Book excerpt: How the 1993 Phillies lived hard, played hard, and bonded in unforgettable season

Inquirer baseball writer Scott Lauber is the author of "The Big 50: The Men and Moments That Made the Philadelphia Phillies” (available in paperback Tuesday), an entry in the “Big 50” sports series by Triumph Books. This excerpt is taken from Chapter 6: “Macho Row.”

Frank Coppenbarger just wanted to go home.

As the Phillies’ head clubhouse manager, Coppenbarger usually arrived for work by 11:00 am for night games. He stayed through the final out, tended to the players’ needs, then helped get everything in order for the next day. Thirteen- or 14-hour shifts were the norm.

But Coppenbarger began to notice something early in the 1993 season. He wasn’t walking through the door of his South Jersey house until 2 or 3 in the morning, his postgame duties taking longer than ever to complete because, well, the players didn’t want to leave.

“They were not in a hurry to get out of the clubhouse,” Coppenbarger recalled. “They loved to spend time with each other.”

Indeed, before the 1993 Phillies became one of the most beloved teams in franchise history, they turned the training room at Veterans Stadium into their private speakeasy. They bonded over baseball, beer, and (cigarette) butts. They played hard, lived harder, and didn’t let up until Joe Carter and the Toronto Blue Jays vanquished them in the ninth inning of Game 6 of the World Series.

Everything revolved around Darren Daulton, the former 25th-round pick who rose to become an All-Star catcher and respected leader. He endured nine knee surgeries during his 14-year career, so he typically made a beeline from the field to the training room and packed himself in ice.

Pretty soon he would be joined by John Kruk, the unkempt first baseman who brought the beer, and center fielder Lenny Dykstra, the tobacco-chewing hustler with the Southern California vocabulary and East Coast grit. Mitch Williams usually wandered in, especially if he had just completed another hair-rising save. So did scarily intense third baseman Dave Hollins and stocky slugger Pete Incaviglia, scrappy second baseman Mickey Morandini, and wise-cracking reliever Larry Andersen, mild-mannered starter Tommy Greene, and outspoken ace Curt Schilling. On occasion, manager Jim Fregosi even stopped by.

They were characters, misfits with mullets and beards and nicknames like Dutch and Dude, Krukker and Wild Thing, Mikey and Inky. Their section of lockers was dubbed by local sportswriters as “Macho Row,” and they embraced that persona. They were loud, irreverent and profane. They didn’t suffer fools or back down from anybody.

And they would hang out nightly in trainer Jeff Cooper’s room and review the game they just played, discuss the upcoming game, and just talk as much baseball as humanly possible.

“I think the thing that probably would surprise most people about that ’93 team is we sat around — and I’m telling you, it was an hour-and-a-half minimum every night — and we talked baseball,” Andersen said. “The perception for that club is that we were just having our beers and talking about going out and partying and chasing women. To say that that wasn’t even a part of it, that it never even came up, I think people would probably call BS. But I’d take a lie detector test. It was talking baseball with baseball players.”

Coppenbarger eventually realized that the only way he would make it home before 3 a.m. was if the players could let themselves out. He went to general manager Lee Thomas, explained the situation, and before long, a new exit door was constructed, keys were cut, and the Macho Row stragglers could turn out the lights and lock the place up.

Few thought the ’93 Phillies would amount to much. Well, except for the ’93 Phillies. Never mind that Thomas traded for starter Danny Jackson and signed Incaviglia, Andersen, and outfielders Jim Eisenreich and Milt Thompson as free agents to improve on a 92-loss season in 1992. The national media wasn’t moved. Nearly every publication pegged the Phillies to finish last, just as they did in three of the previous five seasons.

From the start, then, the chip on the shoulders of the occupants of Macho Row stood out as prominently as the red pinstripes on their uniforms. Daulton declared, “We don’t need to believe this crap.” From the start of spring training, it was the Phillies against the world.

First, though, they had to get their house in order. Hollins led the majors in hit by pitches in 1992 and resented his teammates for not retaliating. It gnawed at him all winter long, so he stood up in the clubhouse in spring training and challenged Schilling, Greene, Jackson, and fellow starters Terry Mulholland and Ben Rivera.

“I had a short, quick statement to our pitchers that I didn’t appreciate the fact that they didn’t ever respond to anything. You know, a tit for a tat?” Hollins said. “I said, ‘If you’re worrying about a guy charging the mound, he’s not going to beat me from third base. But you better worry about me and you after the game. That’ll be the choice. You want me fighting [alongside] you, or me and you alone after the game?'"

Greene, for one, took it to heart. After St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Donovan Osborne hit Hollins in a spring-training game on a lazy Sunday in St. Petersburg, Fla., Greene drilled Osborne. When Cardinals reliever Paul Kilgus hit Ricky Jordan a few innings later, a brawl erupted.

