MacPhail’s small-time words big-time unacceptable
With the chance to use the Phillies’ slight, late-season, youth-driven improvement to inspire renewed fan excitement, Andy MacPhail instead made a recent retreat to the organization’s most humiliating modern-era moment.
Though the team president didn’t reprise the classic Bill Giles lament that he is running a small-market operation, MacPhail projected an identical message. How else to interpret the nonsense that he spread at his postseason state-ofthe-franchise address, beginning with this unacceptable pip: The Phillies are more prepared to spend money on improving their ballpark than on improving the players who work there.
“While our payroll is not at an accustomed level that we’ve had in the past,” MacPhail said, “then this is the time to make investments in the ballpark and in the fan experience.”
The fan experience is the players’ job, not that of the cheesesteak-stand cashiers. If the Phillies win, the experience will be heightened. If not, spoiler alert, the fans will be miserable.
To suggest that ballpark maintenance costs somehow come from the same money pool used to finance left-handed pitchers is as small-market a concept as possible. It’s not even minor league. It’s literally independent league. It’s the wail of ownership trying to maximize every box-office receipt.
Imagine, if it is possible without laughing, the Yankees passing on signing free agents because their stadium needs brighter lightbulbs. It’s an insulting message in any big-league city. It’s unacceptable in the largest monopoly market in baseball.
MacPhail whined that Citizens Bank Park is the oldest stadium in the NL East. That’s only because the other four opened more recently than 2004. And by the way, the sitting world champions play in the oldest park in the National League, and the team that just put up the league’s best record plays in the second oldest.
Somehow after the 20072011 division dynasty, the Phillies became emboldened to ask the fans to accept mediocrity for a while. By last week, MacPhail was casually leaking 2019 into his baseball conversation.
So hang in, Phillies fans. And that new blacktop in the parking lots? It will be very good blacktop.
In the general news cycle stuffed with everything evil about college basketball, there was a lesser-played story reflecting everything good.
Don DiJulia, the St. James High product who has been involved in college athletics for 50 years, including 35 as the athletic director at Saint Joseph’s University, will retire at the end of the academic year.
With dignity and decency, DiJulia oversaw a basketball program that achieved everything it could. Though a compact, non-football, private school on 54th Street, Saint Joseph’s regularly placed players in the NBA, often competed for conference championships and, in 2004, was ranked as high as No. 1 in the country. While other programs attempted to diminish the Big 5, Saint Joseph’s never fully abandoned the Palestra. And never was there a whiff of scandal, let alone the rampaging crookedness that recently had four assistant coaches at more visible programs arrested.
Basketball will forever define athletics on Hawk Hill. And pound for pound, dollar for dollar, opportunity for opportunity, Don DiJulia, a Delaware County legend, made sure that no college program yielded any more pride.
■ Joe Hand Jr., of Philadelphia boxing fame and achievement, is the new president at Glen Mills Schools. His father, Joe Hand Sr., the former police officer who built a rampaging boxing-TV empire, long has been a devoted Glen Mills ambassador.
If Glen Mills is run as efficiently as Hand’s gyms, fight cards and boxing stables, it will easily succeed in its greater mission. As for the athletic programs, believe this: Joe Hand Jr. is not likely to ever settle for the Bulls being anything but the best.
For as long as there has been professional football, there has been the potential for one unforced error: Drawing conclusions too early into the season.
With that, at least consider that the Eagles Sunday could be wading into a longstanding NFL trap. Through a 3-1 start, the Birds have played well and have been coached well, have grabbed early command of the NFC East, have presented a balanced offense, dropped only a handful (pun intended) of passes and have enjoyed the growth of young players, Carson Wentz included.
But they have some injury issues, have had to escape late-game trouble in the last two weeks and needed a club-record-long field goal to beat the Giants. So have they really been defined after just a month of play?
Las Vegas has the Birds as robust favorites for a Sunday visit from the Arizona Cardinals, a franchise that has given them trouble from time to time. The NFL is in an era of parity. Things will level out. So here is a Sunday prediction from one know-it-all who has picked the Birds to win every game so far this season: Arizona 34, Eagles 17.
What began as an offseason curiosity and blossomed into a training-camp mini-topic is becoming something more significant to the 76ers.
That new-look, diet-conscious, thinner, faster Jahlil Okafor has been the best Sixer on the court through two preseason games. Now what? Because Okafor had been unable to play any position but center, and because it has been decided from onhigh that Joel Embiid will be presented and treated as a Hall of Fame legend even when he is not playing any games at all, Okafor has been sentenced to backup status. It’s almost as if the Sixers are pretending that they didn’t once tank an entire season just for the hope of acquiring his draft rights.
But with the continuing undependability of Embiid, and the limitations of potential backup centers Richaun Holmes and Amir Johnson, the Sixers should begin to walk back their view of Okafor as a player ever available on their flea market table.
“A lot of my shots have been easy,” Okafor said Friday, after shooting 5-for-7 in 17 minutes of an exhibition loss to Boston. “That’s one of the things I have been working on, finding easy ways to score. My teammates have been setting me up, so I have been getting a lot of easy buckets.”
He was being polite. Yes, the Sixers do have some players with playmaking skills. But few players have Okafor’s natural aroundthe-basket ability to finish. And he is running the floor, working defensively and blocking shots.
It’s time to stop viewing him as a way to trim some roster fat.