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PSC est. 2018
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Remember these April losses at the end of the season
The Phillies remain over .500, but recent stumblings are cause for concern and shouldn’t just be wav
Published April 22, 2025
It’s entirely likely that the Phillies’ supposed “star-studded” lineup will find more consistency in the weeks and months to come, eventually finishing near the top of the National League in most hitting categories. And the bullpen certainly can’t get much worse, so look for that to improve either based on positive regression of the current relievers or possibly a change to the mix out of the ‘pen. The short-term pain points will probably, hopefully work themselves out over the course of a long season.
But losses are losses in the regular season, whether they occur in April or July or September, and some of the L’s that the Phillies have already put up may very well bite them big time when the postseason arrives. Just look at the last two losses they’ve incurred.
They dropped an extra inning affair to the Marlins on Sunday, a game they had no business losing. But their bullpen failed them, and the bats did next to nothing after putting up three runs in the first inning. Frustrating. Then came Monday night, when the team failed to show up in their first meeting with the Mets since last year’s playoff embarrassment. The offense again slumbered for nearly the entire game, only arriving when it was too late to help out Aaron Nola in another forgettable start for the maligned hurler.
And just like that, the Phillies are three games back of the Mets for first in the NL East, with the rest of the division sitting 2.5-3.5 games behind them. The Marlins and Nationals can be largely discounted this year, and the Braves’ awful start and continued injuries have them facing an uphill climb once again. It could very well be a two-horse race in the East, and the Phillies are already losing it.
Yes, we have 85 percent of the season to go, but the club has been scuffling for two weeks, dropping themselves out of a playoff position for the moment. It’s not totally alarming since we haven’t even gotten through a month of the season yet, but the Phils will be hard-pressed to make up ground on New York if they fall 6,7,8 games back of them in short order. And they may have their hands full competing with NL West contenders as well, for the simple fact that it looks like that division has four very good clubs and one awful one that everyone else will take turns pummeling.
The Dodgers, Giants, Padres, and Diamondbacks all currently sit in playoff position, while the 4-17 Rockies…do not. And, when you factor in that the Phillies have already swept Colorado and only have a 4-game series in Denver next Month to look forward to, things are a little dicey. LA and San Diego have each swept Colorado so far, but San Fran and Arizona haven’t gotten any cracks at them yet. So we are talking about 12 opportunities that the Giants and D-Backs have against an inferior division foe, with the Dodgers and Padres having 9 such games left. Basically, that’s already a few more guaranteed wins that all of those teams are going to bank that the Phillies can’t count on.
The East, meanwhile, has the aforementioned Marlins and Nationals. And while neither is going to be a factor until next year at the earliest, they provide the rest of their division with much stiffer competition than what the Rockies are doing for their division. So, factor this in when you look at wild card races later in the season. It would be in the Phillies’ best interests, of course, to merely take care of business and contend for their division instead. But if they don’t, they’ll be in a dog fight for the last few playoff spots. Because it looks like at least two of the NL wild card clubs will come from the West.
The Central certainly looks like it’ll come down to Cubs and Brewers, with the winner likely being the division’s only playoff rep. And so it’s up to the Phillies to collect enough wins to get out ahead of the other contending clubs in the league. That means taking advantage of April games you should win/avoiding ‘no show’ nights.
The Phillies will get on a hot streak at some point, and hopefully they’ll pull out some unlikely wins to offset some of what’s happened already to their loss column. Because if disaster strikes and they miss the playoffs somehow, we’ll be able to trace it all the way back to April and the way that some subpar efforts cost them in the long run.
Kerkering looks the way that Phillies fans do when the bullpen gets mentioned. (Yong Kim/Inquirer)
I'm also at "Broad Street Buzz" and "That Ball's Outta Here"
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"Yeti" image copyright FanSided.com
The Phillies Just Don’t Feel Like a Great Team
The team is 8-4, which is cool and all, but there are numerous holes.
Published April 11, 2025
It’s not very novel or innovative of me to point out the obvious with the Phillies, but I’ll start off by doing some of it anyway.
Alec Bohm is hitting .160 with one extra base hit.
Brandon Marsh is hitting .133 and has managed a home run, but he also has zero steals and seems to have very little utility for this club.
Aaron Nola still can’t control the long ball, and he’s 0-2 in his first two starts.
The bullpen features multiple relievers with an ERA over 6.00, while numerous former Phillies are excelling in relief roles elsewhere after the team traded them or let them walk as free agents.
That’s a chunk of the bad news with this team, but the mitigating factor is that we are only about 7.5% of the way through a very long grind of a season. Some of this doom and gloom will rectify itself at some point, and other things that are fine right now will go awry. Unexpected contributors will emerge (as Edmundo Sosa has done already), and all kinds of other crazy stuff that we haven’t even thought about yet will come to fruition. It’s the simultaneously thrilling and infuriating part of baseball that happens every season for all but the very best and very worst clubs. The Phillies are no exceptions.