“We kind of bonded right after that,” Morandini said. “The pitchers became close with the position players and vice versa. The chemistry was right there from the beginning.”

The Phillies swept the season-opening series in Houston and won eight of their first nine games. They went 17–5 in April and were 57–32 at the All-Star break. They went nearly wire-to-wire, spending 181 days in first place.

But it was also the way that they won. Kruk homered in the 14th inning to walk off the Padres on April 20 at the Vet. Nine nights later, Thompson leaped at the left-field wall to rob a grand slam in the eighth inning of a 5–3 victory in San Diego. One night after that, Morandini bailed Williams out of a bases-loaded, no-out mess in the ninth inning at Dodger Stadium by making a diving stab at a line drive and turning an unassisted double play. Mariano Duncan hit a grand slam off Cardinals closer Lee Smith in the eighth inning of a 6–5 win on May 9. Williams, of all people, hit an RBI single to win the second game of a rain-interrupted July 2 doubleheader at the Vet against the Padres that ended at 4:41 a.m. Dykstra capped a 20-inning marathon against the Dodgers on July 7 with a ground-rule double in a 7–6 win.

Teams learned not to mess with the Phillies. After Giants reliever Bryan Hickerson spiked the ball to celebrate spearing Wes Chamberlain’s line drive to end the sixth inning on April 26, the Phillies responded by rallying from an eight-run deficit for a 9–8 win in 10 innings.

“Once it started getting out that we didn’t take any crap from anybody and we’ll brawl if we have to, I think a lot of teams were a little bit intimidated by us,” Morandini said. “Just the way we played the game — we grinded out at-bats, we took extra bases, we made diving plays, we grinded out wins — I think that scared people.”

Dykstra batted .305 with 19 home runs and 37 steals, reached base at a .420 clip, led the league in runs (143), hits (194), and walks (129), and was runner-up to Barry Bonds in the voting for NL MVP. Daulton hit 24 homers. So did Incaviglia, in only 368 at-bats as part of a left-field platoon with Thompson. Greene began the season 8-0. Williams racked up 43 saves.

Kruk batted .316 with 14 homers and a .430 on-base percentage. He made $2.45 million in 1993, but might have worked for free. Coppenbarger once found more than $20,000 in uncashed checks wadded up in Kruk’s locker.

“They finally came down and said, ‘You’re screwing up the books. You’ve got to cash these checks,’” Hollins said. “He would just throw 'em right in his locker.”

But the most amazing thing about that team was that so many strong-willed personalities formed such a close brotherhood. Fregosi employed platoons in left field, right field, and second base, but there was never any grousing from players who weren’t in the lineup every day.

“That was all Darren,” Morandini said. “Darren nipped everything in the bud as soon as he saw something that could be an issue.”

Here’s the thing, though, about Macho Row: It wasn’t built to last.

No team can play that hard and expend even more energy off the field and expect to survive for more than one season. Human beings, even ones as tough as these, aren’t capable of that. Those late-night, beer-filled bonding sessions led to seven divorces and countless other problems.

So, the Phillies outlasted the Greg Maddux/Tom Glavine/John Smoltz-led Atlanta Braves in six games in the NL Championship Series — “America’s Team vs. America’s Most Wanted,” Schilling cracked — then overcame a crushing 15–14 defeat in Game 4 of the World Series and a 5–1 deficit in the sixth inning of Game 6 to push the Blue Jays to the brink of Game 7.

But Carter’s three-run homer off Williams in the ninth inning was the brick wall that stopped a Phillies car that had been traveling at 100 mph for seven months.

And although the majority of Macho Row returned in 1994, it was never the same. The Phillies were 54–61 when a players’ strike wiped out the rest of the season, including the World Series. They wouldn’t have another winning season until 2001.

The ’93 Phillies can’t even have a proper reunion. Daulton died of brain cancer in 2017 at age 55. Fregosi, bench coach John Vukovich, pitching coach Johnny Podres, and first-base coach Mel Roberts are gone, too. Dykstra admitted to using steroids with the Phillies and is persona non grata at Citizens Bank Park after doing prison time for bankruptcy fraud, grand theft auto, and money laundering. Williams has declined invitations to come back.

As one-year wonders go, the ’93 Phillies are the poster children.

“I tell people it took me 24 years to achieve my dream. It wasn’t going to the World Series. It was being on a team like that,” Andersen said. “But that was a one-time shot. You can’t play that way again. It was all-out for a whole year, as much love for the game that you could have in one year. That was it.”

Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

This excerpt from “The Big 50: The Men and Moments That Made the Philadelphia Phillies” by Scott Lauber is printed with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Bookshop.org, or triumphbooks.com/Big50Phillies.