The Phillies: A Dark Age Survival Guide

On accepting and enjoying the coming baseball apocalypse in Philadelphia.

Mets vs Phillies Citizens Bank Park 5-31-14 by fressica (via flickr creative commons)

On accepting and enjoying the coming baseball apocalypse in Philadelphia.

For the third straight year, it is June and baseball season is already over. The Phillies are terrible, and the worst is yet to come. Until the team replaces its shockingly inept management team, there is nothing but losing in the near future. Can you enjoy them anyway?

I — The Problem of the Facts

Loving this team requires first facing reality. The Phillies were expected to be profoundly wretched this year, and with the team currently on pace to finish the season 66-96, they are delivering on that promise. The funny thing is that in some ways the team has caught a few breaks.

Second baseman Chase Utley — a deserved fan favorite — is having his finest and healthiest season since 2010, shortstop Jimmy Rollins is aging gracefully and even first baseman Ryan Howard has managed to stay on the field. What he has achieved while doing so is another story that is better addressed later but with Howard you take what you can get.

Before hitting the DL with a hamstring injury, young third baseman Cody Asche had held his own in his sophomore season, and free agent addition Marlon Byrd is on pace to replicate the superb 2013 that got him a two-year deal in the first place. Closer Jonathan Papelbon — he of the absurd, untradable contract and bad attitude — has miraculously recovered enough of his effectiveness to possibly make himself interesting to contenders at the deadline. Ruben Amaro took a lot of heat for re-signing Carlos Ruiz but so far Chooch has remained the solid-but-unspectacular backstop he has been for years.

Do you feel better? Because that about does it for good news about the 2014 Phillies.

Some cold, hard facts: As of June 9th, the Phillies have the third-worst run-differential in baseball and are closing fast on being the worst in the sport. They are 12-19 at home, and have already completed the easiest portion of their schedule, with dozens of games remaining just against divisional powers Washington and Atlanta. Bull Durham’s Nuke Laloosh once famously said, “This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball.” The Phillies are distinguished by their inability to excel at any of those three core, Lalooshian elements of baseball.

Their relentless badness is admirably symmetric: They have scored the fifth fewest runs in the National League, while allowing the third most. The offense has rung up 2.8 Wins Above Replacement, good for 29th in baseball, while the pitchers have fared slightly better with 3.2, which ranks 26th. The team is also 28th in Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) with -28 and 26th in Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), which basically measures how many batted balls a team’s fielders actually get to.

They have been shut out eight times already, and were recently no-hit at home by the aging Josh Beckett. During a recent weekend series with the wretched Mets, the two teams played three straight extra inning games that might serve as the 39 least-desired innings of baseball ever played by two major league teams. A Fangraphs reader and Mets fan recently commented, “I wish the Mets could play the Phillies all year!” and writer Jeff Sullivan responded, “Everyone wishes everyone could play the Phillies all year.”

This is a team that does nothing well, and the scariest part is that they have not hit anything close to rock bottom yet.

The Phillies have, essentially, two kinds of problems.

The first and most straightforward is that the players on their major-league roster are not really good enough for the team to contend, and there is very little help on the way at the upper levels of their minor league system. Beyond Byrd, the outfield is an ugly mess, with Domonic Brown regressing back to his pre-2013 iteration. He’s been so bad, sporting a .218/.268/.322 triple-slash line, that the Inquirer’s David Murphy has speculated about a return to Lehigh Valley. Ben Revere, acquired before the 2013 season to be the centerfielder of the future, has a .298 on-base percentage that just won’t play in the major leagues even with his stellar defense. The pitching story is not much happier. While Cole Hamels has bounced back from his spring training shoulder injury to look reasonably sharp, the rest of the rotation does not inspire confidence. Kyle Kendrick has continued to gamely eat mediocre innings, but AJ Burnett — signed to a contract so convoluted that he is essentially untradable — is pitching through a major injury that will require surgical attention at some point, and #5 starter Roberto Hernandez has been league-average at best.

Last summer the Phillies finally took the plunge of exploring the international free agent market, signing a Cuban right-hander named Miguel Alfredo Gonzalez to join their rotation. Initially Gonzalez was offered a huge deal, but apparently the team didn’t like what they saw in the medical evaluation of Gonzalez’s arm and gave him a much smaller, 3-year $12 million contract. He looked lost in spring training, got hurt and then got hurt again, making him look increasingly like a lost cause.

