The Philadelphia Phillies fired Joe Girardi on 6/3. Before he got fired, they were 22–29. After his departure, the Phillies swept the Angels. Having a below .500 record is not what Phillies fans expect after they signed Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos in the offseason and become the fourth highest salary paid team in the entire MLB.
Phillies general manager Dave Dombrowski has the tendency to use the franchise’s future assets to exchange for current assets. This will lead to the franchise being really competitive in a five year span, but the team’s record will fall off a cliff after the five year as well. A perfect example of this style is the 2014 Detroit Tigers and 2018 Boston Red Sox. The Phillies understand that if they did not get anything going starting this year their future will be a disaster. The Phillies just ended a disappointing season when they were 6.5 GB the Braves from making the postseasons. There is some good take away from that season. Bryce Harper was named the NL MVP and Zach Wheeler was second on NL Cy Young Award voting. This showed some sparks to Dombrowski that if they can get a few more superstars they will be a contention team in the NL east. So, this offseason they signed Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos, but no big name acquisition on their pitching. With Schwarber and Castellanos joining the team, the Phillies were expected to score over 6 runs a game to recover the weakness of their pitching rotation.
The season started with a slump. Zach Wheeler got into IL and barely pitched in the first month. Even when he was pitching, his performance was not as good as it was last year. The other ace on the team, Aaron Nola, underperformed as well recording a 3.92 ERA. The batting was the most disappointing part of the team. All of the batter was swinging at pitches that are outside the zone. The poor plate discipline by the Phillies leads to a lot of runners left on base and double plays. The Phillies are just slightly above average on the LOB stats and the fourth most on double plays. The other issue they had is their bullpen. Their bullpen’s ERA this season is 3.99 ranked 17th in the MLB and a 1.39 WHIP ranked 23rd. The underperformed bullpen can not help the Phillies to keep their lead late in the game. I know a lot of people were blaming Joe Girardi on not doing the pitching change decisive enough, but when you look at how the bullpen has performed throughout the season there is nothing that he can really do. It is hard for Girardi to trust them to let them deal with batters when there are runners in scoring position.
The dilemma of the Phillies all got turned around when they fired Joe Girardi on 6/3. Their batting went hot in June. The whole team is batting .267 with a .892 OPS and scoring 32 runs in 4 games. The pitching has also settled down as well, recording a 3.25 ERA and only letting opponents batting .191. I think the reason why the Phillies bats become so hot is because they become more patient. Their batting strategy started to lean towards selective aggression where they chose to attack the pitch they liked. 90% of the Phillies batter has the ability to slug. It is just the matter of when their runner is on base when these doubles or triples are coming. They started to seize the opportunity when there’s runner on base.
The season is still really long, so I do think that the Phillies still have a chance to make the postseason. It will be really hard for them to win the pennant in the NL east since they are already 11.5 GB the Mets even when Jacob DeGrom is not playing. Despite the poor start they are only 4.5 GB to make it to the wild card. I believed that the Phillies would have the chance to get into the wild card game with one of the most violent batting lineups in the entire MLB.