“I got a lot of problems with you people, and now you’re gonna hear about it!” – Frank Costanza
I am usually pretty optimistic in my fanhood, believing that there’s always a chance. Those hopes have been stretched to the thinnest of threads right now with this Phillies team. We probably need to win two more games this season and that seems impossible right now. They aren’t just slow-motion car crashing with the finish line right in front of them, they are an absolutely brutal watch every night. Whether they eventually make it or not, I need to get out my frustration with them. If you want some serious negativity in your life, please proceed…
Fuck this team from the players to everyone making the decisions to the owner who refuses to make any changes to his cash machine.1
Players
- Trea Turner – There’s no one on this team more infuriating than Turner and his exaggerated flail of a swing that has no chance of making decent contact. How many times can one guy go into a bottomless abyss of a hitting funk? He has hit over .300 4x with two batting titles but somehow looks like he’s faking being a real baseball player. The team treats him like he’s some kind of $300m irreproachable angel too. Why? Because he has NEVER had a big hit in red pinstripes? God forbid you bench him, move him down the lineup, or tell him to move his clumsy ass to the outfield because he can only make backhanded plays at shortstop.
- Brandon Marsh – There’s a Brandon Marsh who can hit the ball and a Brandon Marsh who has no chance. If you told me he had an identical twin that he switches with for half the season, it would make more sense than the fall-off-a-cliff type player that we see every year. When he gets like this, his at bats are not competitive and he does more harm than good to the team. Oh, and please stop with the “he’s a good fielder” false narrative. He isn’t. He also plays left field. He’s average even when he’s compared to wheel-less wagons like Juan Soto and Teoscar Hernandez. If he played a great centerfield he would have some value. An average LF makes him a liability.
- Bryce Harper – YOU KNOW HOW TO LAY OFF BAD PITCHES SO STOP SWINGING AT BULLSHIT!!! The contract doesn’t bother me, the passive aggressive interviews don’t bother me, and even the weird ass blood infusions don’t bother me, but goddamn it, stop trying to be the hero! You aren’t good at it. No more stretching singles into outs, no more swinging as hard as you can at strike 3 a foot below the box, and no more first pitch swinging. You know how to work at bats and you just refuse to do it for some reason.
- Brooks Raley – If we found out that Steve Cohen gave him a $1m parting gift to sabotage the Phillies after the trade, I would believe it. How else do you explain a guy with a 1.96 ERA now being incapable of not giving up runs. 8.71 ERA with the Phillies. He has David Phelps-ian numbers. Lefties were hitting .186 off him in NY. In Philadelphia, lefties are lighting him up to the tune of a .391 average! How is that possible??? Somehow, he’s even worse against righties. He should never throw another pitch for this team.
- Luis Arraez – How can someone with such great bat to ball ability and knowledge of the strike zone swing at so many balls? It’s mind boggling. Maybe even more psychosis inducing, how has he hit into so many double plays??? In 46 games with the Phillies he has into 8 DPs! He had 7 in more than double the games in SF. He and Harper have been DP machines.
- Bryson Stott – I don’t hate Stott, but we also have to stop thinking he’s going to be anything special.
- Not Mad at Right Now:
- Aaron Nola – I am overjoyed that Aaron found out what was wrong and I can only hope he maintains this going forward. His 7/$172m contract looked like maybe the 2nd worst in baseball (behind Trea Turner obvi) but now with 4 years left, it’s almost fair value if he can keep it up.
- Alec Bohm – I really don’t know what to say. He was the worst player in baseball for the first half and now there is no one I trust more in the lineup. He’s even made me think the unthinkable…do we keep him??? I mean, no, but I’m at least thinking about it.
Management
- Dave “Mr. Content” Dombrowski – How are you this bad at reading markets? Bo Bichette and the Mets caught you with your pants down. How was there no backup plan? You figured you’d get Bichette and deal Alec Bohm but when that didn’t work out you ran everything back. $10m on Adolis Garcia who hasn’t been good for 3 years? That was it? Maybe even worse, you hedged the deadline. Arraez and Brooks Raley? All that did was burn a top pitching prospect while not fixing our bullpen problems. Why do something if it’s not going to be enough? We’d be better off doing nothing than not everything. Oh yeah, and these next few guys are your fault…
- Orion Kerkering – He should have never come back this season. There’s no recovering from how last year ended and I don’t blame him for sucking. I blame Dave for keeping around the reminder of last year’s loss.
- Jose Alvarado – Relievers do not get better when they stop taking performance enhancing drugs. No, I do not believe it was a weight loss supplement considering they don’t actually release the name of the drug that popped the positive test. He had a $9m option for this season that could have been used on someone competent. Lefties are hitting .333 against him. HOW IS HE A HARD THROWING LEFTY WHO CAN’T GET LEFTIES OUT???
