Winning streak not a cure to .500 team’s problems
PHILADELPHIA » Joe Girardi had been around baseball long enough to be comfortable in an early-season prediction, no matter how unlikely, no matter how unpopular, no matter how convenient to his status as the Phillies’ manager.
“It will get better,” he said. “I know it will get better.”
There were varying versions of the chant, including, “it has to get better,” but they all made some baseball sense. The Phillies were not going to spend the rest of the summer making seven-run leads melt, being swept by good teams and bad, or chasing fans away from the ballpark with their casual attention to execution. Baseball — the monster that it is — would not have it that way. No, the Phillies were better than a team that was eight games below .500, and so the bounces would begin to hop their way no matter who was managing.
So, it began, the Great Correction, a nine-game winning streak that was as fascinating as it was overdue. That it coincided with the change in managers from Girardi to the guy who’d just spent the better part of the last three seasons two inches to his right in the dugout was but a sneaky baseball trick. One way or another, with one manager or another, the Phillies were destined to become closer to the team they should be, not the one that Girardi helped allow to turn inept.
One way or another, they were going to play .500 baseball, maybe a little better, maybe a little worse, depending on their health.
One way or another, their hitting would delight and their fielding would frighten, their starting pitchers would perform responsibly and their bullpen would rot, their luck would be there one day and the next day would be like Sunday, when nothing seemed to break their way in a 13-1 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks.
It’s how .500 teams happen.
It’s why the Phillies are 30-30, not good, not bad, just OK.
“It’s tough,” Rob Thomson said. “When you have 11 walks and a hit batsman, it’s not the recipe for success, that’s for sure. So we have to do better there. But at the end of the day, we won the series. And the message to the guys is, ‘Move forward, we have another series coming.’”
It was a classic example of selective data collection, the manager concluding that winning two of three home games from an opponent four games below .500 is an appropriate way to measure a team that has underachieved. A more accurate description was that at the end of the day, the Phillies had shown that their bullpen is useless, their defense is suspect and that interesting winning streak was a temporary momentum sway.
By Sunday morning, there was Thomson confronted with the news that stiff-shouldered Corey Knebel would be out of action for a while. At that point, he had two choices: Plan a celebration party or insult the knowledge of baseball fans. He would skip the to-do and declare that he had oh-somany grand bullpen performers that finding a replacement closer would little more than a paperwork challenge.
“It really could be anybody, to tell you you the truth,” Thomson said before the game. “For me, we’ve got a lot of weapons down in that bullpen.”
Any bullpen that has Andrew Bellatti, James Norwood and Jose Alvarado is of less than high baseball quality, but when a team is on a nine-game winning streak, the manager could spray out any propaganda and expect it to be accepted by the mesmerized masses. Eventually, though, there will be a snap back to reality. That, the Phillies did early and late Sunday.
The first inning alone was a perfect reflection of their season, beginning with Ranger Suarez walking the leadoff hitter, including Alec Bohm choosing not to tag a runner a half-a-foot away and featuring J.T. Realmuto failing to catch a 50-foot toss from Suarez as two runs scored.
By the fifth inning, a nice crowd of 41,218 that had been conned into believing that the worst was forever behind because Thomson had every answer, was open to booing every misplay or strikeout. By the eighth, Realmuto was being thrown out at third, down 11 runs. By the ninth, Garrett Stubbs was pitching, the joint was 75 percent empty and the Phillies would have been mangled in an Arizona bullpen game.
Yet there was Thomson, looking back on the winning streak with pride.
“We’ve always kind of thought this is the club that we are coming out of spring training,” Thomson said. “We have to dust ourselves off and go get them tomorrow.”
They are an OK team with unsightly flaws and will struggle as often as not. It’s how baseball works: Eventually, the true value of a team will be revealed. The last Phillies manager had that straight all along.