Winning a World Series ‘changes everything.’ And the Phillies legacies for this veteran core are riding on it.

In 2029, maybe on a sticky summer evening in the nation’s capital, the Washington Nationals are likely to host a 10-year reunion for the only team in their history that has won the World Series.

Trea Turner will probably miss it.

Turner, the Phillies’ star shortstop, will be in the seventh season of an 11-year contract. So, unless he has a day off or happens to be in town in a scheduling coincidence for an NL East series, he’ll have to take a rain check.

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That’s OK. There will be other get-togethers. Championship teams tend to get saluted every five or 10 years or so. Besides, Turner hasn’t ever needed a formal occasion to reminisce with his former teammates about what they accomplished together in the fall of 2019.

“I feel like those memories, those moments, you talk about them forever,” Turner said. “Whenever I see [Max] Scherzer and [Patrick] Corbin and [Juan] Soto and different guys, those always kind of tend to get brought up.”

Not as much with Bryce Harper, though.

Because although Turner and Harper are close friends, and the Nationals won more games and captured division crowns in 2016 and ’17 with Harper in the lineup, those teams never won a playoff series. They weren’t celebrated with title banners. There aren’t reunions planned for them.

Harper was gone to Philadelphia by the time the Nationals won in 2019. Invariably, then, his legacy in Washington is different from Turner’s. Always will be. Maybe it’s unfair, but that’s how it is.

“Once you win one, you want to win another,” Turner said. “And the guys that haven’t are chasing it. That’s kind of the only goal. I feel like the pinnacle of the game is doing that. It’s the ultimate accomplishment.”

It also underscores what’s on the line for the 2026 Phillies.

Team officials point to 11 players who weren’t on the opening-day roster last season as a rejection of the narrative that they are “running back” a team that hasn’t won a postseason series since 2023. They also maintain that there are worse notions than keeping together a band that made the playoffs four years running. Both things can be true.

But it’s also worth remembering that the Phillies pushed hard for star infielder Bo Bichette in free agency in January, a sign that they were interested in changing the mix. Instead, they re-signed J.T. Realmuto, in addition to Kyle Schwarber, and reunited them with Harper, Turner, Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, and now, Cristopher Sánchez and Jesús Luzardo, a core that is talented and expensive.

Each stands to rank among the best Phillies players ever at their respective positions, too. But they’re missing something that Mike Schmidt, Steve Carlton, Larry Bowa, Bob Boone, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Cole Hamels, and other franchise icons possess.

They lack a championship.

And they’re all another year older. Realmuto is 35; Harper and Schwarber are 33; in June, Turner and Nola will turn 33; Wheeler will be 36 at the end of May and is coming back from major surgery.

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Oh, and in case they didn’t already hear their biological baseball clocks ticking, this season will be played beneath the storm cloud of a looming labor war over a salary cap that could eat into some or all of 2027.

“We’re as hungry as we’ve ever been because we haven’t been able to finish the job,” Realmuto said. “Obviously we’ve been a very good regular-season team the last few years, had a couple of pretty good postseason runs. But we just haven’t been able to get over that hump and win the World Series, and we’re still very hungry for that.”

Their Phillies legacies depend on it.

Every year, owner John Middleton hosts a dinner at his Bryn Mawr home for the former players who attend the Phillies’ Alumni Weekend. The memories flow like the wine.

Middleton recently recalled one specific conversation with Schmidt and Bowa, whose shared history includes three consecutive NL East titles but no victorious postseason series from 1976 to 1978. They finally won it all in 1980. Three years later, Schmidt led the Phillies back to the World Series, but they lost to the Orioles.

“They were talking about the difference between winning it and having that memory and having that ring as kind of a uniter of the team vs. not having it,” Middleton said. “Obviously Mike was on the ’83 team, too, so he could kind of talk to what it was like for ’80 vs. ’83. And it is different. I think it does matter.”

Actually, it’s all that matters, according to Bowa.

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“It changes everything,” the five-time All-Star shortstop said. “Teams that get close, like [the] Buffalo [Bills], four games [losing in the Super Bowl], that’s hard to do. But they’re considered, not losers but it was unfinished business.

“And I hope that this team doesn’t have a stigma of, ‘Oh, this is unfinished business.’ Because after a while, when guys get in their 30s, they’re going to make some changes.”

Bowa maintains that late former Phillies owner Ruly Carpenter confided in him before the 1980 season that changes were coming if a core led by Schmidt, Bowa, Boone, Carlton, Greg Luzinski, and Garry Maddox — and reinforced with Pete Rose in 1979 — didn’t get over the proverbial hump.

Schmidt doesn’t vividly remember that ultimatum. But he was well aware of the reputation the Phillies were earning after losing nine of 11 postseason games to the Reds in 1976 and the Dodgers in 1977 and ’78. (These Phillies have lost eight of 10 playoff games dating to Game 6 of the 2023 NLCS.)

“Oh man, we lost three [series] in a row, we seemed to have an image of a team that can’t play under the pressure of the postseason,” Schmidt said. “We had to shake that off.”

It took an epic NLCS against the Astros, punctuated by 10-inning wins in Game 4 and 5 in Houston, for the Schmidt-era Phillies to finally become unburdened by their previous playoff missteps.

“Postseason carries enough pressure itself without adding something to the mix,” Schmidt said. “In our case, we just got some of the right hits at the right time. I’ve always said Del Unser got the two biggest hits of my life after I failed two times under pressure. And that’s what it takes.”