- J.T. Realmuto – Any time you can pay a guy more money per year than anyone else is offering AND give him more years than anyone else is offering, you have to do it, right Dave? That contract was offensive to the senses when it was announced and couple that with it coming minutes after we got fucked by Bichette was just a total GM’ing disaster.
- Every Bad 1-Year Contract
- Don Mattingly – Every stubborn bad decision we lamented Rob Thomson for making, Mattingly is even worse. If there is a guy ready in the bullpen and the exact situation for using him comes up, Don ain’t making that call. Why the hell did you have him up? That’s if he even has someone up at all. How many times this season have we been expecting a meltdown only to be right and Don has to wait 3 more batters because he had no one ready? How do we all know it and he doesn’t? He grinds the pitchers, overuses the bullpen, and abjectly refuses to make any meaningful change to the lineup.
- Seth Johnson – What the hell was that Don? Johnson came in to give up runs in big spots for weeks before Dombrowski mercifully sent him away. It was baffling
- Jhoan Duran – Stop pitching him in non-save situations! He isn’t good in them and he doesn’t need the work. All you are doing is wasting bullets
- Tim Mayza – Why do you constantly warm him up to never put him in? The poor guy has pitched in 59 games but warmed up in every single one of them.
- The Lineup – WHY ARE WE STILL HITTING SCHWARBER 1ST AND TURNER 2ND??? Anything man! Anything!!! Nope. That same fucking lineup that provides no lead in to your run producing hitters is there 1-2 every single game. You couldn’t just try something for a few days? It’s not like you are going to ruin anything we have going. Nothing is going!!!
- Garrett Stubbs – One crazy little subplot of the season is that Aaron Nola pitches much better with Garrett Stubbs behind the dish. I don’t know enough about battery relations to tell you why, but it is so. Why in the hell then did Donny have JT in the lineup with Nola on Wednesday? Nola had his worst outing in 2 months. Why man? Why???
- Kevin Long – It’s an overused adage, but to Kevin Long I’d ask “What is it you’d say you do here?” He had a reputation as some sort of hitting guru and maybe that works for Kyle Schwarber, but none of our players have made any improvement at the plate over the years. In fact, they all seem to have gotten worse. None are consistent in any way at all. That can mean one of two things: either Long doesn’t have any answers or no one is listening to him. Either way, what’s his point? I saw someone recently compare him to Kevin Patullo and the Eagles but if after last year’s offensive disaster, the Eagles kept him on for 5 more seasons. The blackmail this man has on the Phillies must be substantial. Anyone else in his situation would have been fired years ago and that is not an exaggeration; the hitting coach is usually the first guy fired in a slide and yet he’s survived. How did the collpase of 2024 happen with the Phillies bringing back the entire coaching staff?
I think I am one of the few who sees the Phillies spending $300m+ on payroll and not condemning them for not spending more. That’s not my bitch with ownership. I don’t care about all the ads and billboards making the team a walking phonebook either. What I do care about is the thirst for winning attempting to be quenched with sand. The Phillies need to make changes. Hell, they needed to make changes after 2024 when the team clearly died midseason. Something needed to happen. Nope. They ran it back. Then they ran it back again. They are probably going to run it back again next season. You can lament that there are not a ton of moves to make, but that’s not true. There are always moves to make, it’s just that no one in Phillies ownership has the stomach to make big moves other than spending money.
I was shocked last year when the Phillies brought back Rob Thomson. He was a great regular season manager who knew how to navigate the perils of 162 games. His in game strategy was brutal though and it lost us games. His bullpen use in the playoffs has been especially problematic. The only thing I could come up with as to why he stayed was because of the money. By keeping the Phillies even keeled and in the mix, he assured ownership that the park would be packed every day. Once that started to falter this season, he had to go. Why does Middleton wait so long to make changes?
By all reports, Dave Dombrowski is coming back next season. Dombo used to be an elite mind in baseball and has been to the World Series everywhere, but he isn’t providing an advantage anymore. This team needs new direction to try to steer it to the next competitive team. Yes, it will be hard to move any of these bad contracts, but something needs to be done to at least improve around the edges or the morale of the team. It is hard to watch the same guys fail the same team in the same ways every year. WE CAN’T KEEP DOING THIS!!!
- Spared: Cristopher Sanchez, Zack Wheeler, Jesus Luzardo, Kyle Schwarber, Andrew Painter, Jhoan Duran, Alex McFarlane, Derek Hill, Justin Crawford, Edmundo Sosa, Jonathan Bowlan ↩︎
Photo: John S. Middleton, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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