Being a Phillies fan and having an insane jersey collection helped Will Yip win a Grammy award
Fandom is what brings people together, Yip says. And it’s that fandom that helped him win music's biggest prize. “The Phillies changed my life,” he says.
There’s a piano in every studio, a room full of guitars, and a mixing console shipped from Los Angeles that was used to record some of hip-hop’s iconic albums. Everything an artist needs, Will Yip said, is waiting for them in his South Philadelphia music studio.
But perhaps the most important thing is the TV in the lobby that Yip — a Northeast Philly native who won a Grammy earlier this year — flips on each night to catch the Phillies.
The 39-year-old works with some of the biggest acts in rock, continuing a career that started as a teenager volunteering at a Mayfair studio. Music has consumed him ever since he was a kid when he heard his brother listening to Dr. Dre and Nirvana.
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He arrives at Memory Music Studios — the spot he opened in December at Swanson and Wolf Streets — each morning and does not leave until late at night. Artists send him ideas or ask for edits at odd hours. It’s a great gig, but a record producer does not clock out.
So that’s why Yip steps outside the studio every night and puts the Phillies on that TV in the lobby.
“When 6:40 comes around, I can check in on the game. Every game,” Yip said. “It’s my comfort zone and something I can count on every day. When they’re off on a Monday or Thursday, I’m like, ‘Damn.’ It kills me. It crushes me. Especially when they’re good.
“If anything, it has helped my music career. I think if all I was doing was music and didn’t have that time to step away a little each day, I think I’d lose my mind. This way, I can refocus and watch the game and come back and say, ‘This song rocks.’ Everyone needs something, a little balance, another place to put their energy in. Three hours a day, I’m forever grateful for the Phillies.”
For so many, a game is the reward at the end of a day. The Phils are a conversation starter with a stranger, background noise in the car, and even on the TV at the recording studio. Fandom is what brings people together, Yip said. And it’s that fandom that helped him win that Grammy.
“The Phillies changed my life,” Yip said. “I think if I didn’t have the Phillies, I probably would’ve lost my mind on music. I need it. You can ask my wife. I need something to take my mind off music. If I didn’t have sports, I think I would get too consumed with music. I’m always stressing about music, so to be able to take a step back is huge.”
Chase brings them back
Yip remembers how excited his older brother, Wilfred, was to open a pack of cards in the summer of 1993 and find Darren Daulton. The younger brother was hooked. And then Joe Carter hit that homer.
“That stuck with me,” said Yip, who was 6 years old that October.
The Phils bonded Yip with his brother, who is four years older than him. But that connection felt thinner in the early 2000s when the Phillies were in a rut and his brother left for college. Yip, then a teenager, checked out of sports after becoming immersed into music. That was his life.
Then Chase Utley arrived. The Phillies felt cool again. And the Yip brothers had something to share.
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They went to Utley’s bobblehead night in 2006, and the crowd was electric. His sabbatical from the Phillies was necessary, as Yip started his path to that Grammy during those few seasons he missed. But he needed to be a fan again. He needed something else.
Yip worked with Lauryn Hill, sat Prince next to his wife at a concert, and met Jay-Z and Beyoncé. But it’s only the Phils who leave him starstruck.
“If it’s a Phillie, I lose my s—,” Yip said. “I lose my mind. If John Mayberry Jr. walked in the door right now, I’d go ‘Holy s—! That’s John Mayberry Jr.’ I always tell my buddies that my dream in life is to become friends with Chase Utley and Bryce Harper. That’s my dream. Forget the Grammy. That’s the absolute dream. Chop it up with Chase one day.”
The Yip brothers have shared season tickets to the Eagles for 10 years, and Yip said the Birds have never lost when the brothers are in the Linc together. If there’s a big game, Wilfred texts his little brother that “they need us today.” The brothers go, and the Eagles win.
“That didn’t work with the Phillies,” Yip said. “In 2023 with the Diamondbacks, it was Game 7 [of the NLCS], and my brother goes, ‘They need us.’ I said, ‘I’m not sure that works with the Phillies.’ We went, and it didn’t work. But at least we shared it together.”
Maybe it would have been easier for Yip to check out after Carter’s homer. That was enough heartbreak. But Yip, just like everyone else, kept coming back. He stepped away as a teenager but returned to the thing that crushed him when he was in elementary school at John Hancock. Why?
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“There’s always hope,” Yip said. “I think hope and dreams keep us alive. It’s the journey that keeps us alive. If we all accomplished our dreams right now, what would tomorrow even mean? It’s the hope of ‘Man, we can do it.’ That means so much. Without hope, humans don’t exist. I learned that as a sports fan. ‘This could be the year.’
“But for Philly sports, if we don’t have sports, what do we have? Sports is what ties our community together. Purely culture in terms of art, food, music, sports — and this is coming from a guy who works in music — sports is the most important thing to the city of Philadelphia. It just is. It ties everyone together. There’s no concert that you’ll ever put together or meal you’ll ever put out there that will get 2.1 million people walking Broad Street like that parade did.”
