ORION KERKERING CAST a furtive glance around the clubhouse. His teammates — this lot of Philadelphia Phillies who had been his teammates for a grand total of three weeks — were consumed with the work ahead of dispatching the Braves in Game 4 to clinch the National League Division Series, or just otherwise engaged in pregame rituals, and they paid him no mind. He tugged open the plastic bag and double-checked its contents. Satisfied, he squirreled it away in his locker for safekeeping. His time, and the time for the contents of that bag, was coming.
The fact that these teammates were his teammates was silly. That this locker was his locker, illogical. That the contents of that bag, which he had commissioned barely 12 hours ago, were his to commission at all, downright asinine. Six months ago, he took the mound in Low-A ball in Clearwater, Florida. Low-A! And here he was, suiting up in Philadelphia. In the majors. In October. (Philadelphia! The majors! October!)
So roughly four hours later — with the Atlanta Braves duly dispatched and the NLDS safely clinched — when he nudged his clubhouse neighbor and fellow bullpen mate, Jeff Hoffman, smiled with an air of mischief and told him, “Hey, man, look at this,” well, it made as much sense as anything else in this nonsensical year.
The way Hoffman tells it, Kerkering giggled almost like a grade-schooler at what he had done. Fittingly, perhaps, since he’s only 22 and not that far removed from grade school. (He was in grade school, in fact — just 9 years old — when his now-teammate and Phillies closer, Craig Kimbrel, made his major league debut in 2010.)
Hoffman smiled back at Kerkering. “Wow,” he told him. Atta boy, he almost said, which is also fitting. Because Orion Kerkering, a Phillie for 20 days, had made a T-shirt commemorating that sentiment exactly.
In maroon, against a powder blue backdrop on the front: “ATTA BOY HARPER”
On the back: “HE WASN’T SUPPOSED TO HEAR IT”
With help from a college friend and Philadelphia local who made the shirt on about a half day’s notice, Kerkering had memorialized Orlando Arcia, the Brave who launched a thousand Bryce Harper stare-downs. Specifically, the Atlanta shortstop’s dig and subsequent about-face at Harper’s Game 2-ending baserunning blunder. And Hoffman loved it.
“When you win, you can do whatever you want,” Hoffman says. “At least that’s how we look at it here.”
And the Phillies did win, with a hint of bedlam and utter lack of orthodoxy, as is their wont. So with the clubhouse draped in celebratory plastic and geysers of celebratory Budweiser arcing through the air, Kerkering finally put on his shirt. Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm double-fisted a pair of beer bottles and poured them all over it. Kerkering paid it forward, dousing Kyle Schwarber with the beer he’s barely old enough to drink legally.
His path to this beer bath was a little frenzied and more than a little unexpected — which on this particular team, with this particular group of players, somehow feels just right.
The Phillies simply do not do normal. They send the unlikeliest leadoff hitter in baseball to the plate; Schwarber is shaped like a fire hydrant and on many nights, either fires moon shots into the Philadelphia evening or whiffs entirely. Their lineup can boggle the mind; Nick Castellanos, their $100 million slugger, has mostly taken up residence in the 7-hole for over a month now. They can launch (and launch and launch) home runs all the way to the Delaware River, but can forget, for seeming eternities, how to make bat meet ball with runners in scoring position. And they can look like a very good team for 162 games, only to hulk out when the calendar flips to October and there’s a nip in the air.
They are perfectly imperfect. A chaotic mess. A beautiful symphony.
Orion Kerkering — and his chaotic, symphonic climb to the highest level of baseball — fits right in.
PERHAPS IT SHOULD be no surprise, then, that by the seventh inning of Game 1 in the National League Championship Series, a healthy number of Phillies fans and armchair Toppers the Philadelphia region wide were agitating to replace their ace with a pitcher they hadn’t heard of three weeks before.
Starter Zack Wheeler had, by and large, breezed through six innings against the Arizona Diamondbacks, helped steward a 5-2 Phillies lead, then handed the ball to the bullpen. And though Kerkering did not get the nod that night, the clamor was still a dizzying turn of events for a man who currently calls a hotel in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard home.
He’s living out of a suitcase he packed last month, with enough clothes — some shirts, some pants; “I’m not a big stylish guy,” he says — for the final week of the Reading Fightin Phils‘ season, plus a sightseeing trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, with his girlfriend. They pushed back their plans when he got the call to head to Triple-A — then that pushback got pushed back when, four nights and one game into his stint with the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, he got summoned to Philadelphia on a late-September Friday around noon. He had planned to get a haircut that afternoon; instead, he battled midday traffic from Allentown to Philadelphia, dropped his belongings at the hotel, then hightailed it to Citizens Bank Park in case he needed to pitch that night. (He didn’t, but would two days later.)
