Our Fightin Phils are having one of their best seasons ever, and there is every reason to be excited about what lies ahead.

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TWO REIGNING CHAMPIONS?

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If the Phillies win the World Series, it will be the first time since 1979 that a city has had both a reigning MLB and NFL champion. When Pittsburgh's Pirates and Steelers pulled that off, Sports Illustrated named the Pirates' Willie Stargell and the Steelers' Terry Bradshaw as 1979's Sportsmen of the Year.

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CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM

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The Phils' 1980 World Series championship team won only 91 regular season games. The 2008 championship team won 92.  But there have been NINE (9) other Phillies teams that won 92 or more games and failed to win baseball's crown. In fact, 6 of the 7 Phillies teams that won more than 92 games failed even to win the pennant!

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The 2025 Phils will probably finish with around 95 wins, and good for them. But the playoffs are a whole new season.

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A LOOK BACK AT 1964

 

Old Phillies fans still get the night sweats recalling the 1964 season, when the Phils seemed certain to win the pennant and then choked it all away with a disastrous 10-game losing streak in September. Even so, that team finished 92-70 - the same exact record as the 2008 World Series winning team, and one win more than the 91-71 1980 champs.

 

NOT A SPORTS-CRAZED CITY IN 1964

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If you think Philly has always had a massive sports-crazed fan base, think again.

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In 1964, the Phillies set a new team home attendance record - despite averaging only 17,604 fans per game in a stadium that seated approximately 33,000! That broke their previous record from 1950, when the pennant-winning Whiz Kids drew an average of only 15,025 fans per game.

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The Eagles did well attendance-wise, but even 2 of their 7 home games in 1964 were not sellouts. As for the newly arrived 76ers, they struggled to draw more than 5,000 fans for home games and played nearly a third of their games at neutral sites. And the Flyers? They did not even exist until 1967.

 

In the Phils' defense, Connie Mack Stadium was located in a very sketchy North Philly neighborhood where parking was all but impossible - unless you wanted to take your chances parking on the street and paying off a neighborhood kid to "watch your car."

 

That all changed when the Phils moved to Veterans Stadium in 1971. In each of the past 50 seasons, through thick and thin, the team's season attendance has been greater - usually far greater - than it ever was during the Connie Mack Stadium era. Three million fans a season is now the norm.

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We Phillies fans are now officially sports-crazed and eager for a parade.