Philly’s 2022 surprises: Phillies and Rob Thomson, Jalen Hurts and Nick Sirianni, and much more

The past year didn’t produce the best stories in Philadelphia sports history, but it certainly produced the most unexpected successes.

No Philly team, college or pro, won a title, and that included Villanova’s basketball team — a team that doesn’t qualify for this list, since it entered the season ranked No. 4 and reached the Final Four. No Philly player, paid or amateur, was deemed most valuable.

But the number of astonishing outcomes made 2022 a year to remember. Here are the most remarkable.

Nobody knew much about “Topper,” a baseball lifer who’d never managed so much as a Quickie Mart and entered 2022 as a bench coach bent on retirement back in Canada. He exited 2022 in fifth place in the National League manager of the year race. Promoted to replace Joe Girardi as interim manager on June 3, Thomson immediately rearranged and changed philosophies with the bullpen, set the lineup and left it alone, and decompressed a clubhouse wound tighter than Girardi’s gluteus maximus.

Honest, secure, and smart, Thomson had the “interim” tag removed Oct. 10. By November, he had everybody in the city Dancing on Their Own.

Free agent Kyle Schwarber arrived and imbued the club with his essence. Also, he hit 46 home runs, eight more (or, 22% more) than his previous career high.

The Phils rode Aaron Nola, who generally stinks in September, all the way through September.

José “Wild Thing” Alvarado, a 100-mph time bomb, got sent to triple A ... and returned as one of the best left-handed relievers in the game.

Bryce Harper, who hit .211 in his 19 playoff games before 2022, tore through the playoffs with a torn ligament in his right elbow. His .349 average, 1.160 OPS, and six home runs — one of which captured the pennant — is one of the best postseason performances on record.

The injured elbow forced Harper to be used exclusively as the designated hitter, which put butcher Nick Castellanos in right field full-time ... where he made the best four plays of his 30 years of existence.

Rhys Hoskins, around whom the lineup was built, beginning with Harper, hit six homers in his first 14 postseason games.

The Phillies lost to the Astros, the best team in baseball, and there is no shame in that.

Perhaps most incredibly, none of it would have happened if Major League Baseball hadn’t expanded the playoffs to include a seventh team in each league.

In August of 2021, Hurts was a second-round, second-year, gadget-play quarterback locked in a battle with spent veteran Joe Flacco for the starting spot vacated by Eagles traitor Carson Wentz.

By January of 2022, Hurts was the starting quarterback for an Eagles team coached by a rookie nobody named Nick Sirianni that somehow sneaked into the playoffs.

Hurts played poorly in the postseason, so the Eagles spent much of their time in the winter and spring dickering for a big-name replacement — time wasted, as it turned out. By Game 14 of 2022, Hurts was the odds-on favorite to win the MVP award, having led the Eagles to a 13-1 record with the best passer rating in the NFL and a chance to break the team record for quarterback rushing yards in a season.

Hurts has missed the last two games with a shoulder injury, but the kid who was hoping to keep his job last January now is looking at a $250 million contract extension.

If the Eagles clinch the No. 1 seed in the NFC on Sunday, it would be hard to deny Nick the Quick the honor. Brian Daboll did a fine job with the Giants, Kyle Shanahan resurrected the 49ers, and Doug Pederson, my personal favorite, rescued the Jaguars from the NFL’s toilet.

Whether Sirianni wins or not matters less than his position as a contender, if not the favorite. Yes, he took the Eagles to the playoffs in 2021, but that reflected more on the team’s strong roster, led by a magnificent offensive line, as well as the abysmal state of the NFC — the NFC East, in particular — than any magic he performed.

He made bigger headlines with his Flower Power motivational speech and his strange method of analyzing draft prospects by playing rock-paper-scissors and H-O-R-S-E.

In 2022, the East and the conference are both much improved. So was Sirianni, who, after he abdicated play-calling in deference to offensive coordinator Shane Steichen, has become a masterful administrator and a much more focused leader.

Ernst Tanner needed four years as sporting director to give Jim Curtin the type of team that could win a title. In his eighth season as coach, Curtin nearly did it.

Gareth Bale, a Welshman who once was the world’s most expensive player, potted a header in the final 120 seconds of overtime to force a forgettable shootout that gave LAFC the crown instead.

Still, picked by most to finish second in the Eastern Conference, the Union finished first, and their 67 points tied LAFC in the West. Their run to the final wasn’t quite as astonishing as the Phillies’ run to the Series — the Phils finished third in the NL East — but the Union braved uncharted waters and thrived.

It’s tough to accurately remember the bizarre state the Sixers found themselves late last winter when All Star point guard Ben Simmons was holding out, citing mental health issues, as general manager Daryl Morey refused to pay him and refused to trade him for anything but a hefty return. There was no odder situation in the history of Philly sports, and maybe in the history of sports, period. That includes Carson Wentz’s outrageous trade demand of 2021.

Then, on Feb. 10, less than two hours before the 3 p.m. trade deadline, Morey sent Simmons in a package to Brooklyn that reunited Morey with James Harden, his favorite player ever. They never won anything in Houston, but Harden never had a teammate quite like Joel Embiid. Besides, the Sixers haven’t won anything lately, either, and they certainly weren’t going to win anything with Simmons, who is afraid to shoot.

With Harden, they might have the opposite problem — Harden led the NBA in field goal attempts three times, and Embiid has averaged 18.1 since his second NBA season — but the marriage has shown promise. The Sixers won 12 of 16 after the Harden trade and took a playoff series against Toronto, but Embiid got injured and they fell to the Heat in the second round.

Injuries derailed the start of this season, too, but when Embiid and Harden got back together, the team won nine of 11 games to finish the 2022 calendar year.