The thrill of the hunt
There was something about holding the game-used Utley bat that his wife, Christina, bought him for Christmas in 2010. It was like owning a piece of history. Yip needed more.
“I went down this rabbit hole,” Yip said. “I had to see what else was out there.”
He scoured eBay, joined Facebook groups, and logged onto auction house websites. Yip became a part of what he calls an “underground market” of people who become friends as they help each other find game-used Phillies memorabilia. The search became a thrill as he spent an hour every night browsing for new things to add or became friends with other fans who were searching for others. It was another way to step back from the music he was creating.
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And no one has a bigger collection than Yip. He has more than 400 jerseys and has lost track of how much money he’s spent over the years.
“It’s the biggest collection of game-used Phillies memorabilia in the world,” Yip said.
Yip has the last jersey Roy Halladay pitched in and the final uniform Ryan Howard wore. He bought the batting helmet Cole Hamels used when he hit a home run and the first bat Aaron Nola swung. He has World Series jerseys worn by Utley, Jimmy Rollins, and Harper and 100 game-used Rollins bats. He has a glove used by Utley — which is rare, since fielders use the same glove for years — and the video game cover that hung behind Harper at his introductory news conference in 2019.
Not every purchase has been a great investment. Yip is a fan, so he dreamed on the same players everyone else did. He collected Cody Asche, Darin Ruf, and Domonic Brown jerseys. He bought six of Scott Kingery’s tops and spent too much on Maikel Franco.
“My wife probably wanted to kill me when I got a lot of that stuff,” Yip said. “We were looking for the next guy. You can’t hit on them all. But the ones that hit, hit.”
The attraction to collecting was the ability to own pieces of history, something that never felt tangible for the child of immigrants who grew up in a rowhouse near Frankford Avenue and Knights Road. Yip used to stay up until his dad came home from waiting tables at the restaurant he owned so they could watch the Sixers game he taped that night on VHS.
Now he has a closet full of artifacts. No, he does not wear any of it.
“You don’t do that,” Yip said. “You can’t wear that. I’ve never worn one. I’ve swung a bat though. You can feel the power of Chase.”
‘Winning our ’chip’
Yip was at the Grammy Awards in February, but he was thinking like he was in the stands in South Philly as his chances to win started to dim. Turnstile, the band Yip produced, fell to Yungblud for Best Rock Performance and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails for Best Rock Song.
Yip started thinking like a bummed fan late in the game: He talked himself into accepting a loss for Best Rock Album.
“We were like, ‘Hold up. We’re not supposed to be here,’” Yip said. “‘It’s all good. This isn’t built for us. We make punk music, man. We’re lucky to be here.’ I came to terms after the first two that we weren’t going to win the Best Rock Album, which is the one that I really wanted.”
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And then Turnstile won. Yip’s wife started crying. It was all so surreal, like that walk-off you saw only because you refused to leave the game early, even though you didn’t think the Phils would come back.
“It was winning our ’chip,” Yip said. “It was hard work, but it doesn’t make me who I am. A statue is never going to make you who you are. But it does make me appreciate the appreciation from other people. They acknowledged our hard work. We don’t need a Grammy to validate who we are, but it was a win that we touched so many people. That’ll be the closest thing I’ll feel to winning a World Series.”
His family was back home, and his mom told him that his brother cheered louder than he did when the Eagles won the Super Bowl. The brothers watched that game together just like they did when the Phillies won it all in 2008.
They watched the Phils win at Wilfred’s apartment in Gulph Mills and drove back to the Northeast to celebrate at Cottman and Frankford. The brothers stopped at a Wawa as they cut through the city and a man stopped Yip as he walked in.
“If you looked at us, we couldn’t look more different,” Yip said. “He daps me up, gives me a hug outside this North Philly Wawa, and says, ‘We did it, man.’ Me and this guy will probably never see each other again. We’re from completely different neighborhoods, but ‘We did it.’ And that’s what Philly sports is. I’ll never forget that.”
The Phillies were the common bond outside that Wawa, providing a connection between two strangers. The hope that Yip clung to for all those seasons finally paid off. And now the Phils provide a distraction when he turns the music down and takes a brief break from his own dream.
“That is why I lean in on the Phillies so hard and connect with them so hard. It’s the best distraction, the best getaway,” Yip said. “It’s always there. It’s definitely helped my career because it just gives me a reset and a focus. We care so much about sports because of that distraction, that extra thing that connects us all no matter who it is. We can all get together and talk about last night’s game. What else does that? I don’t think anything.”
No matter what moves the Phillies make before the trade deadline Monday, they will have to fix some of their issues internally. Chief among them: Trea Turner's defense at shortstop. And that's where infield coach Bobby Dickerson comes in. Dickerson sat down with "Phillies Extra," The Inquirer's baseball podcast, to discuss Turner's struggles, the problems with analytics in measuring defense, his unique coaching style, and more. Watch here.
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