Tag Archives: National League East

The long, slow Mets deflation

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Juan Soto

Juan Soto—Not his fault.

A choke? Not exactly. More like the Mets stuck a pin in their $340 million blimp, somehow,  and it deflated slowly enough, agonisingly enough. The team that started the season as the best and most expensive in Show finished . . .

No, they didn’t go from the top of the mountain all the way to the rocks at the bottom. They did finish second in the National League East. On the surface, that doesn’t look anywhere near resembling terrible. Know how many teams would jump from the top of the Flatiron Building if it meant finishing second for a change?

Why, over yonder in the American League Central, the Tigers could have been called going down harder. On 12 June they had an eight-game division lead over the next in line. At one point, the Guardians were 15.5 games out of first place in the group.

Then the Tigers deflated painfully themselves to settle for a wild card while the Guards dug, clawed, gnawed, and shoved their way back to take a division that once looked like the Tigers’ exclusive possession. But since the Tigers get to meet the Guards in a wild card set, the magnifying glass is over the Mets.

And how.

How on earth did a team finish play on 12 June and sit 21 games over .500, with a Show-best 45-24 record, and five games ahead of the eventual NL East champion Phillies, but go from there to play .408 ball the rest of the way?

How did that come to include a 10-15 September that featured an eight-game losing streak and a season-ending weekend in which they looked as though they’d signed surrender papers instead of commitments to fight for their very baseball lives?

Juan Soto regrouped after early inconsistency to get within two thefts of posting a 40-40 season and finish the year leading the National League in on-base percentage. Francisco Lindor posted a second 30-30 season in three years. Pete Alonso Alonsoed (38 home runs and leading the league in doubles with 41). But . . .

“A few players thought [manager Carlos] Mendoza’s communication was not as sharp as it could be,” said The Athletic‘s Tim Britton and Will Sammon.

Others suggested that he showed some unnecessary panic early in the season when he kept shuffling roles for different players. That will be part of the conversation this winter.

“I really think he’s done everything in his power,” another club source said. “In this market, you want that type of leader: somebody who is steady and going to be honest.”

That doesn’t mean Mendoza’s coaching staff is safe. The Mets’ defense was a season-long issue. While the offense put up good overall numbers, it operated far too often in boom-and-bust cycles. The pitching staff never put it together in the second half, with many of its purportedly reliable arms underperforming.

Let’s not wait ’till next year. They’ll have all winter to solve the coaching staff, the booming-and-busting, the pitching inconsistencies, and the defense that would guarantee a war over five minutes after it begins—with the Mets on the wrong side. How should we begin to outline the manner in which this year’s blimp deflated?

* When Kodai Senga, one of the best pitchers in the game for the season’s first month and a half, exited his 12 June start with a hamstring injury incurred covering first base, was brought back just before the All-Star break instead of getting that one extra minor league rehab start, and looked nothing like that early-season ace from there, ending up in Triple-A to get himself straightened out?

* When the Rays swept them in early June, which didn’t look that ominous—the Mets were 4.5 in front of the National League East and owned that 45-25 record going in—until you saw the bullpen’s meltdown over the set, and began to get the awful feeling that it wouldn’t be the last time the pen would prove the cobras’ own mongooses? (C’mon, Mr. Webster, make it official and let us use mongeese as the plural!)

* When they rumbled into Pittburgh, where the sunken Pirates were two months past forcing manager Derek Shelton to walk the plank, and got themselves swept by the Pirates in three straight, outscored 30-4 in the set, letting the Pirates drop at least nine runs per game against them during—without Pirates ace/should-be National League Cy Young Award winner Paul Skenes facing them even for a third of an inning?

* When they lost two out of three to the Reds coming out of the All-Star Break, with the 2-1 lead they gifted back-in-the-rotation Sean Manaea squandered by one reliever whose Show debut was just a month earlier but wouldn’t turn up in a Met uniform again? When the Mets won the third game but those first two losses all but handed the Reds the wild-card tiebreaker?

