There Are No Miracles In Baseball, Except When The Phillies Play

PHILADELPHIA, PA — There are no miracles in baseball, besides every night.

On two consecutive nights this week, with two outs, with two strikes in the top of the ninth, the Phillies have been a breath away it all being over.

On Tuesday night, Trea Turner ripped the next pitch into right field for a single. A moment later Brandon Marsh sent the ball some four hundred feet into the upper deck to tie the game. And before the whiplash could set in, two more men were on base and Bryson Stott had towered a fly ball down the line like an apparition, willing it just inside the foul pole and giving the Phillies an 11-8 lead. Ten consecutive hitters came up with two outs, and eight scored in the inning. They wound up winning 14-9.

On Wednesday, with two outs, Kyle Schwarber walked on a full count, and then Derek Hill worked another two strike count before ripping it over the right field wall for his first ever home run as a Phillie, giving the Phillies a 5-4 lead they would not relinquish.

Long before this week, there had been much babble and prattle about how this Phillies team has discovered fight. Now it's going into overdrive. The issue, this script imagines, is that the team that has been among baseball's best for five years lacked somehow a determination to win. The implication then being that you can simply will a miracle.

Any serious athlete knows that you cannot will a miracle in the moment. But you can will a miracle a thousand and one times on a thousand and one nights and fail a thousand and one times....until one heavy D.C. night, that looks like any other night, you will score eight runs on ten consecutive batters with two outs in the ninth. And then do it all again a night later.

"There is no new thing upon the earth," Francis Bacon's Essays quotes the legendary King Solomon. "...so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion."

The oblivion in this case being the memory of the tenacity, the fury, the line drives just foul, the strike three calls that were just outside, the endless frustrations of those thousand and one other nights.

The Phillies have had plenty of that. Historically, no professional sports franchise in North America has lost more games. This year, the Phillies endured a ten game losing streak and at the low point, fell to 9-19 on the season.

"It's not a failure, it's steps to success...there is no failure in sports," Giannis Antetokounmpo famously said a few years ago. " So there are always steps to it...Some days it's your turn, some days it's not your turn."

Indeed, baseball would perhaps be better understood by the public if batting average was calculated by how often a hitter missed, rather than hit. So that Mike Schmidt's Hall of Fame exhibit showed the figure .733, because he got out 73 percent of the time.

Then we would better start to understand what a miracle is, especially for a team like the Phillies that has proven, even when they've failed over the past five years, that they do not give up. If you can think it, it has probably happened on a baseball diamond. If it hasn't yet, it will. A miracle is just a statistical inevitability.