PHILADELPHIA — Birthday baseball eluded Bryce Harper until age 31.
Thanks to his old Washington Nationals’ inability to escape the Division Series and an off day last year after the Phillies wrapped up the Braves in the NLDS, Harper had yet to experience a pro baseball game on Oct. 16.
That ended with Monday’s Game 1 of the NLCS against Arizona.
“I’ve always wanted to play on my birthday,” Harper said Monday before the series opener. “Last year we had a day off because we clinched early, which was great. A Game 1 win would be awesome.”
Harper, who would hit a fairly awesome home run in his first at-bat of the NLCS Monday night, picked up a gift earlier in the day, communicated via text from his wife, Kayla: The return of baseball to the Olympic stage.
That was formally ratified via International Olympic Committee vote for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. It’s the latest shift in a checkered history between the sport and the IOC, with baseball removed after the 2008 Games following seven straight appearances, only to return thanks to the influence of Japan’s baseball culture to Tokyo in 2020. It won’t be at next summer’s Paris Olympics.
Harper will be 36 in 2028, in year 10 of his 13-year pact with the Phillies. He’s already making his bid to be on the Olympic stage.
“I will be old at that point, so I don’t know if they’re going to want me to be on the team, but it’s always a dream,” Harper said. “I mean, I think it’s everybody’s dream to be in the Olympics. Especially it coming here, being able to do that, I would hope that Major League Baseball – and I don’t know if they ever will – you talk about growing the game, and that’s the way you grow it at the highest peak.
“I don’t know if they’ll ever go for it, but I would love to put USA on my chest and represent it at the highest level.”
He need look no further for evidence of Olympic baseball’s impact than his manager. Rob Thomson was on Team Canada at the 1984 Games, baseball’s first appearance in 20 years, as a demonstration sport.
That tournament was held at Dodger Stadium, Canada losing to Nicaragua and South Korea before beating Japan.
“I think it should be in the Olympics,” Thomson, the Canadian Baseball Hall of Famer, said. “My experience was I come from a town of 2,000 people, and I had never played in front of more than 500 people in my life. Our first game … there was 45,000 people in the stadium, and I don’t even remember the first inning, to tell you the truth. I was just as nervous as you could get. But it was a great experience. Something I’ll never forget.”
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Evan Longoria doesn’t have the warmest of memories of postseason baseball in Philadelphia. The driest, either.
But 15 years after the fresh-faced rookie played at Citizens Bank Park for the Tampa Bay Rays in the 2008 World Series, he’s happy to return as a grizzled vet for the Diamondbacks, the other member of MLB’s 1998 expansion class.
“Thankfully, I don’t remember a whole lot about the ’08 World Series other than we lost,” Longoria said. “It wasn’t – we didn’t play good baseball, and the weather was crappy.”
The Series was understandably unmemorable for the 22-year-old American League Rookie of the Year. After two solid series to start the postseason, including four homers in the ALCS triumph over the Red Sox, he went 1-for-20 with nine strikeouts against the Phillies. He drove in a run in the Rays’ only win in Game 2 and had his only hit, an RBI single, on Day 1 of Game 5. He popped out to second base for the first out of the ninth against Brad Lidge in the clincher.
Since that taste of the Fall Classic, he hasn’t glimpsed so much as a championship series, with early eliminations with the Rays in 2010, 2011 and 2013, then the Giants in 2021. Joining a team that lost 110 games in 2021 wasn’t necessarily the route to October, but Arizona has defied those odds.
Longoria batted .223 with 11 homers and 28 RBIs in 74 games this year, mostly as a platoon. He’s batting .167 in the postseason with two RBIs. He started Game 1 at third base, batting eighth.
“Obviously very happy to be back, the opportunity that we have here,” Longoria said. “There’s no better place to come and experience a postseason environment. I think that the team is looking forward to embracing that.”
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The Phillies made no changes in their NLCS roster, preserving the same 13 pitchers and 13 hitters as the four-game win over Atlanta.
That means Rhys Hoskins isn’t quite ready to return. While Thomson is heartened by his progress from March 30 surgery to repair a torn ACL, the presumptive pinch-hitter is still getting his timing back and is “a little bit tentative” on turns on the basepaths.
Both Michael Lorenzen and Taijuan Walker are on the roster, some length in a seven-game series against a right-handed heavy order.
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The Diamondbacks made one change from the 26 men that swept the Dodgers in the NLDS, replacing infielder Jace Pederson with right-handed pitcher Slade Cecconi.
Cecconi was 0-1 with a 4.33 ERA in seven games (four starts) over 27 innings. The 24-year-old was 5-9 with a 6.11 ERA in 23 Triple-A starts.
Arizona manager Torey Lovullo said Cecconi might have been on an earlier roster if he had been eligible, instead waiting out the 15-day window after being sent down Sept. 25.
“We just felt like to give us a little bit of coverage in any type of situation,” manager Torey Lovullo said. “We need a little bit of length coming out of the bullpen.”
Source: Berkshire mont
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