* When relief ace Edwin Díaz’s otherwise stellar season (the finish: 1.63 ERA; 228 FIP; 0.88 WHIP) was rudely interrupted when the Brewers’ Isaac Collins blasted a game-ending home run 10 August, sending the Mets back to New York with their second of a pair of seven-game losing streaks?

* When the Mets turned to Nolan McLean in Philadelphia for his fifth career start, the young man responded with a one-run/5.2 inning performance that would have been enough for the Mets to win . . . if only they could have found a way to score even once? Leading to a Philadelphia sweep and any lingering hope of the Mets reclaiming the NL East they once owned in the trash compactor?

* When the Mets finally gave Jacob deGrom substantial run support in Citi Field—forgetting that deGrom now pitches for the other guys, the Rangers in this case, who’d drop another loss on them the following day for a season-longest eight-game losing streak?

* When the dead-last Nationals beat them 3-2 in the final Mets home game of the year, abetted by a pair of acrobatic fielding plays (robbing Brett Baty of extra bases; swiping a home run from Francisco Alvarez that would have tied the game) by Nats center fielder Jacob Wilson?

* When the Marlins channeled their 2006/2007 ancestors and told the Mets, “Not so fast, boys,” with the Mets needing to scale the Fish on Saturday, the Reds already losing to the Brewers, to nail the third wild card?

* When the non-Díaz bullpen surrendered four in the fourth, forcing manager Mendoza to bring Díaz in early to bind up the wounds?

* When the Mets ended up stranding ten runners, Pete Alonso hit a bases-loaded cruise missle stopped cold by Miami left fielder Javier Sanoja, and the Mets finished 2025 0-70 for the year whenever the other guys led after eight innings? (The number of Mets ninth-inning comebacks this year: zero. The number in 2024, when they got to the League Championship Series: eight.)

“There’s no other way to sugarcoat it,” said Alonso, who didn’t wait too long to let it be known he intended to opt out of his two-year deal and test his market, while leaving a door open wide enough for a reasonable-length deal with the Mets. “Super-talented team and we didn’t even get to October.”

In a sane major league game in which the leagues were aligned and divided reasonably, in which no such thing as regular-season interleague play existed, in which no team earned the right to postseason play unless its fannies were parked in first place at season’s end, the Mets wouldn’t be half the topic they are now.

In a sane baseball world, we wouldn’t have just gone through another wild race of thrills, chills, and spills, on behalf of seeing who’s fighting to the last breath (or rolling over dead trying) to finish . . . in second place.

“Sane” and “Mets” rarely fit comfortably in the same sentence. But this was one of those Met seasons about which you could say it’s liable to get them thrown out of the nut hut.

Do better, Met fans

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Max Weiner

Max Weiner, hoisted by the fan group Metsmerized Online, in the image that stirred SNY’s Andy Martino to outrage. Weiner didn’t call himself the Rally Pimp, so far as we know.

A Mets fan named Max Weiner has been turning up often at Citi Field of late. This would not be great news except that Weiner has a thing for appearing in assorted garish haberdashery at least some of which appears comparable to that worn by actual, professional pimps, and he has become a symbol of the Mets’ in-season resurgence.

Identity unearthed by the Mets fan group known as The 7 Line, Weiner has been tagged colloquially as the Rally Pimp by fans; he may not have  assumed the nickname for himself. But he and they have stirred up a small social media storm, particularly since the Mets have gone 9-3 since his first known appearance at the park following a 1-5 season opening that included losing their first five straight.

We’ve become coldly accustomed to “pimp” as a verb referencing the bat flips and other celebratory displays upon home runs long and longer or theatrical plays in the field. It’s sobering to think that those deploying it so casually may have too little comprehension about the word’s actual, core meaning, in times when baseball’s handlings of domestic violence and sexual assault matters stir contradictory but deeply troublesome passions.