Make no mistake; they are good. There are plenty of bad teams in Major League Baseball, and the Phillies will clean up against them while doing pretty decently against the so-so and run-of-the-mill clubs out there as well. Heck, they even took two of three from the Dodgers, so clearly they can hang in there with the top competitors.
But maybe it’s the age of the club, or maybe it’s the relative inaction over the offseason which didn’t see them do much to move the needle aside from trading for Jesús Luzardo (who has been very good early). Really, it might be because there’s not really any ‘new blood’ injecting life into this lineup. Just the same thing that we’ve seen for 3 or 4 years now. And it really seems like the Phillies are on borrowed time, essentially this year or bust.
They do have Aidan Miller on the way, and he might even have to arrive sooner than expected if Bohm continues this trend. And there’s Andrew Painter. And Justin Crawford. The Phillies don’t lack a farm system. They just don’t currently have any young and exciting players making an impact on the big club every day at this juncture, and that kind of worries you when it comes to the big picture.
Yet, despite having a veteran-laden team in ‘win-now’ mode, they find ways to seemingly give away games all the time, like they did in their two losses in Atlanta to drop a series to a desperate Braves team. The Phillies have enough talent to overcome these types of situations during the regular season, but it feels like we are being prepped very early for another disastrous playoff appearance where the team forgets how to play baseball for a few days and gets eliminated before it hits its stride.
I know, I know, it sounds like whining to say these things when a team is 8-4 like the Phils currently are, which is no doubt preferable to getting out to the kind of legitimately bad start that we’ve seen too many times in the past. So I guess we can take some comfort in the fact that a very flawed performance has still produced a very good result so far. You just don’t want the Phillies to get complacent, cruise to something like 92 wins, and then be unable to reach the next gear in the postseason.
These are all early complaints, I realize. But I’ll monitor their validity and report back after another 6 or 8 weeks to see if the team is truly playing up to its potential or merely coasting. One suspects that once the players find a groove (and we get some weather consistently over 40 degrees), the team will find its place among the best in MLB. Hopefully it will be enough to hold off the Mets, the Dodgers, and any other obstacles they will face when it gets to crunch time. We will find out at some point.
Remember when Bohm was good? No? Ok. (Dale Zanine-Imagn)
One Day More: Opening Day on tap
Big things are expected — no, required — of the 2025 Philadelphia Phillies. Or else.
Published March 26, 2025
Far be it from to approach this baseball season, or any season of professional sports, with an ‘all or nothing’ mentality. That’s doubly so when you consider that the Philadelphia fanbase just got to witness a parade last month and should theoretically be satiated for a little bit. But when it comes to the 2025 Phillies, it really does seem like ‘last chance saloon’ for this group of players.
The team came out of nowhere to tantalize with a thrilling World Series run in 2022, but they have taken incremental steps backward in the playoffs the past two seasons. Never mind the fact that they’ve improved their regular season win total the past few years. That’s all well and good, but it’s nothing to brag about. Simply put, this team will win their 90+ games, and then the real test will begin. (Unless they don’t even qualify for the playoffs, in which case the whole thing should be blown up.)
But in terms of expectations, every player should be held accountable to perform at the necessary levels. I don’t have many notes for the pitching staff, at least the starters. If they perform the way they did last year, this team will be right in the thick of it. Jesus Luzardo is an interesting addition, and if he can give the club around 25 starts with an ERA below 4.00 or so, he will have been a worthwhile addition for this season.
Among the relievers, the gamble on Jordan Romano also has to pay off. If he delivers Craig Kimbrel-like results, the team will once again be scrambling in the bullpen when crunch time arrives. And of course, the big wild card is Andrew Painter. We don’t know when we’ll see him, what his role will be, or how he will fare. But he has the potential to be a difference-maker immediately. We care about his long-term future of course, but the team can deploy him strategically this year. It’s an opportunity they won’t get again.
Onto the hitters, and the concern is that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. This is a veteran (read: old) lineup who failed miserably at the end of last season. Can they adjust to prevent it from happening again? There’s always danger in a short playoff series. You can be solid and consistent for a full 162, and then see your season go down the tubes thanks to a mini-slump.
We’ll just need players like Bryson Stott and Alec Bohm (second half version) to be better. We pretty much know what to expect from the other veterans, although it would be nice if J.T. Realmuto could discover the fountain of youth while also maybe playing a little bit less so that Rafael Marchan can get more exposure in anticipation of him taking over as the main man behind the plate as soon as next season. It’s a necessary transition, honestly, because the Phillies will need to think long and hard about how much money they’d want to give a 34-year old catcher after this season.
