Girardi hopeful Hoskins will turn around slow start

PHILADELPHIA Any baseball season all of 11 games old shouldn’t present any pivotal moments. But this is the shortest of major league baseball seasons, so everything is played under an extra layer of urgency.

Thus Rhys Hoskins’ awful start was probably a lot tougher to take than even his super-sized slump of late last year, and any other skid that came before.

Hoskins was struggling along with a .111 batting average, no home runs and one RBI entering what would be a lost doubleheader Sunday, but at least he managed two hits to boost his average 61 points on the day.

That might not have inspired a return to the kind of player Hoskins was before seemingly hitting a career wall shortly before the 2019 All-Star break. But it did give positive-vibe Phils manager Joe Girardi something

to build a hopeful case around Monday afternoon.

“He gets a couple of hits yesterday, maybe that’s what’s needed to happen for him to take off,” Girardi said on a pre-game Phillies chat with no apparent crossing of fingers.

And if that wasn’t optimistic enough, Girardi was prepared for a litany of other hopeful Hoskins theories.

“Through Rhys’ struggles, he’s found a way to be on base a lot,” Girardi said. “It’s given us opportunities to score runs. When I think of a batting order, you think about, ‘keep the line moving.’ No one needs to be a hero, just keep the line moving. That’s what Rhys has done.”

The notion here was that despite the sharp downward offensive turn Hoskins took after last June, through the first one-sixth of this socalled season, Hoskins at least hadn’t lost his eagle-ish batting eye. Along with his .172 batting average entering a seriesclosing game with the Braves Monday evening, Hoskins had walked 12 times in 10 games, and thus sported a .429 onbase percentage.

That’s one reason Hoskins was back in the second spot in the order for Monday night’s finisher against the Braves.

“You want people to get on base in front of Bryce (Harper), J.T. (Realmuto) and some other guys, and that’s the one thing Rhys has continued to do,” Girardi said. “He’s still gotten on base. Even though his average is low, there’s a ton of walks in there.

“Obviously we want him to be more productive with his average and hitting the ball out of the ballpark, but he is still getting on base. And in how many games, 10? That’s really not that many. It seems like a lot because we only have 60 games, but it’s really not that many.”

As if to make good on his manager’s faith in him, Hoskins singled in the first inning Monday off starting Braves lefty Sean Newcomb, then walked in his next at-bat in what quickly grew to be a Phillies rout.

But it was Hoskins’ fourth at-bat that some not-so-positive people might focus on, as he came to the plate after red-hot Phil Gosselin walked (or was walked?) to load the bases with no outs in the fifth. But Hoskins eagerly swung at a pitch early in the count and popped out to first.

With the Phillies up by a dozen runs, that wouldn’t exactly go down as a pivotal moment. But it wasn’t encouraging, either.

Little matter to Girardi, though.

“I think he’s run into some hard luck at times,” the manager said. “He’s squared some balls up that he hasn’t gotten hits (on). He got two hits (Sunday), maybe that’s the thing that really gets him going.

“We know he has the ability to hit the ball out of the ballpark and I don’t think that’s far away from happening.”

Maybe next time, then?

“You can pull a plug too quick on someone and you may miss out on what they’ve done in the past, and some big numbers,” Girardi said. “That’s what I’m not going to do.”