CLEARWATER, Fla. -- The hulking stranger poked his head through the clubhouse door of the no-longer-moribund Philadelphia Phillies early one spring-training morning. The hulking stranger looked suspiciously like Jim Thome.

"Hey," a voice said from across the room, "who's that guy?"

Mike Lieberthal looked up from untangling the straps on his new shin guards.

	Jim Thome brings a big bat and an even bigger presence to the Phillies' lineup.

"I don't know," Lieberthal said. "But I heard he's got power."

Good scouting report. He knows -- we all know -- this man, James Howard Thome, has a little power. We know he mashed 52 home runs last year. We know he's thumped 101 homers over the last two seasons. We know that in the history of baseball, only Mark McGwire, Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds have better at-bat-to-home-run ratios.

All of which are picturesque numbers for the back of his baseball card. But this will be the year we find out exactly how much power Jim Thome really has.

Because the kind of power the Phillies were looking for when they laid that six-year, $85-million offer in Thome's lap last Thanksgiving was something broader, something deeper, something more urgent than that.

This wasn't about home-run trots and OPS. For the Phillies, this was about survival.

The power they needed was the power to fill all those empty blue seats in the doomed Veterans Stadium -- and seats that haven't even been installed yet in the real ballpark now rising out of the Vet's parking lot.

The power they needed was the power to convince a jaded community that football season doesn't have to last 12 months a year.

And more than any of the above, the power they needed was the power to communicate to the men around Thome that winning didn't just have to be something the Yankees and Braves did.

That's what Jim Thome is doing in Clearwater this spring. That's what David Bell is doing in Clearwater. That's why the Phillies traded for Kevin Millwood and will pay him $9.9 million this year.

"The guys we brought in here weren't just good players," said Phillies bench coach Gary Varsho. "They were winning people. ...

"What we've got to do here," Varsho said, "is learn how to win. I know these guys want to win. But wanting to win and knowing how to win are two different things."

What it takes to win
There's no book on the New York Times best-seller list entitled, "Read This and Win -- or Your Money Back." There's no how-to-win video you can rent down at your friendly neighborhood Blockbuster.

Sorry. The art of Learning How to Win is one of those subtle mysteries with no scientific explanation, kind of like Pee Wee Herman.

The many needs

Five things that have to go right for the Phillies: 1. The bullpen: Jose Mesa led the league in blown saves and there are questions about almost every member of the set-up crew. 2. The leadoff man: Jimmy Rollins has to do better than a .309 on-base percentage for this offense to click. 3. The center fielder: Marlon Byrd is regarded as a big-time prospect, but hit only .229 in a September call-up. 4. The rotation: Are Randy Wolf and Vicente Padilla as good as they looked at times last year? Was Brandon Duckworth's 5.41 ERA an aberration? And is Brett Myers really going to mature into a young Curt Schilling? The Phillies need a "yes" to all of those questions. 5. The manager: The players are his kind of players. The bar is set high. So it's vital that this be a team that brings out the fiery genius in Larry Bowa, not the Mt. St. Helens in him. Jayson Stark

"I would say that guys learn how to win more from each other," said Phillies third-base coach John Vukovich, "than anything else."

Nobody taught the 2002 Angels. The 2000-2002 A's never took that course in high school. It just happens. Ask those teams. Or ask this Phillies coaching staff.

As a player, Vukovich was around both the Big Red Machine and the Phillies teams of the '70s that matured into the only World Series champ in the history of the franchise (1980). Varsho played for the great Pirates teams of the early '90s.

The manager, Larry Bowa, reached the big leagues in 1970, with a sorry Phillies team that was in the midst of a run of seven straight losing seasons -- and then, starting in 1975, either contended or made the playoffs for eight of the next nine years.

"We were different from this team," Bowa said. "With us, it was a matter of just growing together as a team. We had a bunch of guys (Bowa, Mike Schmidt, Greg Luzinski, Bob Boone, etc.) who came up through the minor leagues together, who grew up together in the big leagues. We knew we'd be good some day. But we knew it would take some time.

"With our group, we didn't get a lot of help from (the front office) early on. We just grew up. But with these guys here -- this core group -- they're getting that help."

Uh, there's a good reason for that.

This club that Thome, Bell and Millwood are joining has experienced one winning season since Joe Carter's homer finished another Phillies team's World Series dreams 10 long years ago. Only the Tigers, Pirates, Royals and Brewers have lost more games since then than the Phillies.

The core players on this Phillies team have spent their whole careers hearing how talented they are, how bright the future is. But except for the unsuccessful run they took at the Braves in an 86-win season in 2001, all that talent and promise has translated into nothing but frustration.

Lieberthal, a two-time All-Star catcher, has been a Phillie for seven full seasons. His teams have finished a combined 103 games under .500.

Right fielder Bobby Abreu -- a man with a 30-30 season, a 50-double season and a .409 career on-base percentage -- has been a Phillie for five seasons. His teams have finished a combined 69 games under .500.

Pitcher Randy Wolf -- whose 2.10 second-half ERA last year was second only to Barry Zito among all left-handed starters in the big leagues -- has been a Phillie since 1999. His teams are 31 games under .500.

Now, for the first time in all of their careers, they are pivotal players on a team that is expected to contend. So the biggest question about the 2003 Phillies won't be how many home runs Thome will hit, or how many games Millwood will win, or how much farther Pat Burrell will travel down his own private expressway toward stardom.

It's how this group of players, who have never won, handle the burden of the expectations suddenly being heaped upon them.

