Happy Groundhog Day!

Feb 2, 2023 - 4:27 PM

Happy Groundhog Day! For those of you who prefer warmer weather, I have some bad news for you: The rodent saw his shadow.

While normally, I’m in favor of nicer weather coming as soon as possible, considering how mild this winter has been, I’m somewhat okay with a longer “winter.” At the very least, it should give me more chances to go skiing. (I fully reserve the right to take back this statement five weeks from now when I’m sick of freezing my butt off.)

Unfortunately, for baseball fans, we’re currently right in the middle of the sport’s long winter where not much newsworthy is happening. (Not that the addition of Josh Harrison wasn’t a good move, but it didn’t exactly set the fanbase abuzz.) I certainly can’t complain about the team’s offseason activity up this point, but at the moment, we have nothing much to look forward to until Grapefruit League play begins in about four weeks.

Since the movie Groundhog Day has made us associate the holiday with living the same day over and over again, I figured I’d posit a question to the readers: Which day in Phillies’ history would you least like to live through again?

Would it be October 7, 2011? We woke up knowing that Roy Halladay would surely pitch the Phillies to victory, and we went to bed with our World Series hopes dashed and our first baseman with only one intact Achilles tendon.

How about October 23, 1993? Would you watch the game over and over again, hoping that maybe this time Jim Fregosi would call upon someone other than Mitch Williams to pitch in the ninth inning.

Maybe someone would pick June 16, 2015. The Phillies were bad, they were getting smoked by the Orioles, and as we watched Jeff Francoeur pitch with a white towel waving from the dugout, it was fair to wonder if the Phillies would be bad forevermore, and we might never see them make the playoffs again.

In addition to these atrocities, this franchise has given us plenty of other days that we’d assuredly never want to re-live once, let alone and infinite number of times. Which day would be your least favorite to get stuck in?