The Phillies are ‘in love with each other.’ It’s stoking a new kind of fandom.

After Phillies right fielder Nick Castellanos leapt to catch a deep fly ball in the fifth inning of last Tuesday’s NLCS game against the Diamondbacks, center fielder Johan Rojas leaned in and planted a sweet, celebratory kiss just below his teammate’s left ear.

It was just the latest in a canon of intimacies — shared cigarettes, loving cheek strokes, collaborative jersey unbuttonings — that have become a major part of the Phillies’ appeal for a subsection of fans this year.

The 2023 Philadelphia Phillies are very good at playing baseball, but also, as manager Rob Thomson put it at the end of last season, “They’re in love with each other.” It’s a wholesome love, flowing between the players and echoed by the fans, contributing to that rare, priceless feature that the best teams have: good vibes.

They don’t take themselves too seriously. They wear homemade friendship necklaces and touch the smalls of each other’s backs. Sometimes they have dinner together at Nick Castellanos’ house. Brandon Marsh and Alec Bohm make large amounts of money, yet choose to be roommates. As Vogue recently noted: “The boys love gender-neutral overalls. The boys love the wet-hair look.”

Sure, Bryce Harper and Garrett Stubbs might give each other an earnest double cheek kiss in the dugout. There’s no time for toxic masculinity with a pennant to win.

“It’s incredible vibes and it’s because they’re loose. They’re not aggro-macho-bro-dudes,” said Stephen Hesson, a Phillies devotee and cohost of the podcast Batting Around, which he describes as “the internet’s gayest baseball podcast.” “Yeah, they kind of feel like a frat house, but not one of the ones that’s gonna bully you.”

The cultural shorthand for this team’s freewheeling affection and penchant for undressing has been to lovingly call them “himbos” (among other names). GQ wrote an ode to “a team of scantily clad dudes who love each other,” in a piece calling the Phillies the “beer-drinking himbos baseball needs.” Sports and culture site Defector calls Castellanos “The Phillies’ Himbo Hero.” “Himbos and vibes” shirts are proudly worn on Broad Street.

Even Castellanos’ wife, Jess, joined the fun, regularly liking tweets expressing similar sentiments. “I appreciate the enthusiasm and the love — but no more buttons ladies 😅,” she wrote in September, as fans drew a correlation between the number of buttons unfastened on her husband’s uniform and his performance on the field. She apologized later that day for leaving out the men who were also looking to see more of her husband.

Beyond the superficial, these players seem to have a deep affection for one another, which has in turn unlocked deep affection from a wide-ranging collective of veteran baseball fans, newcomers, women, and nonbinary people, queer people rethinking sports, and sports diehards rethinking sexuality.

“I love to joke about our ‘slutty himbos,’ but I do think sometimes it undermines the sweetness that is also there,” said Alyssa Keiko, 33, a longtime Phillies fan and leader in the thirsty Phillies online community. “I just love to see physical affection from them, and they are having so much fun, and we are having fun with them!!”

In moments of casual intimacy, fans see not just a championship team but a team worth obsessing over for many, many, many games.

“They’re one of the few teams that are comfortable showing their love and affection for each other. And I think in sports, it kind of redefines the idea of masculinity,” said James Gitto, a 32-year-old gay Phillies fan. Gitto said roughly 25% of the attendees at Philly’s queer OURfest parade this month were decked out in Phillies gear.

Other fans see them as aspirational, a beacon in a cold world.

“This is a man not afraid to show a little affection,” host Sheil Kapadia said on The Ringer’s Philly Special podcast, about Rojas after the smooch. “As somebody who is incapable of showing emotion — that’s me, as longtime listeners know — I like seeing others show emotion.”

No one is claiming that the players, who are almost all married to women, are living secret lives. Yet if there are homoerotic undertones to a shirtless Harper saying “You’re so sexy” while pouring beer on Kyle Schwarber in a crowded locker room, or the team ecstatically shouting the lyrics to “Dancing on My Own” — which Hesson described as “a gay man’s moody cover of an electropop ballad that was already considered to be a gay anthem” — it’s all welcome. These players just genuinely love a Cher cover.

For fans, that has opened up new ways of thinking about themselves.

Justin Young, 18, lives in Las Vegas and inherited his Phillies fandom from his dad. He identifies as straight. But then, he watched this team.

“I never thought about looking at another man as hot until seeing guys like Nick Castellanos and Bryson Stott and Bryce Harper just this year,” Young, who also hosts a fantasy football podcast, said in an interview. He has been genuinely mulling his sexuality since watching the boys play.

“It’s just stuff like Nick Castellanos unbuttoning the top button on his jersey,” he said. “It’s kind of hard for me to talk about because queer recognition, that’s not a big thing in my family.”

Kelsey McKinney, a staff writer at Defector who recently did a deep dive into the unbuttoned-yet-partially-stitched-up jerseys that multiple Phillies have been wearing, said the fandom appreciates that this team has a different sensibility than other baseball teams.

“These guys have a kind of awareness that there is a gaze, and they can perform for it,” she said, pointing to Harper “pandering in an absolutely perfect way” by donning cowboy boots with the Phillies logo or showing off a blue suit with the Philly skyline inside. Team-produced “pap walk” style photos have always been common in other men’s sports; the Phillies are now finding ways to play with them, too.

She also noted that context matters: When fans and reporters use objectifying nicknames for women athletes, it happens in a world where women’s sports are historically underfunded, underreported, and under-cared about. That’s not the case here.

In the end, fans just want the Phillies to be happy and free — and, of course, to win.

“People care about them because they’re good,” McKinney said. “If you were dressing like this, but your team was last place in the league, no one would care. You haven’t earned that swagger.”

Staff writers Anna Orso, Aubrey Whelan, and Abraham Gutman contributed to this article, as did their Phillies group chats.