The deployers aren’t just fans any longer; you can hear some broadcasters and journalists use it with the same casual carelessness. But one journalist, SNY’s Andy Martino, author of Cheated, one of a pair of excellent books conjugating the Astros’ illegal, off-field-based, electronic sign stealings of 2017-18, isn’t amused one feather by the Rally Pimp idea. Saying so has gotten him a few rounds of social media abuse.

“Pimp imagery is problematic on so many levels,” Martino Xtweeted, after spying and re-Xtweeting a previous Xtweet from a Mets fan account a photo of Mr. Weiner in a purple fur jacket and large gold-looking chain around his neck holding the Mets’ interlocking NY cap logo at the chain’s end. “Let’s think about it for 2 seconds. Can we please not make this a big part of the 2024 Mets’ imagery? Cue replies about woke culture blah blah. I don’t care, I’m right about this.”

We don’t really know whether Weiner called himself the Rally Pimp or whether the tag was attached to him by zealous Met fans. It certainly didn’t help Martino to say flatly at the finish, “I don’t care, I’m right about this.” But Martino has a point. To tag such haberdashery that way above others, you might (must?) first ask how much you know about the actual doings of actual pimps. Reclaiming Hope, a group dedicated to caring for the survivors of sex trafficking, offers as clear a definition as you might ask of the pimp and his operating style:

Traffickers are often referred to as “Master Manipulators”. They use a variety of tactics to recruit victims and pimps are many times classified as (1) “A Romeo” pimp or someone who portrays himself as a “boyfriend” who loves her and will take care of her, or (2) A “guerilla” pimp who controls through force.

The modern day pimp/trafficker initially seems like a very nice guy who cares deeply about their victims. Then the manipulation and threats begin. One of the most powerful ways traffickers keep their victims controlled is by the trauma bond that develops between the victim and trafficker. Victims are controlled by their pimp through repeated beatings, rapes, drug dependency, withholding of food and sleep, debt bondage, isolation, and psychological abuse, which can include threats against family or friends.

Sex trafficking is a high profit, low risk business with a relatively small risk of a pimp going to prison for human trafficking. Additionally, their “product” can be sold repeatedly, unlike drugs or weapons, where the product can only be sold one time. The faces of victims know no ethnic, religious or social-economic boundaries.

Considering that baseball’s last few seasons have been pockmarked by several players and even front office personnel tagged and disciplined for domestic violence, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse, bringing “pimp” to bear as a term of endearment for a particular and colourfully expressive on-field celebration or a particular and colourfully expressive fan in the stands is described most civilly as grotesque.

More agreeably, the Mets have gone 10-3 since that season-opening five-game losing streak. They’ve done it against teams seen as contenders in the early going, though some may think it debatable that the like of the Reds (from whom they took two of three), the Royals (two of three likewise), and the Pirates (a three-game sweep) will go the distance that way.

Why soil it by attaching to one hideously if demonstrably dressed fan in particular a colloquialism that emanates from a profession whose victims often incur damage even more deranged than those victims of the Roberto Osunas, Aroldis Chapmans, Domingo Germáns, Trevor Bauers, Sam Dysons, Julio Uríases, Wander Francos?

This Met fan since the day they were born urges: Do better, Met fans. Weiner’s costumery is also the type that might be seen wrapped around the bodies of contemporary rock, pop, and hip-hop musicians. Would “Rally Rocker” have had insufficient thrust?

Season lost, Scherzer gone

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Max Scherzer

Scherzer waived his no-trade clause to go from the deflating Mets to the AL West-leading Rangers.

The contemporary Mets fan, to whom a season is usually lost over one terrible inning in early to mid-April, sees Max Scherzer speaking without boilerplate about talking to the front office regarding, stop, hey, what’s that plan, after the Mets traded solid relief pitcher David Robertson to the Marlins for a prime-looking prospect. And, is barely amused.

Then, they see the three-time Cy Young Award-winning future Hall of Famer traded within a day or so to the American League West-leading Rangers, for a more prime-looking prospect. They are somewhere between dryly amused and snarkily contemptuous. Not to mention terribly inattentive or misinformed.

