One of the most miserable baseball fan experiences is when your team turns out to be something other—something less—than you thought it was. For four months and more, you see them as ahead of schedule, mentally tough, on the rise… and then suddenly they’re hapless, star-crossed, and coming up small in big moments.
The stretch of increasingly, ridiculously brutal losses over the last few weeks suggests this could be happening to the 2018 Phillies. Almost exactly 19 years earlier, it absolutely happened to the 1999 Phillies.