Williams has recovered from season like this before
PHILADELPHIA >> Nick Williams knows he’s a better player than his season statistics would indicate. But he found himself slumping at the dawn of September and unable to find a way to improve.
Williams could relate then to the struggles around him, essentially a clubhouse-wide flood of bad baseball that quickly washed away any and all Phillies playoff hopes and is still hitting historically and hysterically bad levels.
Team Implosion was literally packing its things in the clubhouse Saturday afternoon, red-faced over a 78-82 record that felt much worse. They would be trying to avoid what could be a 10th consecutive loss that night, playing the Atlanta Braves in the next-tolast game of their (and not Atlanta’s) season, the middle game of a season-closing series that only several weeks before was being hyped as a possible division championship showdown series.
The Citizens Bank Park crowd wouldn’t be bad, though you wonder how many of those empty blue seats Saturday night had been sold before the humidity of August had evaporated them so dramatically. From 15 games above .500 on Aug. 7 (64-49) ... to this?
What a long, strange tumble it’s been.
“You know, it hurts for me,” Williams said. “I tried to grind through it, some injuries, and I just reached a point where I couldn’t anymore and I just had to speak up about it. It always sucks for me, not to be able to go to war with the team and watching it struggle out there. Just sit and watch and not be able to assist, you know? Not going down and battling with them. For me that’s the most hurtful thing.”
For Williams, it was a one-two punch of shoulder and hand injuries which worked to undercut his numbers in late August and early September before finally sidelining him for a couple of weeks. He had struggled early this season at the plate, hitting just .190 as late as May 5. But then came a summer of steady improvement which even recently had manager Gabe Kapler talking about Williams’ development as one of the season’s most positive points.
By Aug. 22, Williams hit season highs with a
.268 batting average and
.792 OPS. His progress had been steady, his starting status in right field assured. And then his season turned, going where some of his teammates had already fallen.
Williams has had no home runs and just one RBI since mid-August. Not that he hasn’t been there, finished like this before.
“It hurts the way this season ended,” Williams said. “Especially because I’ve been hurt the whole month of September . ... It’s a struggle I’ve actually been through, in (2016).”
Williams was in Triple-A then with a young and talented Lehigh Valley IronPigs team. He had spent much of the season continuing his Double-A success before ending the year in a slump. This for an team that had been 18 games under .500 the year before and went on to win a franchiserecord 85 games in 2016.
But the slumping power hitter and the rest of those upstart IronPigs slowed near the end and were promptly swept in the first round of the playoffs by Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. A fast and fatal finish that was wholly unexpected.
Those memories have come back to Williams during this oh-so painful month spent with several of his former minor league mates around him.
“Reliving it now with this team, it’s just something that you honestly just have to let go during the offseason and not hold onto,” Williams said. “It’s a young team. We have a lot of talent. I believe we’re going to be crazy good next year. I know we’re going to be good next year.
“So it’s just something where you have to breathe and just let go.”
That, Williams said, is the same conclusion he arrived at two years ago. He came to Clearwater for spring training in 2017, recaptured his form early in the season and soon was promoted to the Phillies, and has been here since. This season had been humming along so smoothly, with him winning the job in right field, steadily improving at the plate, producing runs, helping push the club to the top of the National League East for so many pleasant summer days ... what happened?
“I thought, honestly, people were getting tired,” Williams said. “I don’t know if it was mentally or just physically, everyone was drained or what. But as a team we’re just in one big slump. It’s something that started and just kind of snowballed. But it can be motivation.
“There are going to be people struggling at times. It’s not necessarily the next guy behind you that needs to do something right ... everybody should be themselves and just continue to grind through it. But it hasn’t been one, two or three (people), it’s been all of us all around struggling at the same time.”
That has made it difficult to take, for sure. For Williams, for his teammates, especially those who were teammates two years ago. Autumn has brought a cruel fall. But for Williams, there will always be the possibility of renewal ... just like the last time.
“In ‘16, I just knew I was in a tough situation. A hard bad place and it kept going,” he said. “I got to a place, kept trying to do something extra and it was just a snowball effect. But what I learned is that going into the offseason, I thought I was going to be affected a whole lot more, but instead I let it go, or I wasn’t going to have my peace. I wasn’t going to have my happiness.
“We’re young. We should be really good for a long time. We have a lot of athletes. Maybe this will make us crazy good for the next few years to come, because we know how it feels to lose; to get our butts kicked. That’s never a good feeling. But I think it’s going to make everybody humbled and make them that much hungrier here.”