Nobody questions that age has begun to catch up to the righthander. Assorted small injuries plus lingering issues with his back and his side did a little too much to keep him from resembling his vintage self. One moment, Scherzer did a plausible impression of what he once was. The next, he did a plausible impression of a piñata.

There are some who see this year’s 9-4 won-lost record and say, so there! There are others who see this year’s 4.01 ERA and 4.73 fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP) and see a man whose youth and prime may not be visible in the rear view mirror anymore.

When the Mets traded Robertson a few days ago, Scherzer didn’t hold back. He was neither nasty nor snarky about saying it was time for him to talk to the Mets’ front office about the rest of the season and just who projected what. But, first, he was honest enough to begin with a sober assessment of the Mets’ deflating season thus far.

“[O]bviously, we put ourselves in this position,” he said. “We haven’t played well enough as a team. I’ve had a hand in that for why we’re in the position that we’re at. Can’t get mad at anybody but yourself, but it stinks.”

Then he went forward: “You have to talk to the brass. You have to understand what they see, what they’re going to do. That’s the best I can tell you. I told you I wasn’t going to comment on this until [owner] Steve [Cohen] was going to sell. We traded Robertson. Now we need to have a conversation.”

That was after Scherzer looked a little like the old Max the Knife against his old team, the Nationals: striking seven out in seven innings, scattering six hits one of which was a solo home run, and the Mets rewarding him with a 5-1 win, not to mention their seventh win in eleven games. But still.

Some Met fans think the front office elected to punt on third down, metaphorically speaking. Others think that, when Scherzer said they “needed to have a conversation,” it might have meant a conversation about Texas being the next destination for Scherzer himself.

If that involved Scherzer agreeing to go from the sinking Mets to a division-leading troop of Rangers in return for a prize prospect who turns out to be Ronald Acuña, Jr.’s promising brother, it probably took less than we think (even allowing the time) for Scherzer to say yes to one more active, not passive pennant race.

Scherzer had to waive his no-trade clause and exercise his contract’s 2024 opt-in to make the deal. Luisangel Acuña is a middle infielder and center fielder with a live bat (if not always as powerful as big brother’s) who can hit pitching from both sides readily, and wheels to burn on the bases. (42 stolen bases in 82 games; an .894 stolen base percentage.) Most known analyses of him say his challenge is to harness his aggressiveness.

The prime issue for Scherzer at 38 is staying healthy and avoiding home runs. His 1.9 home runs per nine this season are a career high. Yet, his tenure as a Met overall hasn’t exactly been a wash. His Met totals include a 3.02 ERA, a 3.52 FIP, and a 1.02 walks/hits per inning pitched rate. And, a 10.05 strikeouts-per nine rate with a 5.54 strikeout-to-walk ratio.

But they also include his having run out of fuel in Game One of last year’s National League wild card series, battered for four home runs that accounted for all the Padres scoring in a 7-1 loss.

“If [Scherzer] can limit the long ball and stay healthy,” observes The Athletic‘s Brittany Ghiroli, “he should help the Rangers fend off the Astro in the AL West and avoid the wild-card round. What’s more, his competitive personality and postseason experience could rub off on his new teammates.”

He’ll join a Rangers rotation that took a hit when former Met superpitcher Jacob deGrom went down to Tommy John surgery, but resuscitated itself via Nathan Eovaldi and Dane Dunning. He’ll be backed by a bullpen anchored by Will Smith. And a roster hitting .274. So far.

Mets players said goodbye to Scherzer Saturday night, during a rain delay before a game against the Nats that ended in an 11-6 Nats win. Surely they also started wondering what else and who else after Max the Knife could be talked into waiving his no-trade clause. They might have cast eyes first upon Justin Verlander, who’s showing his age as well, but who shook an early injury to look a little better than his old Detroit rotation mate this year.

