LOOKNG TO GET THEIR PHIL
Big spending and playoff drought add extra pressure in 2021
The Philadelphia Phillies hold a dubious honor entering the 2021 season.
They own the longest playoff drought by a National League team and the second-longest in baseball, having not appeared in the postseason since 2011. Only the Seattle Mariners (19 years) have been waiting longer to get back to the playoffs. No other team’s postseason-less streak is longer than six years (Detroit Tigers and Los Angeles Angels).
The Phillies didn’t go all-in the previous two years in acquiring top talent in Bryce Harper, J.T. Realmuto and Zack Wheeler and spending $563 million on those three players in the process not to be a playoff team.
With the Phillies in their window of opportunity with their core group, which includes Aaron Nola, Alec Bohm and Rhys Hoskins, there should be a sense of urgency under manager Joe Girardi.
Bringing in Dave Dombrowski to be the president of baseball operations in the offseason was a game changer. A team that wasn’t expected to spend much on payroll recalibrated with Dombrowski at the helm.
They ponied up to lock in Realmuto and addressed the shortstop position by also bringing back Didi Gregorius.
The Phillies spent $152.5 million this offseason on four key players: Realmuto, Gregorius, right-hander Archie Bradley and left-hander Matt Moore. The Phillies upgraded their depth, too, bringing in Brad Miller, who gives them a lefty bat off the bench, and right-hander Chase Anderson.
“I love that we were able to bring in some veteran players and mix it with some young guys,” Harper told reporters this spring. “Because I feel like the Phillies, the last couple of years, just haven’t been able to do that. We haven’t been able to have that, I don’t believe. So if you look at all the really good teams in the league in the past, yes, they’re super young, but they always have a mix of three or four veteran guys. I’m super excited to be able to get going and figure out what our identity is and how we want to go about it.
“We needed to be able to spend money because we don’t have the prospects to actually trade and do that. So we were kind of in a predicament of: What can we do right now, but how can we prolong this for the next four or five years and not just one year?”
The Phillies likely would have made the playoffs last season if their bullpen had been even marginally better than their collective 7.11 ERA. They finished with the second-worst bullpen ERA in MLB history, trailing only the 1930 Phillies (8.01). It will be hard for the bullpen to be worse, so that alone should boost the Phillies. The additions of Bradley, Jose Alvarado and Sam Coonrod, the latter two via trades, make the bullpen deeper and complement right-hander Hector
Neris, who has been one of the better relievers in the league over the last five years.
The Phillies hired Girardi before last season because they valued his experience and expected him to get them over the top.
More pressure falls on Girardi in 2021 to get the most out of the team.
The organization didn’t endure a painful rebuild and years of middling teams to fall short now that ownership has paid for the type of talent that wins titles.