Then there’s Ryan Howard. Now in the third year of his franchise-altering 5-year, $125 million contract (that also includes a $23 million club option for 2017, or a mind-boggling $10 million buyout), the big guy is a fraction of the player he once was. While he has clubbed 11 home runs and driven in 41, he’s also hitting .233 and sporting an OPS+ of 97. He can no longer really hit lefties or righties, as his career-long platoon split has narrowed by virtue of his inability to clobber anything but mistake pitches. He can also no longer blame the leg problems that derailed his career in the first place beginning in the 2011 postseason. He’s healthy. He’s just a pretty bad player. As someone who likes and admires Howard, I must say it’s nice to watch him play the game without restraint for the first time in years. But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a very highly paid player who is both healthy and unproductive, unintentionally fulfilling the prophecy that the delusional Amaro made when Howard signed his extension in 2010: “Ryan's basically ready to play 162 games. I think that means a lot.” Amaro was right about one thing — it does mean a lot, just not what he thought at the time. It means the Phillies are stuck with him for the duration of that contract.

But it’s the fate of star pitcher Cliff Lee that should be causing Phillies fans to drown themselves to death in a vat of Greg Luzinski’s barbecue sauce. Since signing with the Phillies prior to the 2011 campaign, Lee has been one of the best pitchers in baseball, compiling a 37-25 record and throwing more than 700 high-value innings. So it was particularly disturbing when Lee was shelved with elbow problems last month, especially since he is one of the team’s most attractive trade chips. Lee has been throwing baseballs professionally since the year 2000, and in doing so has racked up more than 2,500 total innings without ever suffering a major arm injury. With the entire sport mired in the trenches of the Great Elbow Ligament War of 2014, it has never been more obvious that pitchers can break at any moment. Like, while I was typing this sentence, somewhere in some team’s system, a pitcher tore his elbow ligament and made an appointment with Dr. James Andrews.

II — The Problem of Ruben Amaro, Jr.

Is there is anyone influential in baseball to whom this basic truth remains non-obvious? If you guessed Ruben Amaro, you get a signed Mike Adams jersey. Because the Phillies have a really big and really important second problem called Ruben Amaro, Jr. It has been obvious since somewhere midway through the 2012 season that the Phillies’ roster needed to be completely gutted and rehabbed.

Yet Amaro remains either unwilling to face reality, unable to get what he perceives as fair trade value for his veterans, or perhaps secretly restrained by his overlords from blowing up the team. No one on the Phillies could have fetched more in a trade over the past 18 months than Cliff Lee, who despite his $25 million a year contract would have been worth every penny to a contender. The way these things work these days is either you eat some of that money in a trade and get some prospects back, or you effectively give the contract away for smiles, gratitude and some B-level double-A talent. Bad baseball teams rebuild in part by trading away players that won’t be around to help them by the time they get better, in exchange for players that will.

For instance, there are now three former Phillies farmhands starting for the Houston Astros, whose wretchedness will soon be a thing of the past. But now that Lee is hurt, it is possible that the Phillies will not be able to trade him at all, and will end up on the hook for his last two seasons of slow, painful Roy Halladay-like decline.

This is a shame, because while the Phillies minor league system has actually gotten a bit better over the past year, it could still use an infusion of high-end talent of the sort that might come back in a deal for Cliff Lee (or Cole Hamels). In a 19-year-old shortstop named J.P. Crawford, the Phillies are currently sporting their first true impact talent in the minor leagues for since Domonic Brown looked like a budding star four years ago in Double-A. Crawford is hitting .314 with a .412 on-base percentage in low-A ball, and scouts love his combination of superb defense, speed and potential power.

Third base prospect Maikel Franco remains the only potential all-star positional talent in the upper minors, and he projects as an above-average player with serious power but defensive limitations and plate discipline problems. Even the pitching pipeline looks a bit grim, with Reading lefty Jesse Biddle projecting as a mid-rotation starter if everything bounces right, and little else on the way after new draft pick Aaron Nola. The team just called up a promising bullpen arm named Ken Giles, but if you have to reach into your relief prospects to get excited, you’ve got serious problems.

The Phillies organizational philosophy has always been to bet on high-ceiling talent rather than taking the safer and lower-ceiling college players that might fall to them. They’ve doubled down on this strategy throughout the Glory Years run that began in 2001, since they’ve often picked late in the draft anyway.

This led the team to gamble on what scouts call “toolsy” players — guys that can run and throw hard and swing the bat quickly but who lack experience or acumen in, say, hitting an off-speed pitch or taking good routes to a fly ball that’s hit to them. Most of the toolsy players the Phillies drafted are now out of baseball (like ’04 first-round pick Greg Golson), on their way out of baseball (like ’08 first-rounder Anthony Hewitt) or playing not all that well for other organizations (Blue Jays outfielder Anthony Gose comes to mind).