“It’s not a certainty that Verlander will be traded,” say Athletic writers Will Sammon and Tim Britton, “but the Scherzer deal offered a blueprint of what to expect should the Mets decide to unload their other top starter. Verlander has performed better than Scherzer and, in theory, should net a better prospect.

“However, Verlander also has a no-trade clause in addition to being under contract for 2024 with a vesting option for 2025. It’s also unknown whether the Scherzer trade made Verlander feel any different about playing for the Mets.” Not to mention whether reported serious interest from the Dodgers, the Rangers, and Verlander’s old team in Houston might compel him to revisit his feelings.

The Mets barely said goodbye to Scherzer when Sports Illustrated reported they were in, quote, deep talks with the Astros about bringing back the future Hall of Famer who won an unlikely Cy Young Award in their silks last year but signed with the Mets as an offseason free agent. Unlikely because Verlander’s the oldest pitcher to win the prize after returning from late-career Tommy John surgery.

As with Scherzer, the Mets will likely demand a choice prospect or two (or even three) while the Astros will likely insist the Mets help them pay for Verlander’s return, including his 2025 vesting option. As the Rangers did with Max the Knife, the Astros may not be averse to helping the Mets continue their farm replenishment and remake for the privilege of one more term with JV.

There’s just one problem with that idea, from the Houston side, encunciated by Three Inning Fan podcaster Kelly Franco Throop: “[T]hey have nothing to give: they are considered to have one of the worst farm systems in the game.”

So much for providing a delicious pickle in the AL West, the two who once headed the Tigers’ rotation together going against each other to help decide that division. As of this morning, the Astros were only a game behind the Rangers in the division and in a dead heat with the Blue Jays for AL wild card number one.

The Mets may have pushed the plunger on a 2023 that was getting away from them through too much fault of their own, but all is not necessarily lost. There’s 2024 toward which to gaze.

There’s also a very outside chance that losing their best reliever and one of their better starters sticks the ginger into their tails. They’re “only” seven back in the National League wild card race. But a Met fan since the day they were born says, “Anything can happen (and often enough does).” Today’s patience-of-a-Nile-crocodile Met fan says, “This year’s been next year since the end of spring training.”

Playing the trade deadline period for prime prospects is a win-win, too. Either they become better than useful Mets soon enough, or they provide fodder for a bigger/better deal or three down the road.

Even if all they’ve sacrificed yet is Max the Knife and their best relief pitcher, the Mets are still in position to bring a certain front line starting pitcher into the ranks for a longer period and potentially better results. The unicorn who now wears Angels silks, threatens Aaron Judge’s AL single-season home run record while he’s at it, and becomes a free agent after this season.

On this much the lifelong Met fan and the contemporary Met fan can agree: The Mets are many things. Dull isn’t one of them.

Meet the new boss, not the same as the old Boss

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Steve Cohen

Steve Cohen, outside Citi Field. The fan-friendly Mets owner preaches patience. Attention-deficit Met fans say, “and we want it right now!”

Listen up, frustrated (and spoiled) Yankee fans who think any early season series lost demands an accounting of “what would George do.” Look across town to the owner of the Mets, whose frustrated fan base seems to wish he was prepared to go full-on Boss because the 2023 Mets, thus far, are (shall we say) underwhelming.

Enough Yankee fans think a season is illegitimate unless the Yankees reach, never mind win the World Series. Enough Met fans think, “this year is next year,” upon one terrible inning—in April. The Yankee fan wishes their owner had even an eighth of his father’s notorious impatience. The Met fan wishes their owner might consider selling to The Boss’s ghost.

Not so fast, urges that owner, Steve Cohen, who is disinclined to push the proverbial plunger simply because the team he thought was well constructed has shown cracks aplenty.

Met fans can’t question Cohen’s own passion. Like me, he is a Met fan since the day they were born. Like me, he knows that frustration comes with the territory at least as much as surreal miracles or surreal self-resurrections. He, like me, knows that blowing a faltering team up at the first drop of a bad inning leaves little enough beyond difficult to contain rubble and fallout.

