyer and Coste to fill out the roster around the homegrown core of talent.

But it’s accidental because they so clearly didn’t plan it this way. Gillick is still held up as the paradigmatic Old-Skool GM who “doesn’t do stats.” They market the hell out of guys like Aaron Rowand and Victorino, who isn’t really a power/patience guy. They couldn’t wait to ditch Abreu and badly wanted to lose Burrell. As we’ve said here many times, to an extent they’ve succeeded in spite of themselves… which is kind of perfect for Philadelphia.

Serously, I’m more likely to get unbanned at BSG than for that to happen – do you realize the monumental shift in ‘acceptance’ of the ‘moneyball principles’ by the mainstream media that would require it to happen? They use ‘moneyball’ as a derisive insulting term, and i’m 99% sure that most of them who use it that way haven’t even read the book or talked to billy beane or sandy alderson or have a fracking clue what it means.

Figures it would have to be Jayson Stark who tries to give the team an identity – the comeback kids who get contributions from anyone and everyone and never say die. If that’s what develops, I’ll take it!

Mike Schmidt, Tug McGraw, Steve Carlton, 1980, John Kruk, Mitch Williams to Joe Carter … that is all I got. I don’t think Ken Burns mentioned the Phillies in his BASEBALL documentary and the media is basically to blame in all of this.

My take is the Phillies are the guys that really aren’t supposed to be here. They beat the almighty Mets (again), and they steamed right through Sabathia and the fresh-off-the-wildcard Brewers… and now they’ve got LA on the ropes.

The fact that the Phillies have in fact remained kind of faceless throughout the postseason is in fact their identity – not that they’re by any means unknown, but they’ve been like Stonewall Jackson’s men marching around Joe Hooker’s flank at Chancellorsville. You know they’ve got some pretty good guys and you expect to have to contend with them at some point, but somehow you sure didn’t expect them to show up here.

Firstly, I have to say I really admire the way this team has been put together – Utley, Rollins and Hamels are phenomenal players and i’m damn jealous of your team for having them, and even though I’m biased against Howard as an MVP candidate, I like the guy. It’s also been heartening to watch the team steel themselves against the mental rigors of previous suffering in the NL East, or last year’s playoff disappointment. It seems like, unlike the Cubs (as currently constructed), your guys are actually getting better at forgetting all the mental BS that prevents you from playing baseball to the best of your abilities.

But this discussion reminds me a lot of the kind of talk we had in 2004 and 2005. Our Cardinals came back from a dismal 2003 — you know, the last time the Cubs were destined to win it all — and surprised everyone (including us) by producing a 100-win team. We had 3 MVP candidates, a HOF-caliber manager, but seemingly no “national identity.” We weren’t “Whiteyball” any more, and Fox could really care less about Bob Gibson, Stan Musial or Dizzy Dean. Telling the Cardinals’ “story” would put the Fox audience to sleep, Ken Burns style, so why bother. So we watched as every other team in the LCS — the Yankees, Red Sox, and the team Roger Clemens was on — seemingly got all the ink.

And I’ll tell you, I think it actually hurt us. The Cardinals played a phenomenal NLCS series in 2004, some of the best baseball I’ve ever seen, but when they arrived on the World Series stage, no one seemed to care. If anything, they were asked to play the spoilers against the Red Sox, who were quite simply walking on water. And it didn’t jibe with how the team wanted to be seen.

It’s pretentious, but the Cardinals fans, and our local media, think of their team as baseball royalty. The players on the field, being surrounded by this history and the still-living ghosts of Gibson, Musial, Mike Shannon and Red Schoendiest, have to soak that up to a certain extent. It was insulting for them to be cast in this “spoiler” role, the villain in some other team’s redemption story, and they just didn’t seem to have it in them to carry it off. As a result, they played like petulant children and got spanked for it. Ironically, it wasn’t until 2006, when we truly had an underdog team that “wasn’t supposed to be there” that the team played up to and beyond their abilities, and won it all.

So from an outsider’s perspective, and as someone who’s now rooting for the Phils since my own team is out of it, I can see your team as fighters, as underdogs facing a series of uphill battles, each year a stronger test than the one before. The “Rocky” comparison might be cheesy but it sort of fits. Or, if you prefer, James J. Braddock, the Cinderella Man.

A story’s only good to a team if they believe it. And it’s no good to a team if it gets in the way of playing good baseball. (To my mind, the Cubs will never break their 100 years of suckitude until they make like the 2004 Sox and simply stop caring about it. Having a team of sufferers who actively want to deliver the Cubs from their cycle of misery is just the wrong mindset.)

In a Rays-Phillies matchup, the Phils might look like schoolyard bullies compared to the cherubic Tampa team. To some extent it’s better to not worry about storytelling, and just pitch, catch and hit.

Or is “why we’ve forgotten to talk about the Phillies’ story” such an obvious question right now given the media’s shameful coverage of the team so far?