These days, the difference between getting bounced in the divisional round and winning it all is razor-thin.

To wit: Middleton still wonders what might’ve happened last October if the automated ball-strike system was available to challenge umpire Mark Wegner’s missed strike call on a 2-2 pitch by Sánchez to the Dodgers’ Alex Call with one out in the seventh inning of Game 4.

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“We probably would’ve had as much chance as the Dodgers,” Middleton said, “of winning the whole thing.”

Instead, Call walked on the next pitch, and Justin Dean, who pinch-ran for Call, scored the tying run in an eventual series-ending Phillies loss in 11 innings. Sánchez said Wegner later admitted to him that he got it wrong. The Phillies went home. The Dodgers went on to win their second consecutive World Series.

And the legacies of players of each team danced on the head of a pin.

“We’ve been so close as a team,“ Harper said. ”I’ve been so close as an individual player, as well. Obviously that’s the remaining thing on the mantel, right? … Winning a World Series trophy is what you play for, what you dream for. Hopefully looking forward to doing that this year.”

Said Nola: “It would mean a lot. We want to win a World Series and win it for the city. I think it would be huge to be up there with the 1980 and 2008 teams, and especially with this group of guys. We’ve been around each other for a long time. It would for sure be special.”

Before he led off and played shortstop for a World Series champion, Turner was an integral part of Nationals teams that won 95 and 97 games and back-to-back NL East crowns before bowing out in consecutive win-or-go-home Game 5s in the divisional round.

“It took us a long time in Washington to win,” he said.

By 2019, in fact, the rap on the Nationals was that they missed their chance. There was enough talk about windows to drown out a Pella sales meeting. And that was before the Nats went 19-31 to open the 2019 season.

There was a fair amount of roster turnover from 2016 to 2019 in D.C., a town that knows something about term limits, with Harper among the most notable departures. But several core players stayed through the annual October disappointments, including Turner, Scherzer, Ryan Zimmerman, Anthony Rendon, Michael A. Taylor, and Stephen Strasburg.

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“When you run back the same team, you have guys that can learn from their experiences,” Turner said. “If we had a whole different team and guys that hadn’t played a lot of postseason games or whatnot, maybe they have to go through the same experiences that we’ve gone through and kind of restart everything.”

But the Phillies represent the most extreme example of roster continuity, especially in modern professional sports.

Harper, Turner, Schwarber, and Realmuto have each gotten at least 400 plate appearances in three consecutive seasons. Only 19 teams have ever had as many as four age-33 players who got 500 plate appearances in a season. And if new right fielder Adolis García (33) was to join them, the Phillies would be only the fifth team ever with five.

(It hasn’t happened since the 2007 Yankees, with Derek Jeter, Bobby Abreu, Hideki Matsui, Johnny Damon, and Jorge Posada.)

But Dodgers officials privately breathed a sigh of relief after three wins over the Phillies by a total of four runs in a division series that felt to them like a coin flip. Across the sport, rival executives lauded Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski for leaving the guts of the roster intact and taking another shot.

“It’s one of those situations where, if we left those winter meetings [in December] and we hadn’t signed Schwarbs back and he signed somewhere else, I wouldn’t have felt very good about that and we wouldn’t have been running it back,” Dombrowski said. “So, I think it depends on who you run it back with, and we like our core players. They do a great job for us.”

But Dombrowski also knows as well as anyone about what happens when a talented core makes multiple playoff runs without winning it all.

From 2011 to 2014, he built Tigers teams that won 95, 88, 93, and 90 games and four consecutive AL Central titles. They went to the World Series once, in 2012, and got swept by the Giants. Otherwise, they lost in the ALCS twice and the divisional round once.

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And so, Miguel Cabrera, Justin Verlander, and Scherzer were great Tigers whose legacies in Detroit aren’t quite the same as their counterparts from 1984 (Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Jack Morris, Kirk Gibson) and 1968 (Al Kaline, Denny McLain, Bill Freehan, Willie Horton).

“Historically, it will never be viewed the same as the ’68 and ’84 teams because they won world championships,” Dombrowski said. “The ultimate is achieving the world championship. That’s just kind of the way it goes.”

New Phillies bench coach Don Mattingly can relate. He captained the Yankees when they won more games than any organization in the 1980s. But they never won a World Series, and it’s a piece of Mattingly’s legacy in the Bronx.

Fair or not, that’s how it will go for these Phillies, too.

“It’s hard to win a lot of World Series, but I think there’s so much talent in that room, they’ve got to win one, for sure,” Bowa said. “And we’ve been close. But I think this team would feel, I don’t want to say a failure, but they’d be very disappointed if they don’t at least get to a World Series again. But they’ve got to get there.”

Every now and then, especially when his 2019 Nationals double-play partner Howie Kendrick is around the team in his role as a senior adviser, Turner will share stories from that magical season with his Phillies teammates. Schwarber occasionally does the same from his World Series triumph with the hex-breaking 2016 Chicago Cubs.

“We’re not sharing those stories to be like, ‘This is what we did,’” Turner said. “It’s more so like, ‘This was a cool moment in our careers.’ And I think everyone in here is chasing that.

“You get so close. The year before I was here, they were so close, and then I felt like in ’23 we had a really good opportunity. Just as competitors, I think that’s why we play the game. It’s kind of all you want.”

More than anything, it’s what these Phillies need.