The firing of Joe Girardi by the Philadelphia Phillies Friday underscores the team’s failure to grasp any of the subtleties of team-building.
Girardi was let loose with his team sitting a disappointing 22-29 and third in the NL East. The team spent nearly $190 million just this off-season to upgrade its offense without appreciable result.
Philadelphia Phillies need to learn their lesson
The problem was that Phillies President Dave Dombrowski and general manager Sam Fuld committed almost all of that money to add offensive elements the club already had plenty of, namely one-dimensional sluggers. They signed Nick Castellanos for five years at $100 million and Kyle Schwarber for four years at $79 million.
Both players fit what might be called the Phillies model: low-average, low-contact, high-slug guys who don’t play the field especially well.
The Phillies already had an abundance of such players headlined by Rhys Hoskins and Alec Bohm.
What they needed this off-season was pitching and contact. Instead they chased slug, the most likely commodity to disappear on short notice.
As a result, in 51 games through Thursday the Phillies have scored three runs or fewer one-third of the time while allowing five runs or more two dozen times. Those markers are significant: 4.5 runs is the standard for success or failure in the modern game.
The Phillies fail in that most basic although often under-appreciated skill: putting the ball in play. Schwarber is hitting .192, a fact that should be no surprise given his career .233 average. He, Hoskins and Castellanos are all averaging more than one strikeout per game. The team literally averages a strikeout per inning.
Because the Phillies can still slug, the club’s run production – 4.5 per game – is treading water. But treading water is not what Phillies fans expected in exchange for a $229 million payroll, a total that ranks fourth behind only the Mets, Dodgers and Yankees. That gets back to pitching. Phillies arms are also giving up 4.5 runs per game. That may not fully explain being seven games underwater, but at best what Phillies management has assembled is a .500 cast.
The early data suggests that across much of MLB, contact is coming back into vogue in 2022. Through 50 games, the strikeout rate is actually declining, albeit modestly, from 23 percent in 2021 to a 22 percent pace thus far this season. If that decline continues, it would be the first one percent reduction in strikeouts since 2005.
Yet Philadelphia Phillies batters are trending in the opposite direction. They are on pace to whiff 23.8 percent of the time, up from 23.0 percent one year ago.
The mantra among the game’s intelligentsia has until this year swung heavily toward the concept of power, and strikeouts be damned. Phillies management seems not to have gotten the memo that ideas regarding the importance of contact are shifting. The firing of Girardi is unlikely to help. It’s hard to score runs without hitting the ball.