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Turns Out the Phillies Just Had to Empty Their Brains and “Trust Harder”
By Kyle Pagan
Published:
Rob Thomson didn’t have some rah rah speech before Game 3. There wasn’t a quote that’ll be etched on the clubhouse walls in CBP for the life of the stadium. Nope. He just had a saying you’d find on some teenage girl’s AIM away message going through a breakup, “Trust harder.”
The story from Matt Gelb at The Athletic (with ads):
Before a convincing 8-2 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 3 of this National League Division Series to extend the season by another day, Thomson urged his players not to think about the enormity of it all. He left them with an idea.
“Don’t try harder,” the Phillies manager said. “Trust harder.”
That’s it. That’s all it took for the Phillies to feel like they could still compete with the Dodgers down 2-0 and I wish I was kidding. That and Kyle Schwarber’s mammoth 455-foot home run:
“Everyone was just in awe,” outfielder Max Kepler said. “It felt like a revelation at the same time.”
A revelation of what?
“A revelation,” he said, “of, ‘We’re back.’”
Max Kepler did the meme:
These guys should turn their brains off more. Seriously. They work themselves up into a frenzy when they think. That’s why the top of the lineup goes 1-13. Once they turn their brains off they hit bombs and manufacture runs any way they can. What a hilarious team of himbos. One Schwarbomb and they remembered they were world class baseball players again. It wasn’t the millions that they’re paid or the fact that hundreds of thousands of people come out to watch their games. They see ball go boom and their mainframe is wiped back to factory reset where they become baseball players again in the backyard. It’s like the crack of the bat turns these guys into elite hitters like “Relax” turned Derek Zoolander into an assassin ready to kill the Prime Minister of Mogadishu.
Tonight no one is allowed to think about anything. I want them to get in the box against Tyler Glasnow and their brain better be so empty they start drooling on themselves. Thinking bad. Their brains better look like Homer Simpson’s:
Topper telling the Phillies to trust harder:
Kyle writes blog posts and does Man on the Street-style videos all around Philadelphia. He graduated from Temple University (a basketball school) in 2015. contact: k.pagan@sportradar.com