Mike Celizic

If it seems that the Philadelphia Phillies aren’t getting a lot of respect in these playoffs, there’s a good reason. Respect isn’t a right. You have to earn it.

All of us who were saying this was the Cubs’ year to end 100 years of misery should have applied the Philadelphia Principle to Chicago. If Philly gets no respect because of that team’s 27 championship-free seasons, the Cubs should have gotten even less.

Okay, so we got a little giddy with the Cubs. We made a mistake and we’ve learned our lesson. From here on out, the Phillies, for all their accomplishments this year, are going to have to show on the field that they deserve respect before we go handing it to them.

I’m going to be the first to admit this is more than a little unfair. The Dodgers, who are generating whatever buzz remains in the National League playoffs, last won the World Series in 1988, eight years after Philly. But the uneven treatment of the two teams isn’t totally baseless. The Dodgers have had success in other seasons; they’ve won other championships. The Phillies have just one, and it came a generation ago.

If somebody says “Dodgers,” you probably think, “great franchise with a history of winning.” If somebody says “Phillies,” you probably think, “losers.”

Hey, I don’t make the rules. I just comment on them. You want to blame somebody, try W.C. Fields, the man who proposed as his epitaph: “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” Or blame the Philadelphia fans, who have never paid money to see a hero they couldn’t boo.

Lord knows, the fans have reasons for their dyspeptic view of the home team. This is the fourth straight year that the Phillies entered the season as a popular pick to make the playoffs. In 2005 and 2006, they gagged down the stretch. Last year, they mounted a heroic stretch run that overtook the Mets, who went down in history as the biggest September chokers in history. It should go without saying that the previous holders of that distinction were the Phillies of 1964.

But the Phillies couldn’t get out of the first round of the playoffs last year, getting steamrolled by the Colorado Rockies in three straight.

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Now it’s the fourth year of the Phillies’ resurgence. Progress is being made. They did dispatch the Brewers with relative ease in four games. And now they’re taking on the Dodgers, who are in the playoffs by virtue both of playing in the worst division in baseball and of having had the wisdom to work a deadline trade for Manny Ramirez.

A strict comparison of the lineups should favor Philadelphia in NLCS. Nobody left in the playoffs can match the top of Philly’s batting order: Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard and Pat Burrell. Rollins and Victorino have 83 stolen bases between them. Howard, Utley and Burrell have combined for 114 home runs and 336 RBIs. Howard Utley and Victorino have scored a combined 320 runs.

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Their pitching isn’t quite at that level, putting up a staff ERA of 3.89, but that was good for fourth in the National League, and closer Brad Lidge was a perfect 41-for-41 in saves during the regular season and went two-for-two against the Brewers in the NLDS.

Maybe none of Philly’s starters are yet among the elite of the league, but young Cole Hamels is getting there. But even if they’re not, that should be more than good enough when paired with the league’s second-best offense. (Actually, they tied for second with the Mets; the Cubs were first.)

But what a team should be doesn’t count. What it is does. And what the Phillies have been from their birth in 1883 until now is an outfit that has rarely found it difficult to live down to the expectations of the most determined pessimist. It took them 22 seasons to finally finish first in the National League, an achievement they celebrated by losing the World Series in five games to none other than the Boston Red Sox. (The Red Sox drew 42,000 fans per game in that series; the Phillies half that.)

After the passage of a mere 35 years and two World Wars, the Phillies were back in the World Series. The year was 1950, the opponents the Yankees, the result a sweep. Slow forward another 30 years and the Phillies won their sole championship, beating the Royals in six games.

Those of us who were alive back then remember it was a glorious triumph. But we also remember that Philly had had a great team since 1976 anchored by the likes of Steve Carlton, Bob Boone, Greg Luzinski, Larry Bowa and Mike Schmidt. They had won their division three times in four years before 1980, yet never made it to the World Series. And after winning the series, they again lost in the playoffs in 1981 and lost the 1983 World Series in five games to the Orioles. In the 25 years since, they’ve been back to the World Series once, in 1993, when they lost in six to Toronto, and the playoffs three times, the last two coming in the last two years. And last year, they didn’t win a single playoff game.

So if there’s no respect for the Phillies, there’s good historical reasons for it. If you’d spent the last 88 years predicting that the Yankees would win the World Series, you’d have been right 26 times. If you’d done the same with the Phillies, you’d have been right once.

If they want respect, they’ve gotta do better than that.

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