Phillies Winning Ways Put Them in Great Position…Or Does It?

It turns out that Cliff Lee wasn’t content with just throwing eight innings of shutout baseball while only giving up four hits and striking out 10 batters. In proverbial icing on top of the cake fashion, Lee also blasted a seventh inning home-run off of Ted Lilly that would end up being the game winning run.

The result was the Phillies‘ 11th win in 12 games and leaves the Phils with a season record that now stands at 76-40, the best record in the Major Leagues. It also puts them eight and a half games ahead of the Braves and everyone else in the National League.

At first glance, this would seem to make the Phillies the favorites to make the World Series and win it, but as I’ll show you a little later in this article, the most dominant regular season team has struggled quite a bit to cap off those seasons with World Series victories.

With 46 games remaining in the 2011 season, the Fightin’s have an excellent chance at winning 100 games for the first time since 1977. Winning a Benjamin’s worth of games has only been done twice in the entire history of the Philadelphia franchise, which goes all the way back to 1883 and those world-beaters known as the Philadelphia Quakers, though to be fair, even a perfect season wouldn’t have accomplished that because they only played 99 games back then.

The franchise record for wins in a season is 101 games, which the Phillies managed to do in both 1976 and 77, though sadly, neither of those seasons ended with a World Series victory. So for the 2011 squad to break the franchise record for wins in a season, they would only need to go 26-20 over these last two months, and considering that of the remaining 46 games, half of those are against teams with losing records, I’d say their probably going to break that record.

Taking a look at some of the more recent teams from the National League who had dominating regular seasons, the 2004 Cardinals rolled along to 105 wins, only to lose in the World Series, and the 98 Braves managed 106 wins but also failed to bring home a ring.

There are, however, some older examples of dominant regular season N.L. teams who won the World Series, including the 86 Mets and the 75 Reds, who are the only two N.L. teams in the last century to win 108 games, a number the Phils have a chance at reaching.

As far as the all-time record for wins in a season, it’s actually a tie between the 1906 Cubs and the 2001 Mariners, who both won 116 games, although the Cubs win the tiebreaker because they managed to accomplish this feat in 10 less games.

Now, I’m just mentioning this as an interesting fact because the Phils would have to go 41-5 to break this record, and that’s about as likely as Ryan Howard laying off a 3-2 curveball in the dirt (Sorry Ryan, I respect your game, but it was a good simile). Again it’s interesting to note that neither one of these teams won the World Series.

So as great as it is that the Phillies continue to win and pull away from the rest of their competition, there is some evidence to support that this might not be as great as it sounds. Teams with massive leads can sometimes become complacent in the last few weeks of the regular season, and then when it comes time to ramp up their level of play in the postseason, they struggle to regain their form.

Just looking at Philadelphia’s recent run of successful seasons, they won the division by six games each of the last two years but ultimately fell short in the postseason. However, in 2008, when they won the World Series, they spent the first half of September chasing the division lead, and it wasn’t until they ripped of 10 victories in 11 games that they managed to grab hold of the NL East. That sense of having to battle each and every game carried right over into the playoffs and helped the Phils become champions.

Every team is different, and with guys like Roy Halladay, Chase Utley and others who never seem to let up regardless of the situation, maybe having the luxury of a big division lead where they can set up their rotation and give some guys a rest will work out great.

Whatever the case may be, I just hope the end result is the sequel that I’ve been waiting three years to see. World F’in Champions Part II.

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