This tweet, which Philly Nation says is a joke, gained a lot of traction:

Flippant or not, I’ve heard a lot of this over the past week or so, even extending back to when the playoffs began, because some longtime Phillies sufferers found it corny that people were jumping back on the bandwagon after 10 years of nothingness. Maybe there’s something to that argument, or maybe not. If you never gave up on the team and remained a diehard, that’s certainly admirable, but you also willingly subjected yourself to Cody Asche and Grady Sizemore.

The thing about the World Series lottery is that a ton of people got dicked over. There weren’t enough tickets for the diehards, let alone Emily from Doylestown (E.F.D). Thousands of people were gonna get dicked, regardless. And even then, there’s nothing to preclude lottery-winning non-posers from cashing in on their luck so that some rich doctor can drag his uninterested botox wife (U.B.W) to the game and sit in the front row. The playoffs price out the mongrels and favor the rich, which hurts the atmosphere because the former actually give a shit about baseball and know the sport while the latter are only there for the trendy experience.

So if Philly Nation actually wasn’t joking, I can sympathize with him in a way.

Still, Emily from Doylestown shouldn’t necessarily have to catch collateral. Maybe she was a huge fan from 2010 to 2015 and then finally gave up. She likes the Phillies too, she just decided that sitting in the nosebleeds to watch Cesar Hernandez wasn’t worth the time or money. If E.F.D., however, couldn’t name anybody outside of Bryce Harper, and then went down to Center City to climb a pole while taking a selfie, then yeah, that would be a little lame. There’s a difference between entering your Phillies fandom into abeyance vs. blindly following the crowd.

Gatekeeping is a thankless exercise with diminishing returns, if any. Sometimes it’s warranted, but the line is thin. I think we’d all agree that we want the stands filled with hardcores, but we’re talking supply and demand here, and Capitalism allows E.F.D. and U.B.W. to enter the fray and usurp the diehards, whether we like or not.