Patience is not an easy thing to preach in the last week of June. But that’s where the Phillies are. Time is the only thing that can solve their issues. The only reinforcements they need are already on the roster. They are Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. Their salvation lies within.
We’ve reached the point of the baseball calendar where the buyers assess their needs and the sellers assess their best chance at exploiting them.
The bad news is that the Phillies have a lot of needs. The good news is that they already have the players who can fill them.
They need Bryce Harper to get hot. They need Trea Turner to get right. They need Aaron Nola to peel himself off the wall he ran into last postseason. In the meantime, they need to stop running themselves out of so many innings.
If all of that happens, they’ll be fine. If none of it happens, there isn’t a deal out there that will make them fine. With one month to go before the Major League Baseball trade deadline, the Phillies’ only legitimate strategy is to wait and see.
1. The only thing missing from Harper’s game is his power. That’s happened before. When it comes, it will come loudly.
The biggest reason to believe in the Phillies is the knowledge that Harper’s power is going to come.
He’s a guy who spent an offseason with an arm in a sling and is still in the process of getting his timing and bat speed back. It isn’t anything deeper than that. You saw it in the eighth inning on Sunday when he just missed parking a meatball of a Vinny Natoli slider in the center field ivy. You saw it a couple of innings earlier when he sent a chest-high fastball to the edge of the outfield grass in left field. This is why the numbers are what they are: three home runs, 13 total extra-base hits, 199 plate appearances.
Everything else is there: the contact, the walks, the on-base percentage. The only thing missing is the power. Harper’s home run percentage is a third of what it usually is. The extra-base hit percentage is about 60% of his career average.
Harper’s power outage isn’t anything new. Last year, he returned from thumb surgery and had just 10 extra-base hits in 155 plate appearances from Aug. 26 to Game 1 of the Phillies’ wild-card series against the Cardinals. Then, he unleashed hell. His home run off Miles Mikolas in the second inning of the Phillies’ 2-0 wild-card clincher jump-started a 16-game tear in which he hit six home runs and seven doubles in 67 plate appearances through the end of the postseason.
The same thing happened in 2021: three extra-base hits in 49 plate appearances after a two-week absence. Then: 59 extra-base hits, including 27 home runs, in his last 388 plate appearances of the season.
It will happen again. The only the question is when. Right now, the advanced metrics paint a clear picture of a guy who is playing catch-up. Literally and figuratively. He’s hitting the ball to the opposite field more often and pulling the ball less often. He’s hitting way more ground balls and way fewer fly balls.
A sampling:
— Harper’s groundball/flyball ratio: 1.44 in 2023 (career: 1.11)
— Pull percentage: 34.7% in 2023 (career: 38.7%)
—Opposite field percentage: 31.5% in 2023 (career: 26.4%)
Just wait.
2. There are some signs that Nola is on the verge of a breakout.
His fastball velocity has ticked up over the last month. In his first nine starts, it averaged 91.5 mph, according to FanGraphs. Over his last seven starts, it has averaged 92.8 mph. Over his last five starts: 93 mph.
Velocity is more of a leading indicator than it is a cause or a cure. Keep in mind the context: This is a guy coming off a career-high workload with an offseason that was shortened by a month. He was clearly out of gas at the end of last year’s postseason run. Think back to 2009, when Cole Hamels followed up his playoff heroics with a (relatively) abysmal campaign.
Maybe that’s how it will remain for Nola. But I remember talking to him back in spring training about his approach to the offseason in light of the high workload and short turnaround between 2022 and 2023. He said he didn’t think it would be an issue for him, but he also acknowledged that he was in uncharted territory. Starting pitchers are creatures of habit. The workload, the short turnaround, the pitch clock — these are new variables for a guy who has been as steady as they come since breaking into the majors. There’s a chance that his body is just now getting to the point where it typically is by the end of April.
The bottom-line results aren’t there yet. But Nola’s strikeout rate has jumped from a concerning 6.9 K/9 in his first nine starts to 11.0 K/9 over his last seven. He’s generating more swings-and-misses. In his last two starts, his groundball-to-flyball ratio is double what it was in the previous six starts.
3. Turner may already be back to being the guy the Phillies need.
He certainly was a force in the Phillies’ 7-6 win over the Mets on Sunday. His home run off Carlos Carrasco in the first inning snapped a 16-game drought. But he has a .343 on-base percentage during that stretch, thanks in large part to a strikeout rate that has normalized toward his career average. On Sunday, he reached base three times and manufactured a run all by himself, swiping back-to-back bags and then scoring on a wild throw from home. His exit velocity has seen a marked improvement over the last month: 91.1 mph off the bat, up from 88.7 in April and May.
It’s been a strange start to the season for Turner. But you’d much rather be counting on guys like him to be the guys they’ve always been than you would hoping to capture lighting in a bottle elsewhere.
A lot of things have broken right so far. Craig Kimbrel looks like a legitimate closer again. Nick Castellanos looks like a legitimate five-hole hitter. Bryson Stott and Brandon Marsh have both become capable big league hitters. The Phillies are 35-27 since their 5-10 start. They’ve done it without any sort of hot stretch from three of the guys on their roster who can get the hottest.
That kind of thing tends to change in a hurry.
