Second-half turnaround hopes begin with Franco, Herrera
It was 6:45 on a Sunday and Cameron Rupp was hurrying to catch the 8:15 to wherever he was spending the AllStar break. Rupp may have wanted to spend more time savoring the rare Phillies victory — do something once every three games and ‘rare’ could qualify as a modifier — but he really was in a rush.
Then again, it doesn’t take long to answer a question about the Phillies and offensive show and tell.
“Hitting’s contagious, it really is,” Rupp said after the 7-1 (even rarer) blowout victory over San Diego in the Phillies’ last exhibition of all-around competent baseball before the four-day break, the first game that featured six Philadelphia home runs since 2004.
“It was fun,” Rupp said of the barrage. “Nicky (Williams) got us started and I hit one, Freddy (Galvis) hit one, Odubel (Herrera) hit one, Freddy hit another one; it was awesome.”
If hitting is contagious, winning should be, too. Except when losing is a lot more contagious due to other environmental factors, such as lack of talent and cohesion and chronic mistake-making.
The only remedy to such baseball maladies are adhesion to a disciplined approach to the game, determined coaching and leadership in the locker room, and you wonder if the Phillies this season are getting even two out of three in that equation.
Rupp would make the case that you can’t judge his manager, coaches and teammates by the ugly cover of their winloss record.
He sees a team that in the pre-break days of 2017 lost 23 games by one run, which means that with a homer here, an extra hit or three there, and a dozen or more of those kinds of losses could be victories in the near-half of the season still to come.
Just the law of averages would indicate that.
Of course, you don’t have to be an old stick in the mud to suggest that the thin Phillies talent base, poisoned by repeated mistakes in the batter’s box and on the basepaths, offsets any positive-leaning odds. But Rupp thinks there is a natural correction coming.
Not sure if he had his fingers crossed or not.
“I think some of us get away from our approach,” Rupp said. “We try to do too much. We’ve had a lot of situations where we haven’t been successful moving runners, getting guys in from third base with less than two outs, situational hitting . ...
“I think we put a little too much pressure on ourselves. When you put pressure on yourself you’re swinging harder, you’re swinging at bad pitches; you’re not ready to hit. When you do that you’re going to get the results that we’re getting. So we just have to do a better job of sticking to our approach, make adjustments before the pitcher makes adjustments.”
Most of the heralded prospects are still slugging it out for the Triple-A Lehigh Valley IronPigs, but the Phillies as currently constituted are still a young team. One that could use all the onfield ledership it can get.
To that end, Herrera and Maikel Franco, respectively 25 and 24 years of age, are pegged by management as nextgen club leaders. What they’ve largely been in the first half are contributors to the Pete Mackanin hair color challenge,
These two expected to take charge of the rebuild are only leaders in the clubhouse when it comes to mistakes. That hardly means either one of them should be given up on, though Franco could use an offseason of swing retooling and Herrera ... well, there are so many things Herrera could change.
Franco might be too established a player to ponder playing winter ball again, but then again he’s been there the past two winters ... and every added voice of advice can’t hurt in the ongoing effort to get him to cut down on his swing and improve his selection.
It also wouldn’t hurt if he met regularly with a personal trainer and came into spring training next spring a bit lighter and tighter.
“I know I’m too much up and down,” Franco said over the weekend. “A couple of days good and a couple of days bad, but you have to stay positive. The second half is almost (here), so you have to get 100 percent ready and try to do everything you can do.”
Ditto Herrera, who as a player that signed a six-year, $30.5 million contract extension last offseason, certainly isn’t about to spend this one back in Venezuela playing baseball in December. Considering how inconsistent he’s been, though, it’s unpredictable whether or not anything Herrera does in the offseason would hurt or help his game in any way.
Neither one of them are lacking in effort to improve, especially Franco. But change this year for him has been slow to come.
Of course, both Franco and Herrera could instead answer the Rupp Challenge and start playing more like the players management swears they are more consistently in the second half. If they take that lead, the rest of the team should follow. If not... More of
“This game, it’ll crush you like that,” Rupp said with a snap of the fingers. “It snowballs and it continues and continues. Then you’re in trouble. The only people that can help you get out of the mess that you get yourself in, is yourself. No one is going to feel sorry for you, nobody’s going to pat you on the back and say, ‘Hey, it’s OK.’
“No, you’ve got to tough it out. You’ve got to battle to get out of it. That’s how you win.” the same, anyone?