When nature calls, Phillies relievers have a place to go (published 2022)

HATBORO, Pa. — It’s the ninth inning at Citizens Bank Park, and the Philadelphia Phillies’ relievers are back. They’ve already blown one lead, with Jeurys Familia and Seranthony Domínguez belting homers in the seventh. Now, after a comeback, the game has fallen apart with closer Corey Knebel on the mound.

The Miami Marlins win 11-9 and from the couch in his suburban living room, Matt Edwards sighs.

“It’s really hard to honor some of these guys,” he said.

And it is: The Phillies are the only National League team not to have been in the playoffs in 10 years, and their bullpen is an annual adventure. Nostalgia can be a tempting escape (beer helps, too), and no one celebrates the past quite like Edwards, a 45-year-old telecommunications salesman with a wife, Cheryl, two young sons, a Great Dane — and a shrine in his downstairs bathroom to retired Phillies relief pitchers.

“We’re very aware that we weren’t one of the five starters or one of the guys on the field,” said Chad Durbin, who spent four seasons as a Phillies reliever. “But you know, we had our moments. So when we’re remembered, we embrace that.”

Durbin played 225 games for the Phillies, including the postseason, with an earned run average of 4.07. He pitched for five other teams, but as far as he knows, none of their fans have his picture in their bathroom. As you might guess, Durbin is also not in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “But I did in the Relief Room.”

The Relief Room is what Edwards calls his bathroom, because that’s where you go to relieve yourself. That’s the joke.

Edwards played third base in Little League and left field in men’s softball. His sons are not pitchers. His favorite active player is a first baseman, Rhys Hoskins of the Phillies. But like a comedian who finds endless material by staying committed to the bit, Edwards has created a brand around players who get no respect, no respect at all.

“I remember opening a deck of cards and seeing a mustache and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s Mike Schmidt’ — and no, it’s Dan Schatzeder,” he said in his home office, which is overflowing with artifacts that don’t quite fit in the 3-by-8-foot museum around the corner.

“But that was the fun of going through the cards, trying to find that guy. Now, I don’t want to defend the Mike Schmidts or the Bryce Harpers. I want to defend the guys like Schatzeder and Andy Carter and Amalio Carreño, because nobody does that. Celebrating the little guy that nobody remembers is more memorable than talking about the stars, because everybody knows them.

“Nobody knows about Tyson Brummett. He’s one of the ‘cup-of-coffee guys.’ So this is a ‘cup of coffee’ — enjoy a cup of coffee with Erskine Thomason.”

Edwards picks up a custom mug featuring the black-and-white face of Thomason, who pitched the ninth inning of a losing game on Sept. 18, 1974, in his only major league appearance. The definitive statistics website, Baseball Referenceuses a blank headshot with a question mark next to Thomason’s name. That would be blasphemy to Edwards.

He knows that Thomason was the subject of an NFL Films documentary and that the filmmakers, who followed him all season, somehow missed his only game and had to re-enact the footage. He also knows that Brummett pitched one game in 2012 and was later killed in a plane crash. He knows that Carter was ejected from his first major league game and Carreño from his last.

And of course he knows that Schatzeder worked for years as a high school physical education teacher in Illinois.

“You look at that guy and you can totally picture him in a tracksuit with a whistle around his neck,” Edwards said. “That’s amazing. Who’s going to sing his song from the top of a mountain? If not me, who is?”

For Edwards, there’s sincerity in the satire. He remembers a high school classmate getting drafted by the Mets, the thrill of a major league team wanting someone he knew. Fewer than 23,000 people have ever seen a game in the majors; you could pack them all into the old Veterans Stadium, with more than 40,000 seats to spare.

They all have stories, and if they happened to pitch as a reliever for the Phillies, Edwards makes it his mission to tell them. Edwards, an English major at the University of New Hampshire, reads extensively about his classes, gleaning fun facts from each class and organizing them by date on his computer. He sends out several tweets a day to a modest group of followers with some famous names — famous to Edwards, anyway.

“He loves Tom Hume,” said Scott Eyre, a left-handed specialist from the late 2000s, referring to a bespectacled right-hander from the 1980s. “He would probably faint if Tom Hume went to the Relief Room.”