“When things get really bad,” Cohen told the New York Post‘s Joel Sherman over the weekend, “I’m not going to blow up. I don’t think that’s the proper response. I don’t think it solves anything, other than it gives people a one-day story. But it doesn’t really solve anything.” Where was he when George Steinbrenner turned the 1980s Yankees into Jacobin France as it might have been administered by the Rufus T. Firefly Administration?

“There’s plenty of blame to go around from a performance point of view,” Cohen continued. “So blowing up, I’m not sure it solves anything. It would demonstrate, ‘Oh, he really cares. He’s one of us.’ But the reality is it’s not going to solve our problems. And I think in some ways it can be demotivating.”

Hark back to how many times a Steinbrenner tantrum demotivated and demoralised Yankee teams from their top of the line stars to their glittering turned jittery prospects. (Roger Erickson, 1983 pitcher: “They told me I’m their future. I told them, ‘I don’t want to be in your future. It’s frustrating enough being in your present’.”)

“I’ve got enough experience, whether in my business or even in baseball now,” Cohen said, “to know that when things are going great, you are never as great as you think you are, and when things are going really bad, you are not as bad as you think you are. Things can turn around fairly quickly.”

They can. Until they can’t. Sometimes, they do. Sometimes, they don’t. Sometimes, things turn around quickly from tragedy to triumph. (Think of the 2019 Nationals and, what do you know, the 1973 Mets.) Sometimes, they turn around quickly from triumph to tragedy. (Think of the 1964 Phillies, the 1969 Cubs, enough Red Sox teams for the final 82 years of the 20th Century, and the 2007 Mets, to name a few.)

Cohen has the patience of Job. Enough of his fan base seems to wish Job had hit the ceiling running. But neither he nor they expected Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, a pair of future Hall of Famers in the sunsets of splendid careers, to show their ages quite this drastically. Neither Cohen nor Met fans expected rotation inconsistency from that pair down to turn into bullpen exhaustion. Neither Cohen nor Met fans expected Pete Alonso to hit the injured list with a wrist injury off being hit by a pitch. Neither Cohen nor Met fans expected inconsistent hitting with men in scoring position.

Certainly manager Buck Showalter and general manager Billy Eppler have made an error or three. The Met fans who lack Cohen’s lifelong immersion in the team think the solutions range from throwing out the first manager to throwing out the first general manager—and then getting really mad. But Yankee fans with memories long enough and hubris short enough can tell you how well that worked for The Boss in the 1980s.

It’s not as though the National League is composed entirely of threshing machines. The league is somewhere between modest and mediocre overall this season. The Mets may not look quite as terrible as their surface record and their daily over-under-sideways-downs. And things could have been much worse.

Remember the gnashing when Steven Matz was thought to have gone back on his word and then signed with the Cardinals? How did that work out for the Cardinal Wayward? Matz had an injury-addled 2022 with a 5.25 ERA, and his non injury-addled 2023 has him at 5.72 and demoted to the bullpen.

Remember the prayers that some way, some how, Jacob deGrom might be made a Met for life? The injury-compromised great now requires his second Tommy John surgery. Of all the might-have-beens in baseball history, deGrom is liable to go down as the saddest of them all, a Hall of Fame talent who owned the mound when he was healthy but whose body told him, almost continuously, “Don’t even think about it, Buster.”

Remember how close the Mets got to making Carlos Correa one of their own? Until Correa flunked a physical exam for the Mets, just as he had for the Giants, then re-upped with the Twins. This season, thus far, Correa has a 97 OPS+, a .304 on-base percentage, a pace to hit far enough less than his career-long 162-game average 28 home runs, and he’s one defensive run below the American League average for shortstops. That should be a sigh of relief that he didn’t become a Met and become the planned third base experiment.

