The World Series Phillies And The Miracle Of Baseball

PHILADELPHIA, PA — It's an age of tribalism, an age of inexorable entrenchment, an age of politics played out in the microcosm of every unlikely chance arena. Days of sunshine, days of rain, a child's schoolbooks and assignments have become so much coinage for bureaucrats and prolocutors seeking pluralities, seeking power.

In the arena of Red October, the carnival of absurdity is stripped away like a Houston hitter's bat zipping the air above a Ranger Suarez sinker. The Phillies are two wins away from a World Series championship.

This is not war, it's our best and only analogue for it.

Between innings, when corporations and conglomerates have their say and the individuals vying to represent humanity in government engage in something more akin to the comments section of a social media post, there is a studied ignorance. In bars and homes, between families and friends. At McCusker's Tavern, Philadelphia's best dive bar a few blocks off Oregon, barflies look down into pints of a house beer called "Damage, Inc." Something more inspiring in the swirls and eddies of that ominously named ale, then the slings and arrows of a now irrelevant world. Till red and blue or maroon hats can tilt north again to the arena.

Because the arena is bigger than the stadium. It's a suspension of disbelief not dissimilar from theater, but even more encompassing. This is not alternate reality, it is mundanity itself transcended like snow on a gas station.

See on Tuesday afternoon how a rainbow found its genesis high above the Philadelphia skyline and fell to earth out beyond the Ben Franklin Bridge in Camden County. From the Navy Yard just south of Citizens Bank Park the spectacle appeared to fire straight into the sky over the stadium. Its colors were Phillies red and Phillies blue and it was paralleled by a gold core symbolizing the laurel the Phillies are two wins away from realizing.

"A sign from the heavens," one said. "This is happening," added another. "Seems like even God is in attendance tonight," said another.

Fans captured images of it next to Billy Penn donning his Phillies hat again, next to a Wawa Schwarberfest banner in the sky. Heavens panoplied.

Down in Rittenhouse Square, "Dancing On My Own" blared at 5 p.m. It has for days. Like a dusktime call to prayer. The blocks of high rises so many minarets. Earlier in the day, construction crews put the Rocky theme song on speakers that carried down through the tarred alleyways and boulevards panoplied with Phillie gonfalons flourishing. The songs echoed in the cavernous blocks. Like the ancient Icelandic Gjallarhorn calling to something sacred. "Its blast can be heard in all worlds," so the old Norse text Poetic Edda claimed.

Tuesday night, there was enough faith that the roar of the stadium in south Philadelphia was tantamount to an earthquake that fact checkers had to clarify there hadn't quite been seismic movement.

As failings in democracy and the political machine reecho themselves daily like that 5 p.m. Rittenhouse speaker, Philadelphia has recreated itself into something closer to America after V-J Day. Replete with an iconic love story of a man lost in the crowd and hopping on the shoulders of a woman in the midst of celebration after Game 5 of the NLCS. The photo of the pair frozen in the heartbeat of chaos is Philly's Times Square kiss.

Sport has been compared to religion, to politics in its mania. But the occasional heavyweight bout between a fanatic and a Pattison Avenue police horse notwithstanding, the Phillies are what the ancient Greeks dreamed the Olympics could be.

You can call it a bandwagon. You could call it a tribe, but really you can’t. Modernity sees tribalism played out like a forerunner of the Hunger Games in the immemorial carnival of the Internet. By at least one estimate, 88 percent of America is rooting for the Phillies, numbers that even ’08 Obama and ’80 Reagan can’t match. This broken modern world harbors few more potent unifiers. With reminders of division at every turn, the Phillies ring the bell of an American dream we haven’t realized yet that we haven’t lost.