READING, Pa. – It’s a big night for the R Phils, who will be facing Erie in game two of the championship series.<\/p>\n
“We just have to win one of the next two,” says Reading Fightin Phils General Manager Scott Hunsicker. He was there 31 years ago, the last time the team won the championship.<\/p>\n
“I was here in ’95, it was awesome,\u201d says Hunsicker. “It was really fun! In 2001, 9\/11, we were in the championship series, and then that tragedy happened. So, they just halted it and sort of declared co-champions, but that wasn’t really the same. Then 2015 we made it to the final game, game five of the championship series at that time it was five games, and we lost the final game.”<\/p>\n
He’s optimistic this team can pull it off.<\/p>\n
“We don’t really market winning,” says Hunsicker. “We market the fact that we have great prospects. You can see them on their way to the big leagues. We market the food, the music, everything like that, and we still have that going on tonight, but it’s a whole different atmosphere when it’s like, man, we really want to win this game!”<\/p>\n
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WFMZ-TV | Caitlin Rearden<\/p>\n
Longtime head groundskeeper at FirstEnergy Stadium, Dan ‘Dirt’ Douglas also remembers that big moment in the team’s history.<\/p>\n
“The night was special when I was part of sneaking in the Phanatic in for like the fifth or sixth inning,” says Douglas. “I remember Matt Beech struck out a guy, runners on base, Phanatic was flying out on the field, and the crowd went crazy, and we scored a couple runs and held on.”<\/p>\n
He says by this point in the season the fans and energy shift.<\/p>\n
“The atmosphere is phenomenal,” says Douglas. “The players, you know, they work all year to get to this point, and they go through the season kind of working as individuals and then develop as a team. Al Pedrique did a wonderful job of making these guys a team down the stretch, and that’s why we’re here.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. – It’s a big night for the R Phils, who will be facing Erie in game…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[121024,46982,136,24584,128,130,129,44158,121025],"class_list":["post-291885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-championship-series","tag-dan","tag-erie","tag-firstenergy-stadium","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-reading-fightin-phils","tag-scott-hunsicker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}