Since that Friday when his fall turned topsy-turvy, Kerkering has made:
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His major league debut, on Sept. 24, a 1-2-3 eighth inning against the Mets.
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His postseason debut 10 days later, a 1-2-3 eighth inning against the Marlins.
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His NLDS debut three days after that, a 1-2-3 seventh inning against the Braves’ historically potent offense.
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His NLCS debut a week after that. He allowed one hit, served three strikeouts and looked generally filthy in the ninth inning to close out Arizona in a 10-0 laugher.
Kerkering’s swift ascension to these playoffs makes a meteor’s pace seem glacial. To wit: Since 1992, according to Stats Perform, he’s just the second player to pitch in Low-A, High-A, Double-A, Triple-A and the major league postseason.
And though he finally looked the part of a rookie by the heart of the NLCS — he gave up three straight hits and the game-tying run in the Phillies’ Game 3 loss; he delivered a bases-loaded walk before closing out the seventh inning in Game 4 — Kerkering swears he has never been cowed by the moment or the enormity of what he has done since late September. Instead, shell shock took hold when he passed a Bryce Harper or a Kyle Schwarber or a Trea Turner. Or a Nick Castellanos or Aaron Nola or Zack Wheeler. He rattles off what feels like half the roster, recounting how he’d see them in the clubhouse, realize they were his teammates, then laugh to himself about it all. “A little-kid kind of moment,” he says, a bit sheepishly, now that the bewilderment has faded and he’s a seasoned veteran of 20-plus days.
Which is pretty much what his teammates make him out to be, on the mound at least — a seasoned veteran — a distinction they also say he comes by honestly.
“If I had his stuff, I’d be pretty mellow too,” says pitcher Michael Lorenzen. “I’m telling you. It’s that good.”
A popular refrain, by all counts. J.T. Realmuto, Philadelphia’s longtime catcher, heard it early this year, and often.
“To be honest, I’ve been hearing about him and his stuff since May,” he says. “Every time I asked any minor league coach, ‘Hey, what do we have coming?’ He was the first one they always mentioned.”
So is it enough, his devastating slider and the aura of inevitability that trails in that slider’s wake? Can Kerkering be a secret weapon and a fittingly unorthodox puzzle piece for this unorthodox team in the throes of another October run?
“100%,” Lorenzen says. “100%. He’s going to throw a lot of important innings. Everyone’s going to know who he is at the end of this. Everyone will.”
IF EVERYONE DOES know who Kerkering is at the end of this, it’s a tale that’s especially apropos told here. Philadelphia falls hard for chaos to call its own.
One day before he turned Arcia’s words into a fashion statement, he strode into Citizens Bank Park for Game 3 against the Braves wearing someone else’s eloquence.
“If you don’t get it, then get the f— out of Philly,” said Phillies backup catcher Garrett Stubbs, by way of postseason hype video. Stubbs’ exuberance wound up printed on T-shirts. The T-shirts wound up on a table in the clubhouse, up for grabs for interested parties. Kerkering saw them, snagged one for himself — if nothing else, he was still getting by on his two weeks’ worth of clothes, and an extra tee could prove handy. Then, caught up in the team’s emotional roller coaster of a start to the series against the Braves, he figured the Phillies’ first NLDS game at home was a fine time to showcase it.
So what don’t people get, exactly, about Philly? These people who need to get the f— out?
“Just how passionate we are,” Kerkering estimates. We, he says, this Venice, Florida-raised Phillie who has called Philadelphia (or at least a hotel room in Philadelphia) home for a month.
Philadelphia has fallen hard for Kerkering because of his wardrobe choices, his ridiculous slider and his rapid-fire rise to the top of the baseball food chain. And because of his father, Todd, who stumbled into his own bit of viral fame after he was caught on the TV broadcast overcome with emotion during Orion’s regular-season debut.
When the cameras caught Todd choking up, he wasn’t just watching his son take the mound in Philadelphia. He was watching him take the mound when he was 6, and 10, and 14. He was watching him at 7, getting ready for fall ball. Orion’s coach at the time assembled his team and asked the players: “Who can play what position?” Orion’s response was immediate and resolute: “I can play them all.”
Todd is a former Marine and has long tried to pass down the lessons he learned from his service to his son. “Be the silent professional,” he starts. “Be patient. Slow is fast.”
They’re lessons that Orion has not heeded, at least not in his baseball career. But the Marines also taught Todd to maintain a sense of humor, lightheartedness and joy. So he smiled, too, at his son’s willingness to play to the Philly masses with his pointed fashion choices.
Among those Philly masses are a couple of his old Marine Corps friends. They texted him in recent days: “Everyone loves your kid.”
“For right now,” Todd wrote back.
Both Kerkerings, it seems, are quick studies in the art of playing in Philadelphia, and for these Phillies. And all their attendant chaos.
