‘I never lost my fandom’: Lifelong Phillies supporter is fulfilling a dream of seeing his team in the World Series
“Seeing my team in the World Series: This is a bucket list thing for me,” said Dave Eck, who moved to Colorado from West Chester when he was 13 but never lost his love of the Phils.
HOUSTON — The Phillies were Dave Eck’s first love; his father took him to games at Connie Mack Stadium and the Vet.
West Chester was home for the first 13 years, until his father was transferred to Colorado, where Eck, now 60, still lives, south of Denver.
But the Phils have been a mainstay of his life, even in another time zone.
“I never lost my fandom,” Eck said. When the Rockies play the Phillies, Eck heads to Coors Field. When he lived in Washington, D.C., for a time, he bought Phillies season tickets and headed to Sunday games in Philly.
For a long time, Eck felt starved to watch Phillies games; since the advent of the MLB Network, Eck can at least watch games at home.
“My family is used to building their schedule around the Phillies games,” he said. “Every night, I have them on.”
Eck, who works in marketing for Nokia, has been to three Super Bowls and baseball All-Star games. But somehow, he had never been to a World Series. But on Saturday, he found himself at Minute Maid Park in Houston, wearing his Phillies red and carrying a sense of wonder.
“Seeing my team in the World Series: This is a bucket list thing for me,” Eck said.
It was a tricky thing: Eck’s daughter is a cross-country runner for Vanderbilt University, and Eck and his wife, Katie, had plans to be in Mississippi for a meet on Friday. But the family made the logistics, and the math, work. (”I argued it was on the way,” Eck said.) They flew from Denver to Memphis, drove to Oxford, Miss., then headed back to Memphis for a Saturday flight to Houston.
Making it to Philly for a game would have been amazing, but that wasn’t in the cards for Eck. Houston offered easier travel and fewer financial burden.
“The prices at Citizens Bank Park were just crazy,” he said.
Being a Phillies fan far from Citizens Bank Park can be isolating. Eck vividly remembers the 1980 World Series, when he was a freshman at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
“I watched it on a big screen at some Pizza Hut with one other guy who liked the Phillies,” Eck said. “Nobody understood why I was jumping up and down. I had nobody to share it with, and I was so far away.”
On Saturday, he was anything but isolated, even with Phillies fans vastly outnumbered by Astros orange.
But that didn’t matter. Eck said he teared up when Bryce Harper hit the world-tilting home run that won the National League Championship Series for the Phillies. In Houston, it was all joy.
“We’ve been starved,” said Eck. “It was so frustrating for so long to be a Phillies fan, but this is incredible.”