"There is a mental part of it," Bowa said. "But if you surround yourself with people who have won, it's a little easier. ... There's a confidence you get when you take a look around you at certain players who you know are winners."

Phillies following in Indians' path
It's not too hard to figure out what attracted Jim Thome to the Phillies. Ehhhh, it's not like there were a lot of other guys riding around on the Broad Street Subway who were 52-homer men and had won just about every year of their careers.

But believe it or not, there was something that attracted Thome to this team beside those 85 million negotiable American dollars.

Once upon a time, at a different stage of his career, he was a member of another team haunted by an endless succession of seasons with unhappy endings. Then, in Cleveland, they opened the doors to a dazzling new ballpark -- and everything changed.

	"	This reminds me of when we started winning in Cleveland and, as a young player, I had the opportunity to watch the Dave Winfields and the Orel Hershisers go about their business. There was a sense of everything coming together and everybody wanting to win. That's the feeling I get around here. "
		— Jim Thome, on being with the Phillies

Now, as the Indians veer in a different direction, Thome sees a chance to relive the best part of his career.

"This reminds me," he said, "of when we started winning in Cleveland and, as a young player, I had the opportunity to watch the Dave Winfields and the Orel Hershisers go about their business. There was a sense of everything coming together and everybody wanting to win. That's the feeling I get around here."

Even Indians GM Mark Shapiro says that, of all the clubs that have opened ballparks since the arrival of Jacobs Field coincided with the arrival of the Indians' best seven-year run in half a century, "no team has done a better job of emulating that formula than the Phillies."

And Charlie Manuel -- a coach and manager for those Indians teams, and now a special assistant to Phillies GM Ed Wade -- says there isn't a day that goes by this spring when this team doesn't evoke memories of 1995 in Cleveland.

"This team adding Jimmy and David Bell and Millwood is a lot like when our team (in Cleveland) added Eddie Murray and Dennis Martinez and Hershiser," Manuel said. "We were already coming on by then. Right before the strike in '94, we were really hot. All our young hitters -- Thome and Manny (Ramirez) and Sandy Alomar and (Paul) Sorrento -- were really starting to come on.

"That run in '94 and the first part of '95 showed our young players how good they could be and that they had a real chance to win. I see the same thing happening here."

Nobody expects Thome to stand up one morning and lecture for 20 minutes on the art of winning. But Bowa says he does expect Thome's new teammates to look at him walking around in that red cap and understand why he's wearing it.

"He very easily could have stayed in Cleveland and rode into the sunset as a hero," Bowa said. "But he wants to win. That's why he's here. I think just him being himself will affect a ton of people. He's very down to earth. He's a baseball player. He talks baseball, eats baseball and sleeps baseball. And that attitude is very infectious."

"I'm here," said 41-year-old reliever Dan Plesac, "because he's here. Up to about the first week of December, I was still set on retiring. But for me, Bell and Thome changed the whole complexion of this team.

"To me, to play just to play didn't excite me enough to want to come back. But to play on a team that has a legitimate chance to do something was a different matter. That played a big part in changing my mind. This is about as upbeat a situation as I've been in for a long time. This has a chance to be a very special team."

Not coincidentally, it's a team that is constructed, at least in part, in its manager's fire-breathing image. Which would be a slight departure from last spring -- when Scott Rolen and Bowa weren't even talking, and a sizeable chunk of the clubhouse was questioning the manager's sanity.

"There's definitely not as much negativity -- no guys talking smack about whatever," Lieberthal said. "Last year, with the Rolen situation, it was crazy. This year, you can see how excited everybody is. New teammates. A chance to win. The personality of this team is much different."

And that's no accident, either. But it was more than a simple case of management expunging all the malcontents. It was also a case of finding players who didn't think playing in Philadelphia, for this manager, was a worse job than handing out American flags in Baghdad.

	"	He very easily could have stayed in Cleveland and rode into the sunset as a hero. But he wants to win. That's why he's here. I think just him being himself will affect a ton of people. He's very down to earth. He's a baseball player. He talks baseball, eats baseball and sleeps baseball. And that attitude is very infectious. "
		— Larry Bowa, Phillies manager, on Thome

"One thing that's taken place in the last year," said Vukovich, "is that many of our core players here had some choices -- and they wanted to play in Philadelphia. And those of us who have been in that town for a long time know how important that is. We've got about a dozen core players who decided this was where they want to play. So they know they're going to be here for the next four to six years. And they know they're going to be with each other."

Just to pay those men, the Phillies have committed close to $280 million in the last 12 months to their core players. But the result is that just among their starting position players and starting pitchers, they have 11 players who can't become free agents before at least 2006.

There is a danger in all those commitments, though: Now they almost have to win with this group -- because, in the next few years, they'll have three players making at least $14 million a year (Thome, Burrell and Abreu). So there won't be much financial flexibility if they find they've sealed their fate with the wrong guys.

But that's not a problem to be dealt with in February, 2003. Right now, they look around and see a team with no outs in the lineup. They see a better defense than the Braves or Mets. They see a potentially dominating rotation -- fronted by Millwood, Wolf and an All-Star starter (Vicente Padilla) who new pitching coach Joe Kerrigan has already compared with a young Pedro Martinez.

So it's been a long time since there has been a spring training like this for those once-downtrodden Phillies. Except now comes the hard part -- connecting the dots and actually winning.

"Yeah, we're great on paper," said pitcher Brandon Duckworth. "Now all we have to do is do it out on the field."

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com.