The Phillies have gotten so bad at drafting ballplayers, in fact, that the last time a player called up from its system after Cole Hamels contributed a season of more than three Wins Above Replacement was Vance Worley in 2011. And you know what? This can happen. Drafting and developing prospects isn’t a science. In this year’s amateur player draft, the Phillies changed course for the first time in living memory, drafting a college pitcher named Aaron Nola with the seventh pick in the draft, a guy most scouts agree will probably be the first player from that draft to reach the majors.

The trouble with the Phillies isn’t that they don’t have any smart people working for them. It’s that they are led by a general manager who should have been fired three years ago, and whose continued enjoyment of the role is an ongoing travesty. The full, dispiriting history of Amaro’s reign bears no retelling here. But one of the most frustrating parts of his tenure is how easily other teams seem to be able to turn around their seemingly hopeless situations. For instance, a year ago the Marlins had traded the core of their team to the Blue Jays for prospects, and went on to have a can’t-look-away train wreck of a season, finishing 62-100 while giving thousands of plate appearances to washed-up veterans like former Phillie Placido Polanco and never-going-to-make-it young players like shortstop Adeny Hechevarria. The team’s abrupt disposal of its veteran core led fans to completely avoid the Marlins’ gleaming new stadium, and you could have sat behind home plate for most of the summer for less than the cost of a beer. It looked pretty bleak. But amazingly, the Marlins have already turned it around with savvy trades for young core pieces like pitcher Nate Eovaldi and the promotion of cornerstone prospects Christian Yelich, Marcel Ozuna and Jose Fernandez. The latter, one of the most exciting pitchers to emerge in years, tore his elbow ligament in May and yet the Marlins have such depth that they are hanging around the NL East race and look to be a force in the division for the foreseeable future. The Marlins are owned by a world-class toolbox by the name of Jeffrey Loria, but their management team is among the game’s best.

An even more extreme example is the Houston Astros, who you may remember as the team whose major-league roster the Phillies looted in 2010-2011 in exchange for prospects. Astros GM Jeff Luhnow inherited such an overwhelming field disaster that he had to completely tear the team down, and the Astros responded by losing more than 100 games for three consecutive years in 2011-2013, one of the worst stretches of baseball in major league history. Last year’s team went 51-111 and was one of the three or four worst outfits to stink up a field in the last 50 years. But the strategy was deliberate — gut the roster and finish last, thereby selecting first in the amateur player draft year after year. And now, having graduated a slew of top prospects to the major league team (and sitting on probably a dozen more), including several who were drafted by the Amaro regime, the Astros are on the up-and-up and are already significantly better than the Phillies.

Unfortunately, the Phillies have almost certainly missed their chance to productively trade veteran depth for top prospects, unless they want to send Cole Hamels packing and eat part of his contract. The existing situation would be difficult enough for some hotshot visionary general manager, let alone Ruben Amaro, who can’t GM his way out of a paper bag.

No one seems to know quite what Amaro’s plan is. Are they keeping the team barely afloat to please their malevolent Comcast overlords heading into the new television contract? Is Amaro even trying to move veterans for prospects? Will he be allowed to oversee this summer’s sell-off, or will ownership finally take stock of the disaster’s epic scale and bring in a new management team?

The bad news, sports fans, is that no matter who is running the Phillies in August, they have some lean years ahead — probably three in a best-case scenario, and add a year for every six months that Amaro keeps his job. There’s not going to be a lot of help on the way in free agency, as teams have taken to locking up their standout young players for as a long as a decade, and the cream of the minor league system is years away. The best days of the ’08 holdovers are long behind them. At best, we are in the middle of another great Phillies dark age, and at worst, it is just beginning.

So why keep watching?

III — The Problem of Hopelessly Loving a Bad Team

Recently, Good Phight blogger Liz Roscher returned from a hiatus to ask why she keeps coming back for more from this Phillies team: “Why rejoin this collection of clearly insane and damaged people who watch the Phillies every day and then write about them? Why subject myself to a team that’s been built by people living in a baseball world that doesn’t exist anymore?”

