Firing Girardi will not help Phillies

There isn’t much he can do with his bullpen other than cross his fingers and hope

Every columnist has a little grab bag of gimmicks that he or she can pencil in depending on the time of year. Some use Thanksgiving as an opportunity to write about things to be thankful for. Others mark New Year’s Day with a column about resolutions. Me? I wait for Memorial Day, when everybody wants to fire the Phillies manager, and I write that they shouldn’t.

Truth be told, I feel a little guilty dipping my bucket in this well as often as I do. But I also think that there is some value in periodically reminding ourselves that Joe Girardi bears as much blame for the Phillies’ current level of mediocrity as Gabe Kapler and Pete Mackanin and Ryne Sandberg and Charlie Manuel did. The Phillies are a mediocre team because they have a mediocre roster, and they have a mediocre roster because that’s the best roster a team can assemble when it goes a decadeand-a-half without drafting and developing talent at a functional level.

Girardi? He’s irrelevant, just like every competent manager. The incompetent ones are bad, sure. The great ones might win you a playoff series the way Bruce Bochy did for the Giants back in 2010. But Bochy himself was 62 games under .500 in his first 14 seasons on the bench. And he was 58 games under .500 in his last three seasons. The guy was a manager for 25 seasons. You do the math.

Nine times out of 10, firing the manager is nothing more than a coping mechanism. It’s a way to fool yourself into thinking that the immovable object might yet budge. In the Phillies’ case, the object in question is a roster with the same exact holes as the ones that plagued the previous manager. More on that guy later.

First, though, it’s important to

Castellanos, but that was the extent of the Phillies’ damage that inning, and for the game for that matter. Herrera popped up on a 2-0 count, Johan Camargo walked to load the bases again, and Schwarber flied out.

Including Saturday night’s game, the Phillies have faced Mets starter Taijuan Walker four times already this season. Walker increased his splitter usage over those four outings, but wasn’t giving the Phillies a drastically different look. Nevertheless, the Phillies’ offense failed to show up in the way Eflin needed it to, tallying only the two runs, six hits, and three walks against the Mets’ starter in his five innings.

The Mets, on the other hand, teed off on the Phillies’ staff, recording 10 hits, eight runs, and four walks.

A rough night for Eflin

This was easily Eflin’s worst start of the season. He allowed seven earned runs through six innings (although one of those runs could have been saved by Herrera or Schwarber). Even still, Eflin struggled, allowing eight hits, two walks, and a three-run homer to Jeff McNeil , with four strikeouts.

Eflin struggled in his previous outing against the Mets, too — allowing five earned runs through 4

innings on May 1 — but had pitched well over his last two outings. On May 22 against the Dodgers, he struck out a career-high 12, allowing only two earned runs through seven innings of work. That start felt like a distant memory on Saturday.