What would you do without us?
Believe it or not, you’ve been angry with what we’ve had to say about the Phillies for 20 years now. Back in 2005, David Fischer founded TheGoodPhight (TGP) and our lives have been forever changed. At the TGP, we take a tremendous pride in our community. Developing and guiding a community over 20 years requires a tremendous a lot of time, effort and passion to which we’ve been lucky enough to have had many great leaders and writers. This season we’ll be take a deep-dive in celebrating what we’ve accomplished and what we hope is still to come for TGP.
First up, David Fischer was kind enough to go into the history of TGP, favorite Phillies moments and more…
TGP turns 20 years old this season. Can you tell us the motivation to launch the blog back in 2005? The name inspiration?
David Fischer: A lot of it had to do with Bobby Abreu and the aftermath of “Moneyball.” I think sports fandoms are like most subcultures in that, under the umbrella of their shared interest—love of a ballclub, Star Wars, a religious denomination, whatever—the adherents will find things to divide over and fight about. Sometime this is sparked by new ideas and energies. In baseball, this had been bubbling up since Bill James started his work of pushing people to think differently about what went into winning baseball, and how a lot of the conventional wisdom was misguided. Many of us had been reading James, or Rob Neyer, or Baseball Prospectus, and our ideas about what made good ballplayers and well-run organizations had evolved from when we started watching the game as kids however many years before. Michael Lewis’s book crystalized this and certainly raised the visibility, but the scouts-vs.-stats battle lines had been drawn for some time.
For Phillies fans, Bobby Abreu was the embodiment of this. The guy was fantastic! I’m still not quite convinced he’s a Hall of Famer, but he had access to a platonic ideal of the strike zone, and could turn a game with his power or speed. From month to month and season to season, he was absurdly consistent. On his worst day, he’d make pitchers work to get him out. But most fans didn’t embrace him. We thought some of that was probably failure to appreciate his plate approach, and some of it might have been soft racism, and some of it might have been the oddity of his playing for a manager in Larry Bowa whose own game was the opposite of Abreu’s, though Bowa was gone by the time we launched.
I think I came up with the name. I actually wanted to call it “Phight Club,” but somebody had already registered that URL and we didn’t love it enough to really pursue it. “The Good Phight” was a reference to what we saw as our mission to advance a more rational approach to enjoying the sport, with Abreu as a kind of mascot or avatar. I don’t want to overstate this—we weren’t ever deep into advanced metrics—but we knew enough, or thought we knew enough, to offer a perspective on the team in its day-to-day action and its larger direction that we weren’t seeing online anywhere else at the time.
Was this a solo effort or did you have co-collaborators from the beginning?
David Fischer: I had worked in sports media about a decade before, right after graduating from college, and occasionally wrote about baseball on my personal blog. But I didn’t have the bandwidth or desire to do it all myself. At the time the opportunity to launch came up, I was spending a lot of time in a fan community called philliesphans.com. I think a few of us might have been in a fantasy league, or were talking about it. We pulled together the original lineup of writers, and three of us—David Cohen, WholeCamels, and me—are still around even if we don’t contribute as much these days.
How long was the blog independent before being incorporated into SB Nation? What was that process like?
David Fischer: TGP actually began in response to the emergence of SBN. I have a close friend from college who’s a lifelong, hardcore Minnesota Twins fan. She’s an amazing writer who has gone on to success as a YA novelist. In the early 2000s, she started a blog, bat-girl.com, and built a wonderful online Twins community that featured, among other things, game recaps with LEGO reenactments of key plays. Probably in early 2005, she was approached by the people who were starting SB Nation, one of whom was the Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas. They were looking for bloggers for each team, and wanted to incorporate bat-girl.com as the Twins blog. As we were talking about this, I started to wonder if they had a Phillies site yet, and when the answer came back no, we pulled together a proposal and they brought us onboard.
What were some of your favorite Phillies or blog moments during your time active with TGP?
David Fischer: The first few years of the Rollins/Utley/Howard/Hamels run were so much more fun and satisfying for my fandom as a result of being involved with TGP. Even before the charge down the stretch in 2007, the team played some epic series with the Mets where we would be living and dying in the comments almost on every pitch. The last day of the season, when the Marlins chased Tom Glavine in the first inning while the Phillies took out Washington, was unreal. Then the whole postseason run in 2008, when you could just feel it coming together—the last three games of the World Series in particular.
How long were you the site manager before stepping away?
David Fischer: This is a little embarrassing but I can’t remember! I think it would have been around that time, the start of the mini-dynasty, when I handed it off to WholeCamels who was way, way better at running the show than I was.
Do you have a favorite piece(s) you’ve written?
David Fischer: The most fun were probably the game stories after amazing wins: this absolutely bonkers game against the Braves in 2008 sticks out in my head, though I can’t find the story. The clincher of the 2009 NLCS was another one. I remember writing it and then in a burst of possibly intoxicated enthusiasm buying a Jayson Werth replica jersey online, the only such thing that I own. In terms of more thoughtful pieces, a couple come to mind. Somewhere in the later part of the 2007-2011 run I wrote an article called “The Ultimate Good Luck”—blatantly (and with acknowledgement) ripping off the title of a Richard Ford novel—pointing out how historically unlikely it was given their draft position that the Phillies had gotten so much value from Utley, Howard, and Hamels in three consecutive drafts. Many, many years later I wrote about Bryce Harper’s “Bedlam at the Bank” moment, my main reflection on which is how special it was to come out the other side of that decade-plus where the team was just not relevant or compelling, and how fortunate I was to still be able to write about it for TGP.
Do you have any favorite articles written by fellow TGP writers?
David Fischer: I’m so proud of the amazing talent that has come through TGP—all the folks who have gone on to make careers writing about sports, and all the laypeople who did this as a hobby or a labor of love. That people like Liz Roscher and Justin Klugh and Matt Winkelman and John Stolnis and so many others have contributed to the site is a tremendous legacy, one that the current roster of contributors continues to hold up. As far as specific pieces, the two that come to mind are my fellow OG TGPer David Cohen’s reflection on the life cycle of Philadelphia fan-favorite athletes, the link to which I unfortunately can’t find, and Terry “Wet Luzinski” Lynch’s series in the voice of Pat Burrell—well after he was no longer a Phillie—called “Veteran Clubhouse Presence.” Comedic sports writing has a super high degree of difficulty—god knows I could never pull it off—and Terry’s stuff was hysterical. I’d like to think that Pat himself would read it, spit out some tobacco juice and grunt in affirmation.
How do you feel about TGP’s lasting legacy in Phillies blogdom and what does TGP currently mean to you?
David Fischer: It seemed in the late 2000s and well into the next decade that there was a Phillies blog for pretty much any fan sensibility. Certainly there were sites that leaned harder into analytics than we did, and there were others that seemed to be going for more of a guys-in-a-bar vibe. They all had their strengths and many of those writers went on to national outlets too. But I thought what made our site special, and still does, is the sheer breadth of well informed and well written perspectives. If you wanted game stories, roster analysis, prospect talk, history, stats, or random nonsense, TGP had it, and has it. The whole point was to make readers better informed and more engaged baseball fans, and to offer a community experience based on our shared love for this dumb and wonderful team and this infuriating and transcendent sport. I’m proud to have played some part in building that, and I hope it’s around for as long as people are enjoying Phillies baseball.