Castellanos recharges before getting key pinch hit
PHILADELPHIA » One day after proclaiming that he hadn’t been at ease in the Phillies’ lineup all season long, pricey free agent outfielder Nick Castellanos was asked to take a comfortable seat on a dugout bench.
Not that the timing was coincidental or anything.
“Actually I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days now,” interim manager Rob Thomson said of starting Monday night’s series opener against Miami with both Castellanos and Alec Bohm on the bench. “Then I was asked about it last night (after Sunday’s game) and I hadn’t talked to Casty yet. So I went back to the clubhouse and that’s when I talked to him. We talked it through and he didn’t ask for a day, but I gave it to him.
“Same thing with Alec Bohm. He didn’t ask for a day. I just thought it was a good day to give those guys a little breather. We’ve got a long stretch here, we’ve got a doubleheader coming up in Washington (Friday), so I thought today was probably the best day.”
Another reason to not start the two right-handed hitters went unspoken: The Marlins were starting Sandy Alcantara, the righty carrying a 1.61 ERA into Monday’s game, and a guy called by Thomson “one of the better pitchers in baseball.”
But lately it’s seemed that any day would be a good off day for Castellanos, who has good numbers against Miami (career .352 average with three homers and 12 RBIs in 20 games), but has struggled lately, hitting .194 in June with his OPS dipping from .757 on May 30 to .715.
That moved Castellanos to surprise a few people after a 13-1 loss to Arizona Sunday, saying, “I haven’t been comfortable all year, you know?
“It’s just me, honestly, more than anything,” he added. “I just don’t feel comfortable.”
That said, Castellanos did predict he’d be back in the groove soon.
“Sometimes you go through phases where you don’t really have a good feeling at the plate, at least for me,” he said. “But I’m just one at-bat or honestly, sometimes all it takes is just one swing, man, and then it just clicks and starts rolling.”
If that sounds like a recitation from The Power of
Positive Thinking … well, hey, whatever works. Castellanos entered Monday night as a pinch-hitter and singled off lefty reliever Steven Okert.
“He hasn’t said that exactly to me but I can feel it, because he’s a really good hitter,” Thomson said of Castellanos. “Like I said last night … at the end of the year I would think the back of his baseball card is going to look like it has. It’s just that he’s going through a rough stretch right now and I have full confidence that between him and (hitting coaches) Kevin Long and (Jason Camilli), they’re going to work this thing out and he’s going to be the hitter that we signed.”