There is some hope for the future with the likes of Painter, Justin Crawford, Aidan Miller, and others. But they will have to be systematically added to a winning ballclub to properly transition into the next phase of winning and successful Phillies baseball. Otherwise, the fear is that all of the current veterans age out at the same time and the next wave can’t grab the reins. Then you’re faced with either languishing through growing pains as you try to get back to being competitive or you have to overspend on free agents and mortgage the future in ‘win now’ trades that will bring real pain in the near future.
So, to solve all these problems, just win this year. Then we’ll deal with whatever comes of it. It worked for the Eagles, and it can here too.
Play ball. And don’t stop until Halloween.
Time to go to battle, boys. (Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn)
Nothing to complain about at this time — but there will be
Philly fans are still all smiles at the moment. But check back real soon.
Published March 13, 2025
Remember last month? The Birds won the Super Bowl, in case you missed it. Then there was a parade, and it was cool. We all bought a bunch of stuff and we’ll be wearing it and gloating for years. And not that the Eagles aren’t the main focus of this town 24/7/365 anyway, but winning it all has helped us to completely dismiss the miserable basketball and hockey teams for the time being, as well as tempering expectations for the ballclub whose upcoming season will in all likelihood end in infuriating fashion.
Being a sports fan in this city is fun.
All negative vibes from the Sixers and Flyers aside, nobody anywhere is complaining. You literally can’t. If you are, just go away. Unless you’re some weirdo that supports some Philly teams and not others. In that case, you can also go away. Dealing with the supposed basketball team first, most fans in town can’t name half the roster, which is really saying something for a team with about a dozen guys. All we know is that we can stick a fork in the Joel Embiid era, and maybe this can finally be regarded as the death of ‘The Process’, with the last dim embers of it being kept alive by Embiid now going cold for all-time. Things can turn on a dime in the NBA, and you can put a competent club on the court in short order even after the kind of miserable season the Sixers are experiencing right now. But from the ownership on down, they are the embodiment of being totally inept and disconnected in every single way.
Other than that, everything is going great.
As for the Flyers, things don’t look nearly as bad. Yes, they stink, and they’ll be missing the playoffs for the fifth straight year, tying the longest drought in franchise history. But nobody realistically expected them to make it this year either. We were given a considerate plan from the management when it took over two years ago, and things are on the timeline. Now, will they actively try to be better and make a run next year? Or do we still have to wait two more seasons? Can the Flyers even afford to be irrelevant for that much longer, or have we already reached the point that they might as well take all the time they need to ice a truly competitive roster? All I know is, I miss playoff hockey. It would be nice to get some in this town this decade. Remember, the Wells Fargo Center has not hosted a Stanley Cup Playoff game since Gritty was introduced in 2018. Let’s get the big guy some postseason action.
Moving forward, the Phillies somehow start in two weeks. They are once again expected to be a good team and make the playoffs. Anything short of that will require completely detonating this team. Assuming they take care of business, however, falling short will simply not be acceptable. This is an old club. Yes, there are some good players in the making who will be here soon, but the farm system is not loaded. We’ve never had two titles in one year in Philadelphia. This is the most realistic chance that we are ever going to get. If the Phillies aren’t all-in for 2025, they’re wasting everyone’s time. What’s the likelihood they end up disappointing us? Probably like 85%. But they’re in the mix and they’re good enough to win, so let’s be more hopeful than anxious about probable failure.
See, I’m being rosy about it.
This brings us back to the Eagles. The last few days have seen the team lose numerous key pieces of their Super Bowl championship club. Repeating is going to be extremely difficult, and you would expect nothing less. But they have maneuvered themselves so smartly that any perceived ‘huge loss’ should still be regarded as part of the master plan as they navigate the salary cap, the draft, and other roster construction issues over the next few months. I can’t get on board with the people who live and die with the entire offseason. Relax, they won, and this is all a necessary part of the life cycle of these things. The team’s management makes a living figuring these things out, so don’t go crazy when they have to make hard choices.
Just continue to be content at the moment and stay that way for as long as possible. Because something is always around the corner in Philadelphia sports that will snap you out of that euphoria in a big way. Let’s keep it at bay while we can.
Joel Embiid in happier times. (Mitchell Leff)
Kevin's Book is Still Available!
I'm Getting a Sports Complex: Trials & Tribulations of a Thirtysomething Philadelphia Sports Fan
A journey through the last quarter-century of Philadelphia sports, as seen through the lens of a true fan. The book includes an exclusive list of the 50 Most Disliked Philadelphia Athletes. A must-read for all of Philly's long-suffering fans, especially those who "grew up" during the 1990's and early 2000's.
