Phillies Opening Day 2025

It's Opening Day for Major League Baseball, but it's hard to get truly excited at this moment, given the unsettling nature of how things are unfolding in the United States, on multiple fronts.¹  But I'll be a trouper and take a swing at it.

Sitting atop the desk in my bedroom were these old Philadelphia Phillies media guides, which may or may not end up on eBay (they wouldn't fetch much). 

Media guides were incredible handy for sportswriters back in the days before the internet began to fill up with our accumulated human knowledge and history (now being replaced by our accumulated misinformation, disinformation, AI garbage and alternative history).

Decades-old media guide sell for a couple dollars apiece, usually in bulk lots. Folks mostly don't want them, and they'd rather have other things taking up shelf space. I get it. They're no different than old encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, atlases, etc. Curiosities that add to clutter. I reckon that, in my case, one or two aren't a huge space commitment, though.

Here are some images from inside these guides (from 1981 and 1988).

The Phillies open their 2025 season against the Washington Nationals this afternoon. One thing I do like about Arizona is getting Phillies games earlier in the day (three-hour time difference). It's especially nice with weekend afternoon games, which may start at 10 a.m. my time and be over before lunch, leaving the rest of the day open.

The Phillies' lineup today will be:

SS Trea Turner

1B Bryce Harper

3B Alec Bohm

DH Kyle Schwarber

C J.T. Realmuto

LF Max Kepler

RF Nick Castellanos

2B Bryson Stott

CF Brandon Marsh

SP Zack Wheeler

They have a very good team this year. I'm more optimistic than the average Philadelphia sports fan, who thinks the Phillies should have gutted the team after losing to the New York Mets last October. I guess I can be bold like John Doll 96 years ago and make some predictions for the upcoming season:

DIVISION WINNERS:

AL East: Baltimore

AL Central: Detroit

AL West: Texas

NL East: Philadelphia

NL Central: Chicago

NL West: Los Angeles

WILD CARDS:

AL: New York, Boston, Cleveland

NL: Atlanta, New York, Milwaukee

AL Pennant: Baltimore over New York

NL Pennant: Los Angeles over Philadelphia

World Series: Los Angeles over Baltimore

Not exactly going out on a limb there, of course.

Maybe, in a weird way, it will be nice to have a predictable summer on the baseball diamonds across the United States, when much else is in disarray and despair. Then, this autumn, we'll have One Battle After Another.

Some previous baseball posts

• A neat piece of Phillies history (1970 hex sign giveaway)
• John Doll's 1929 baseball predictions
• Down memory lane with 1983 Topps Baseball Sticker Album
• Collection of Phillies ticket stubs
• Baseball-themed advertisements from a 1953 Phillies scorecard
• Inside the 1973 Spartanburg Phillies program
• Some Phillies Fever from the Bicentennial summer of 1976
• It's been five years since Harry Kalas, the Voice of the Phillies, died [2014]
• Steve Jeltz's greatest day (Phillies 15, Pirates 11)
• Connie Mack has some advice for the 2013 Philadelphia Phillies
• For Opening Day, great Phillies hairstyles of the late 1970s
• Ches Crist, baseball player
• It's Opening Day! Do you have Phillies Phever?
• Philadelphia Phillies spring training photos from March 1984
• 1959 Fleer baseball card showing the "Ted Williams Shift"
• Baseball program ads for Coca-Cola and Hires
• An all-star lineup of Camel smokers from 1954
• Postcard: The haunted hotel that spooks Bryce Harper

Grim footnote

1. For example:

• Charlotte Clymer: "If you think what happened to Rumeysa Ozturk can't happen to you because you're a citizen and she's not, you are sorely mistaken. Ozturk was snatched off the street not for being a national security threat but for having a wrong opinion. If we don't put a stop to this, it's coming for all of us."
• Gillian Branstetter: "No matter your station in life, there is astoundingly little separating you from those men in that cage behind Kristi Noem. No charges, no attorneys, no hearings, no trial. Just conjecture and brute force could be enough to justify completely dehumanizing you, too."
• Erin Reed: "It’s not just trans and gender nonconforming people who should be worried — most every marginalized group will be impacted by this measure, as well as huge impacts on married women."
• Prem Thakker: "So the position of the Trump-Vance administration — and every member of Congress unless they explicitly say otherwise — is quite literally you do not have guaranteed free speech rights in America if you say things they don't like. That is the headline."
• Andrea Pitzer: "As long as thugs in hoodies can disappear people from our streets, we do not have a functioning democracy."