That’s a great question. Like me, you have probably been told, during one of your life’s lowest moments, that suffering builds character. Some of you — the ones who arrived during the third inning during the Glory Years and left by the seventh if things weren’t going well — have probably already moved on to other pursuits with your free time, because you almost certainly suffer enough from work, or from life’s bad breaks, or from the basic injustice of American society, or from some sad, broken marriage and don’t feel like adding to the already-towering sum total of your life’s misery by watching the hollowed-out but extremely well-paid shell of Ryan Howard try to hit left-handed pitching. And this is all well and good, because most people are simply not going to enjoy going to the ballpark to watch the hometown nine get embarrassed night after night, with a bleak future of losing unfolding across the horizon like a slow summer storm. In a few years you’ll unearth your crumpled Halladay jersey from the back of your closet, think briefly about the good old days, and then you’ll go run that marathon, or head to the farmer’s market, or whatever it is that normal people do on summer days.

It’s not only that the team is bad — it’s that it’s run by incompetents who in addition to delivering a bad product on the field are also doing really terrible things like ratting college players who don’t sign with them out to the NCAA — itself perhaps the most morally bankrupt sports cartel in the world. So I almost envy the casual fan who can just walk away. But the truth is that there still are certain kinds of pleasures to maintaining an interest in a terrible team through the dark ages. I reached out to friends of mine who have lived and died with teams that at various points in their history were among the most pitiful and poorly run franchises in sports — the Chicago Cubs and the Oakland Raiders. (I was unable to unearth a living fan of the Los Angeles Clippers.) During their dry spells, these teams were distinguished not just by poor play, but by Major League-type leadership situations that often made it seem like ownership was intentionally running the team into the ground.

Living in Chicago, I have access to the world’s finest example of a fanbase that has never abandoned a team. The Chicago Cubs, as you may know, have not won the World Series since 1908 and have not even played in the Fall Classic since 1945. Their few moments of glory, like the team’s 2003 playoff run, have been marked by last-second, excruciating heartbreak. And yet their stadium is jammed out most days with loyal fans (and, it must be admitted, a lot of tourists and people just there to party). But the team purposely tests its fans’ loyalty with incredibly high ticket prices and a game-day atmosphere that management seems to have orchestrated deliberately to turn going to Cubs games into a drunken frat party.

Cubs fan Derick Loafmann says that “The promotion of Wrigley as a party means that the organization can keep selling tickets at higher prices and not have to worry about whether or not they’ve built a team people want to watch play baseball.” The Cubs also once moved ticket sales from an in-house operation to a ticket sales company that was also owned by the team, raising prices and as Derick points out, effectively “scalping their own tickets.”

Yet Derick says one of the joys of watching the Cubs flail all these years has been the seasons where they unexpectedly made a run, like 2003, and in rooting for players that weren’t expected to be good or who are not, in fact, very good. You develop attachments to these marginal players — attachments you’ll remember fondly someday when the team actually gets good. Another friend, Christian Pedone, calls this the “right way player” — someone who puts his head down and plays hard, a guy you can get behind no matter how bad the team is.

Christian has the misfortune of loving the Oakland Raiders, a football team run for years by owner Al Davis “as if it was Pyongyang.” Davis hired the wrong coaches, refused to exercise any patience and would often “swoop in on Fridays to drastically change the game plan for a Sunday game.” The Raiders have been bad since their 2002 Super Bowl appearance, and Christian says, in the NFL “being bad for a decade takes poor luck and prolonged and vigorous incompetence.” But even in the midst of a decade of futility, with no break in sight, he enjoys watching “right way” guys like former Raiders punter Shane Lechler.

After the Phils finished off the Rays in that weird, two-day Game 5 in 2008, my friend Bryan Moody and I sat at the long lost West Philly bar Abbraccio and made toast after toast not to Hamels and company, but to all the Phillies who endured the losing but weren’t around for the championship. The “right way” players. Ricky Otero. Rico Brogna. Mickey Morandini. Mike Lieberthal. Kevin Jordan. Wayne Gomes. Jose Mesa. Ricky Bottalico.

These are names that probably mean nothing to the casual fan but they are guys who sacrificed themselves on the altar of pointlessness for the diehards. I loved watching them play even when the Phillies were awful and played their home games in a Stalinist mausoleum.

These Phillies have guys like that too. The remaining core of the ’08 championship team — Utley, Rollins, Hamels, Howard and Chooch — are all gamers that you should appreciate watching even with their diminished skills. Ben Revere may not be great, but he plays hard and he seems like a nice dude. Kyle Kendrick is not getting a plaque in Cooperstown, but he’s our kind of player, someone who has worked hard for years and achieved a level of success far beyond what his underlying skills would suggest. Whatever Cody Asche turns into, he is this generation’s Rico Brogna. He’ll be the answer to a trivia question about who manned third base the year the Phillies began their streak of 90-loss seasons. And when those players are succeeded by the ones who bring home the glory, it creates, as Derick says, a “thrill that can only be gained by enduring so much failure.”