Eyre did so in early 2020, following a neighborhood autograph drive. (Edwards wore his Hume T-shirt for the occasion.) Eyre, who knew Edwards only from Twitter, became the first reliever to actually relieve himself in the Relief Room. It made sense, since he hung out with Edwards for hours, well past 1 a.m., drinking beer, opening old decks of cards, and telling stories about Chuck McElroy, Dan Plesac, and other honorees he knew.

A pilgrimage to see a Phillies fan’s bathroom isn’t something Eyre ever expected. A California native who now lives in North Carolina, Eyre once had a no-trade clause to Philadelphia. When the Cubs sent him there in 2008, he asked Jon Lieber, a teammate who had played for the Phillies, what to expect.

“He says, ‘Dude, you’re going to love it out there, and they’re going to love you,'” Eyre said. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You’re a stand-up guy and you are who you are.’ And that was exactly right. If you go out there and do your job and admit the mistakes you make, they’re still going to love you. They just want to yell at you a little bit, and that’s fine.”

Eyre understood the essence of Philadelphia fans: They expect to win no matter the circumstances, and they want to be heard. Failure feels like a personal affront and gives fans the right to boo. But they embrace players who make no excuses and genuinely show they care.

Take Mitch Williams, the only man in the world to allow a walk-off home run and lose the World Series, against Toronto’s Joe Carter in 1993. Williams, known as the Wild Thing, is a folk hero to Phillies fans and is honored in the Relief Room.

“On an easy level, it’s the mullet and the headband and all that, but he showed it every time,” Edwards said. “His bravado, his machismo, the way he strutted around. You could tell he didn’t want to let anyone out, he just wanted to go in and take everyone out. But he was responsible, and that’s huge.”

Williams is one of a handful of well-known relievers in Edwards’ gallery. Most have had smaller impacts, including Kyle Abbott, Josh Lindblom and Wally Ritchie, all of whom Edwards follows on Twitter. They are among about 300 faces adorning the bathroom walls, mostly on baseball cards but dozens more in larger photos, such as the one of Renie Martin above the mirror.

“There’s something new in there,” Edwards’ mother, Joann, told him when she saw it. “He’s looking right at me and I don’t like his face.”

Martin pitched for the Phillies only briefly, but Edwards relishes the fact that he appeared for Kansas City in the deciding game of the 1980 World Series, when Tug McGraw clinched the Phillies’ first championship. After the second, in 2008, Edwards’ father, Jim, hung two photos above the toilet: one of McGraw and the other of Brad Lidge, both in October.

Edwards bought the house from his father a few years later, kept the photos of McGraw and Lidge, and added everything: the bar of soap with Sparky Lyle, the commemorative Ron Reed soda can, the four-sided Kleenex dispenser with Porfi Altamirano, Warren Brusstar, Tom Hilgendorf and Barry Jones.

The handle on the cabinet is the barrel of a broken Don Carman bat; a retired Phillies groundskeeper sent it to Edwards. Greg Harris, an ambidextrous reliever, wrote on his photo: “Use both hands in the Relief Room.” Artist Dick Perez, once the official Hall of Fame artist, donated an original portrait of Hilgendorf — a hero of Edwards’ who first saved a drowning boy from a swimming pool.

“And then this whole ’10 cent beer night’ thing in Cleveland,” Edwards said. “He gets beat up with a chair, blood pouring out — and the next game he’s facing six batters and getting six outs!”

If you’re dead-set on the Relief Room, there’s a basket of vintage magazines like “Phillies Today,” featuring Steve Bedrosian and Jeff Parrett in firefighter gear on the cover. There’s a collection of McGraw’s comics from the ’70s and a Guess-The-Mustache flipbook. (If you don’t recognize Altamirano, you automatically lose a full mark.)

There are tentative plans to expand the Relief Room, Edwards said, if he and Cheryl can move the washer-dryer out of the adjacent utility room. For now, though, Edwards needs a home for his latest treasure: the game-worn soccer cleats of Toby Borland, a rangy ’90s sidearmer. His buddies, Brian and Mike Carroll, bought them on eBay for $30.

The studs would easily fit on the wall above the toilet, which is largely empty space. But that area is sacred, Edwards said, and is reserved strictly for relievers on championship teams. The Phillies have improved of late, but are still recovering from a slow start. They may need to summon the spirit of McGraw to make this their year.

“Cheryl’s like, ‘There’s so much space, do something else with it,'” Edwards said. “I’m waiting. That’s the point. That’s the optimist in me: I’m going to fill this wall.”