PHILADELPHIA — After every Phillies home win this postseason, after the players exchange hugs and high-fives while some 45,000 fans remain in Citizens Bank Park and sing along with the team’s anthem, “Dancing on My Own,” backup catcher Garrett Stubbs hurries off the field and finally gets to work.
Stubbs has only caught one inning in these playoffs, mop-up duty during Philadelphia’s blowout victory in Game 2 of the NLCS. But no player has been more instrumental in cultivating the team’s immaculate vibes and continued success, as the Phillies are now one win away from playing in their second straight World Series.
After peeling away from the group, Stubbs rushes inside the clubhouse, changes into his signature overalls, and opens up Spotify to perform his most essential duty: He’s the team’s DJ, responsible for turning the locker room into a club house.
As players filter in, a machine pumps fog throughout the room. The walls pulsate to the beats of “Love Tonight” by Shouse — the leadoff song in the Phils Win playlist. On deck is Calum Scott’s cover of “Dancing on My Own,” with “Cold Heart (PS1 Remix)” by Elton John and Dua Lipa in the hole. Batting cleanup is Trey Lewis’s “Dicked Down in Dallas,” followed by “Dixieland Delight,” which the Phillies have written their own lyrics for the call-and-response chorus.
The Messenger approached Stubbs at his locker last week, curious to understand why three of the first four songs are about relationships going wrong or being cheated on. Stubbs laughed, the realization hitting him for the first time. Unintentional, he said.
That may be true, but at least one new member of the Phillies thinks it could be more than a coincidence that the collective subconscious embraces jilted heartbreak as a prevailing theme.
“Maybe there are some subliminal feelings throughout the team that they’ve got to get off their chest,” says first baseman and outfielder Jake Cave, who remembers being puzzled the first time he heard the Phillies playing “Dancing on My Own” earlier this season. “I hadn’t ever heard the song before. And I was like, ‘How is this our win song?’”
If the Phillies’ playoff run were a movie, the soundtrack would be deemed too on the nose after Philadelphia lost to the Houston Astros in the World Series last season. Then again, there’s an unexpected depth. The heartbreak is hidden in the songs’ upbeat tempos — a perfect way of describing how the Phillies have been playing this postseason.
“It has nothing to do with anything,” Stubbs says of the heartbreak theme. “I mean, most songs are about sex or drugs.”
Sex, drugs, and the Phillies are on a roll.
Leading the NLCS, 3–2, they head back to Citizens Bank Park, where they are 6–0 this postseason. With five home runs in this NLCS alone, unorthodox leadoff batter Kyle Schwarber now has 20 career postseason homers, the most ever by a left-handed batter — and tied for the fourth-most all time with Derek Jeter, who finished his career with 483 more playoff plate appearances than Schwarber has now. Bryce Harper continues to rake, and co-aces Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola, who gets the ball in Game 6, have combined to go 6–0 with a 1.61 ERA and 53 strikeouts over 44 ⅔ innings in seven starts this postseason.
The Phils Win playlist features 102 songs, with a total run time of six hours and 34 minutes. That’s longer than it would take to watch the first two Godfather films back to back. Most of the music is pop, rap or EDM, with a few country and rock songs mixed in. The playlist is publicly available on Spotify. When this story was first published on the morning of Game 6 in the NLCS, it had been followed by 30,090 people and counting.
Stubbs never intended for the playlist to be accessible by anyone outside the clubhouse. He wasn’t hiding anything, he says, he just didn’t think people would be interested. He only made it public so it would be easier for teammates to play it whenever they wanted, wherever they went.
As its creator, Stubbs is in charge of the playlist, but he’s not dictatorial about it. He welcomes recommendations from teammates and usually accepts them, though on a few occasions he has had to exercise veto power. Stubbs won’t disclose which of his teammates suggested songs that didn’t make the cut, but he says players won’t pitch songs on a whim.
The most pressure that outfielder Brandon Marsh feels this October has to do with the playlist. He keeps wrestling with the idea of suggesting “Go Away,” by Woop, which was his high school team’s go-to song. He doesn’t know if it would be approved, and he worries about disrupting the locker room’s energy, so he’ll wait until next year to pitch it.
To make it into the Phils Win playlist, songs must meet the following criteria: Do the players want to sing along to it? And, as Stubbs puts it, “Is everyone gonna pop bottles to this song?”
When the Phillies close out a series, Stubbs waits until after manager Rob Thomson toasts the team and the first bottles are popped before putting on the music. Everyone participates in the revelry, shouting, dancing and spraying beer and champagne everywhere. With this group’s unbuttoned Himbo culture, shirts are always optional.
“Everything that we do in here after a win is supposed to be fun,” Schwarber says. “It's supposed to be all of us together. It's a sing-along and dance-along.”
Schwarber is the only other person who has administrative privileges to make changes to the playlist, though he has done so only once, when he added four songs on April 27.
How did Schwarber earn collaborator status?
“Look at the guy. He's a f------ animal,” Stubbs says. “He is one of the biggest personalities in this locker room and one of our leaders. We're lucky to have multiple leaders in this locker room. He's just an animal. I freaking love partying with that guy.”
Schwarber, who joined the Phillies last season, was responsible for adding “Dancing on My Own” into the mix. He brought Scott’s remixed rendition with him from the 2021 Boston Red Sox, the first team to rally behind it during an unlikely playoff run. It became the Phillies’ anthem last year as they marched to their first postseason berth since 2011 and their first World Series appearance since 2009.
Before this season began, the Phillies decided to move on from “Dancing on My Own” because they wanted to start fresh in what they hoped would be a more successful season.
But after a loss on June 2, they were tied for the second-worst record in the NL. Desperate, they tried to rekindle the magic of last season. The next day in the batting cage they put “Dancing on My Own” on repeat and cranked up the speakers.
“Each guy came down, one by one, just so fired up that it was on,” Bryce Harper told MLB.com’s Todd Zolecki. After that day’s game, which the Phillies won, 4-2, hitting coach Kevin Long shouted, “Just play the f------ song!” (The playlist came back with the “f------ song,” and it has helped push Scott’s version past 1 billion streams on Spotify; the artist recently thanked the Phillies on social media and said in an interview with NBC Philadelphia that he would perform the song in Philly if the Phillies win the World Series.)
Understandably, the Phillies have never listened to the playlist in its entirety. They don’t shuffle through the playlist, so many of the songs are hardly ever played. But if they can win the World Series this year — you know, put a ring on it like Beyoncé and Nick Castellanos both implore — then revelers in the streets of Philadelphia will hear the entire list.
“We plan to listen to every single song on Broad Street for six and a half hours,” Stubbs says. “I feel like that's probably what a parade would be — six and a half hours of mayhem. We can run through all of them then.”