Cohen is not going to erect a guillotine in Citi Field or anywhere else just yet. The Boss kept his Yankee guillotine on red alert every month, so it seemed, at the worst of his depths. Meet the new boss, not the same as the old Boss.

“[T]he only other thing I see that, frankly, I’m a little bit troubled by is I’m seeing mental errors that we didn’t see last year and that we can fix,” Cohen continued. “That’s fixable.”

And I just don’t know why that’s happening. We all see it on the field on a daily basis. And that’s, that’s on the players, you know, and they’re working hard. I guess teams get into a funk, that happens. And then come out of it. These are veterans that have performed before, and they’re working hard. They care. They’re good guys. I believe in them.

And they’re smart enough, they care enough, that they’ll fix it on their own. They’ll fix, at least the mental side. We’re going through a bad period, but they know it, and they are willing to own it. Those are what I would call unforced errors that we can fix and we will because these are good guys who are working hard. As much as the fans care, as much as I care, they care even more.

It could be worse. Much worse. To which one fears today’s attention-deficit Met fan would reply, “Off with your head!” Even Cohen knows the present state can’t continue. That he refuses to just blow up the joint is more than admirable. But he may also know that a move or two may have to be made, soon enough.

The Phillies throw out the first manager

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Joe Girardi

Girardi’s Philadelphia nightmare ends with his execution Friday morning.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A front office builds a team with money no object and no other cohesive object in mind. They front-load the team with sluggers, leaving little room for defensive fortification, overtaxing a fine starting rotation, and discover they can’t out-slug the wasted defensive outs or the bullpen’s arson.

All of which leaves their third-year manager half lost for finding ways to prevent late-inning collapses, early-inning slaughters, and solving the riddle of how he could have been handed what amounts to a desperation roster built with no forward thinking and not even a nod toward replenishing the farm or delivering mid-season fortification.

Then, seeing that uncohesive, porous mess deliver a 22-29 season-opening record, they reach into their heart of hearts, pray hard, and decide it’s time answer all the last fortnight’s speculation and throw out the first manager of the season.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2022 Phillies. Sitting twelve games behind the division-leading Mets in the National League East. Unlikely to improve even to a shot at one of the NL’s wild cards unless their fielders patch up the holes in their gloves and their defensive routes and their bullpen discovers more than just bull.

For openers. It’s not that Joe Girardi is any sort of managerial genius. He’s been a fairly overrated manager in his entire skippering career. But this one’s on that front office, led by Dave Dombrowski, an executive with a too-well-known tendency to sacrifice a future for a today that doesn’t always strike platinum. Not to mention the classic mealymouthed style of explaining why Girardi should have become the sacrificial lamb.

It has been a frustrating season for us up until this point, as we feel that our club has not played up to its capabilities. While all of us share the responsibility for the shortcomings, I felt that a change was needed and that a new voice in the clubhouse would give us the best chance to turn things around. I believe we have a talented group that can get back on track, and I am confident that [interim manager] Rob [Thomson], with his experience and familiarity with our club, is the right man to lead us going forward.

Translation: We still thought this team could slug more than enough to out-fly fielders who might as well be scrubwomen wearing oven mitts and save the asses of relief pitchers who forget to check the gasoline cans at the gates. And if you think we’re going to execute the people responsible for building that mess in the first place, you don’t know us vewwy well, do you?

Except that four of the Phillies’s sluggers (Nick Castellanos, Rhys Hoskins, J.T. Realmuto, and Kyle Schwarber) haven’t been slugging quite to the extent they were expected to slug, even if three of them dialed long distance during that ten-inning fall to the Giants last Monday.

The slugger who’s been hitting like the defending MVP he is and who just so happens to be their best defender, Bryce Harper, has a torn UCL in his throwing elbow that’s limited him to a DH role for long enough now. He’s been around the league average in right field when he played before the injury; he’s posting a .943 OPS/.166 OPS+ so far that are not too far under the numbers (1.044/181) with which he led the entire Show last year.

