NLCS is baseball's ultimate party series
By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist
When the San Diego Padres beat the New York Mets in the wild-card round, Manny Machado made a tour of the locker room, champagne bottle in hand, dousing the bubbly stuff onto the heads of his teammates, staff and finally himself.
After the Los Angeles Dodgers were toppled in the NL Divisional Series, Wil Myers went out to celebrate, and needed little persuasion to buy 100 shots of tequila for the gleeful patrons of a nearby establishment.
How do you top that? Oh, only by turning the entire National League Championship Series into a party, against an opponent that is similarly minded.
That’s right, the NLCS has become the party bus of this postseason, a fiesta of noise and smiles and color and fun that is now locked at 1-1 after the Padres rallied to win Game 2 against the Philadelphia Phillies on Wednesday.
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Ben Verlander and Alex Curry recap a wild NLCS game 2 between the Padres and Phillies.
San Diego and Philadelphia — the teams, their fans and their cities — are reveling in the best kind of enjoyment baseball can provide, a postseason run that has come against the odds. The respective franchises have waited long enough, and the supporters are making darn sure they don’t let the chance for festivity pass by.
There was a civic outpouring in San Diego for Games 1 and 2, and why not? The Padres have been through a stretch both long and painful, a 16-year gap between hosting a postseason game in front of their own fans and plenty of localized prior torture from those Dodgers.
Now, it is Philadelphia’s turn to host, a city where everything seems to be aligning in a sporting sense, with the NFL’s Eagles rampant at 6-0 and the Phillies having secured their second winning season and first playoff appearance in 11 years.
It is a feel-good story for the neutrals, at both ends, although it isn’t truly much of an underdog one.
The Padres threw money at this, lavishing huge contracts on Machado and the electrifying Juan Soto. When you splash cash on big bats other trades sometime fall under the radar, which is what happened to a degree with the acquisition of missile-hurling closer Josh Hader, who has proven to be a devastating weapon with which to finish games.
The Phillies have also spent "stupid" money, in the words of owner John Middleton, to go after and lock down the likes of first Bryce Harper, then Zack Wheeler, Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos, game-changers all.
"You look at a fan base who’s hungry to win," said Schwarber, whose 46 regular-season home runs were second to only Aaron Judge. "I just wanted to go to a place where I thought that we had a really good chance of winning and trying to make deep runs."
And to have some fun with it. The Phillies have gone with the flow, too, a chilled-out approach that saw Harper and two of his colleagues share breakfast photos with a pair of fans they randomly encountered at a San Diego café.
The level of relaxation stems possibly from Philadelphia manager Rob Thomson, himself jocular and lighthearted, with the easy manner of a 59-year-old who was content with the likelihood that he’d never rise higher than assistant coaching positions. Then he did, thrust into the job when Joe Girardi got canned, resolving to keep things cool and let the players be themselves.
The resulting turnaround? Well, that’s why the Phillies are still playing baseball late in October.
Like any good party, this series doesn’t let the action stop. The scheduling is intense, necessarily so because the season got sandwiched into a tighter window due to the threat of a work stoppage, then, once things got underway, everyone quite rightly wanted there to still be 162 games.
This is the only off day, if you can believe that, meaning that assuming one team doesn’t win all three games on the East Coast, there will be action in Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon then again by the Mexican border on Monday evening.
The ALCS is no less worthy, it’s just different. The Houston Astros aren’t tired of winning, but they’re possibly becoming tired of being so disliked. The New York Yankees welcome the hate, but the weight of that pinstriped history brings an air of seriousness to everything.
They throw a mean party in the Bronx (I went to one by the Grand Concourse once, and it was magical), but when it comes to baseball New York gets stern, and Yankee Stadium is more of a cathedral than a carnival.
The real party is on this side of the bracket.
Game 3 between the Phillies and the Padres is on Friday (7:37 p.m. ET on FS1 and the FOX Sports App) and as the series moves forward, it is going to get more real at some point, the notion that this current duel leads to a perch just one step removed from the most cherished prize in baseball.
Some nerves are going to kick in and hey, they’ll keep partying for sure, but there will be some nervousness running through it all.
These fans are the lucky ones, with a chance to savor one of the sweetest things in all of sports, success that comes hard-earned and rare, the ultimate reward for all that devotion.
The rest of us, the neutrals, we get to enjoy the ride, without the stress, gaining a reminder if needed that playoff baseball is supposed to be loud and wild and colorful and exuberant.
That such opportunities are special enough that they’re worth partying like there’s no tomorrow. And if there is a tomorrow — or a next week, and another — well, why not party then, too?
Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider newsletter. Follow him on Twitter @MRogersFOX and subscribe to the daily newsletter.