Losing can also be a kind of performance, and one that can be enjoyed if you’re in the right frame of mind. I’m not sure I ever loved the Phillies more than when they arrived at the 1997 all-star break at 24-61 and on pace to give the ’62 Mets a run for the all-time loss record. Some of you may be too young to remember, but between the fluke ’93 pennant winner and the beginning of the glory years in 2001, the Phillies were really, really terrible. Bad teams find ways to make losing quite memorable.

Derick recounted for me an early-oughts interleague game in which the Cubs lost to the Rangers on a wild pitch by Jeff Fassero. As he puts it, “We lose with style and anti-grace.” If you’re a Phillies fan of a certain age, you may remember losing back-to-back 13-inning games against the Yankees at the Vet in the summer of 2001, the second on a balk by reliever Ed Vosberg in the 13th inning.

I was there in the cheap seats with my brother, and I’ll happily take that weird memory with me to the grave. So look on the bright side: The Ben Revere, Ethan Martin, David Buchanan and Cody Asche-led Phillies are going to lose some games in ways that you’ll never forget. And who knows — if Hamels and Lee are spun away to contenders, next year’s team could be historically bad.

Maybe I’m just a sadist, but I’d tune in every night to watch the Phillies chase 120 losses. It would be epic.

There’s also the matter of convenience. While it can be a blast going to the park when it’s sold out every night and the team is in the thick of it year after year, it can also get old, and close, and crowded. You get tired of having to hit up Stubhub just to get in the park, or being forced to settle for standing room tickets on a hot summer day. During the Glory Years, having a friend with season tickets was like knowing someone with a car in New York City. Particularly in the age of the digital secondary market for tickets, loving a bad team means being able to score a last-minute, choice seat for a game, and then settling in to appreciate the nuances. In the late 90s and early 2000s, you could show up for one of Curt Schilling’s starts at the Vet five minutes before gametime and then sit anywhere you could afford, or better yet, pay $5 for a seat in the nosebleeds and hang out with the lunatics in the Wolf Pack, Person’s People or Padilla’s Flotilla. Those long, languid summer afternoons were tremendous fun, especially when you’ve yet to turn 21 and the city’s nightlife is basically verboten.

And even bad teams have enjoyable rivalries. Christian told me that he refers to the Raiders games against hated rivals in Denver and Kansas City as “clear-the-calendar days.” Or as he puts it, “My optimal 2014 football season is 2-14 with wins in Denver and KC. Coaching staff fired. First pick in the draft.” Good or bad, when the Mets come to town, Citizens Bank Park turns into a chaotic circus — not courtroom-in-the-basement crazy like Eagles but raucous — as Phillies and Mets fans stake out their territory. In a 100-win season like 2011, every game is potentially a blast, but when you’re losing 90-plus contests a year, you need to do a little homework to see when your nemesis is in town, or to check on when stars like Mike Trout, Andrew McCutcheon or Yasiel Puig will be coming through. Yes — loving a bad baseball team sometimes means your happiest moments will happen watching other teams’ all-stars pummel your heroes.

If you’ve gotten this far into this article, you’re either my parents or you love the Phillies with a passion that borders on the divine. You well-up when you see the first pitch of the first spring training game. Everyone has read Moneyball, but you’ve read Ball Four and The Lords of the Realm and you have a subscription to The Baseball Prospectus. You could tell me the name of the backup shortstop on the ’93 Phillies (that would be Juan Bell, non-crazy people). You watched the live coverage of Veterans Stadium getting demolished and it made you weep. You still have the free hat from one of the pre-Glory Years opening days.

It may be five years from now, or 25, but one of these seasons, the Phillies are going to win it all again. And while your drunk friends will be kind of happy, you will feel the kind of once-in-a-decade ecstasy that you can only experience after extended and devoted suffering.

So stop pitying yourself, tune in and put yourself back out there. It’s summer. And the Phillies — your expensive, awful, hopeless, mismanaged, beloved Phillies — have a baseball game to play.

____________________________

Photo Credits: Phillie Fanatic by fressica via Flickr, Ryan Howard by Ksebruce via Flickr, Ruben Amaro by ElCapitanBSC via Flickr, Cole Hamels by Geoff Livingston via Flickr.