The Phillies have achieved the surrealistic feat of outscoring their opposition yet awakening this morning seven games below .500. The big reasons, as ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle reminds us, are a 4-10 record in one-run games and a fourth-highest-in-Show fourteen losses in games during which they held a lead at one or another point.

“Measures such as these are never wholly on the manager,” Doolittle writes, “but they are certainly not data points in his favor. The best embodiment of Girardi’s struggles is probably an early-May loss to the Mets in which Philadelphia blew a 7-1 lead it carried into the ninth inning. It sure seems the heat under his seat kept rising after that game.”

The Phillies also continued leaning upon Corey Knebel to close out games—but why? He spent May picking up four nebulous saves and earning very nebulous credit for one win during which he surrendered the game-tying run in the top of the ninth and was bailed out in the bottom by a two-run infield error.

Meanwhile, Seranthony Domínguez has been an assassin out of the pen through today: he has a 1.83 ERA and a 1.92 fielding-independent pitching rate in 19.2 innings’ work thus far. Knebel: 3.27 ERA/4.01 FIP. You tell me who should be getting the work when the games are squarely on the line—and screw the “save situations,” the real moments when a game needs saving aren’t limited to the ninth inning.

So maybe continuing to assign “roles” to his dubious-enough pen instead of training his eyes upon the best of the group falls on Girardi. He’s hardly the only manager who might still believe in “roles” instead of what the game moment and the records as they are tell him. Maybe his long-time associate Thomson will pay closer attention and move accordingly, even with the continuing dubious straitjacket of the three-batter minimum for relievers.

But everyone with eyes to see looked upon the stockpile of designated hitter-types Dombrowski and company assembled when the lockout ended and that hurry-up spring training began and said, with no sarcasm intended, just what Jayson Stark asked aloud in The Athletic: “Can a team as defensively challenged as the Phillies win anything?”

In one way Dombrowski did work with a hand tied behind his back. Last winter’s free agency market—rudely interrupted by the ridiculous owners’ lockout—offered him little enough chance to fix a dead-last defense (the 2021 Phillies were the Show’s worst for defensive runs saved) at all, never mind in one grand sweep. But there remains the sense that he didn’t have to go all the way the wrong way.

Fair play: There have been teams who could and did hit their way to even the World Series despite having defenses helpless even against a division of babies in carriages. Just ask the 2015 Mets, whose porous defense enabled them to lose a World Series in five games despite taking leads into the ninth inning in three of their four losses.

Maybe these Phillies have done their notoriously negative-think fan base a big favour. (Remember the Philadelphia wedding. Clergyman to the happy couple: I now pronounce you husband and wife. Clergyman to the gathering: You may now boo the bride.) Not by firing Girardi but by collapsing early and often under the weight of their slug-now/defend later construction. They’re not likely to make the postseason even as an outside entrant in the expanded wild card picture. They won’t be able to break the hearts the 2015 Mets broke.

But Girardi isn’t exactly innocent. Another Athletic writer, Britt Ghiroli, isolates the point. Again, stop me if you’ve heard this before, as in when his days managing the Yankees came to a halt, but make note of where Ghiroli places the core responsibility:

Two things seem to have sunk Girardi: recent bullpen-management moves that came under fire and players telling The Philadelphia Inquirer that it didn’t look like they were having any fun on the field. (They aren’t very fun to watch on the couch, either.) Girardi is known as a no-nonsense guy, and although clubhouse culture can be overrated, once players start mentioning it, it almost always spells doom for the manager. This is still a mess Dombrowski created, a defense far worse than anyone envisioned and a bullpen problem that just never seems to go away. Firing Girardi doesn’t make the Phillies a playoff team, or even a competitive unit. But it does quell the masses, at least temporarily.

The only thing missing now is Dombrowski saying, “I didn’t fire Joe. The players did.” The questions now include just how long before the Phillies’s administration gets what previous team regimes finally got and sends Dombrowski on his not-so-merry way, too, in favour of a builder whose materials aren’t limited to collapsible shelves.