If this first weekend was any indication, the Phillies are going to be an entertaining team this year… for all of the wrong reasons.
The Atlanta Braves will face the Phillies a lot over the first 2 months of the year. Usually, these encounters are spread out better, but after this season opener, the Phillies are back to Atlanta again on April 16-18 before the Braves finally go north to see them at the end of the month.
Even after that, Atlanta heads back to Citizens Bank Park for a series from May 21-23. So that’s a total of 12 meetings over the first 50 games of the year.
Hopefully by then, new manager Gabe Kapler will have figured out exactly how to run his ballclub… and maybe that realize that Spring Training is over.
How so? Let’s just say that there’s been a rough start for him:
- THURSDAY: 6 pitchers used; great criticism for removing his #1 pitcher early – and almost solely because of the “3rd time through the order” metric… especially as it applied to the next hitter: Freddie Freeman. We know how well that worked for him.
- FRIDAY: 9 pitchers used (over 11 innings). Sure, they won the game, but only because of 3 errors by the Braves and a poor slide that led to a call that had to be overturned on appeal in the bottom of the 8th inning.
- SATURDAY: 6 pitchers used… er, actually 5 pitchers and one position player, to be precise. The game was a meltdown: 4 Philly errors, 15-2 loss, and the awkward scene of bringing in a pitcher that apparently had not been notified to warm up.
Note to Philadelphia bullpen dwellers: keep your glove close by and at least keep yourself limber throughout the game.
What Did They Expect?
I was going to write today about the bullpen warm-up fiasco that got Brian Snitker a Hall Pass to be excused from the rest of the game for the 2nd time in three attempts. But others have already written enough on that, and this is frankly a much bigger thing.
Kapler was hired specifically because of his skills with baseball’s advanced stats: the analytics. This is who he is. It’s not like he’s making poor decisions because the game is overwhelming him. He’s making poor decisions because the numbers are cold and unfeeling… they don’t accurately reflect the flow of a game or how to gauge whether a pitcher is struggling and so far, he is completely separating game flow from the stat sheet.
Aaron Nola was not struggling Thursday afternoon when he was relieved. At 68 pitches and just one solid hit off him (the Inciarte double to lead off the 6th), he could have easily finished the 6th and started a 7th inning. Even had Freeman homered off of him instead. Why? Because the Braves’ hitters were struggling themselves against Nola.
But Kapler is different. Note this evaluation as his hire was being announced (longer than I like to go with an outside quote, but it’s all very instructive):
"He has 39,000 followers on Twitter. He has written for Baseball Prospectus, the industry’s analytics hub. He worked in player development for Tampa Bay after his career ended. He became an analyst for Fox Sports. On his lifestyle website, filled with testimonials from current and retired players, he once wrote: “Writing strengthens humans.”So does, in his mind, the search for new information. He will rely upon analytics to make dugout decisions.“Teaching baseball players about new performance metrics is not the lesson here,” Kapler wrote in 2013. “Instead, the lesson is embracing education. Thinking that, because we play or played the game, we know the game best is a dangerous proposition.”"
Wow. That’s… interesting. It tells me that Kapler has a way that he wants to proceed and that it’s not going to be ‘traditional’. If the numbers tell him something, he’s going to act on that factoid, and his players had better understand that this is simply how he wants to play the game.
Look: I’m not against using advanced stats to assist a team in recognizing that there are trends that will benefit them. When properly applied, such numbers can truly be beneficial.
I am, however, questioning this notion of driving a significant portion of your calls by the charts and graphs while seemingly ignoring what you can plainly see happening on the field.
Small Sample Sizes?
My knee-jerk reaction to this is that all of this is probably well and good if he had a really good team around him. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
More from Tomahawk Take
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- Atlanta Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos’ views on the offseason so far
- Braves News: Dansby goes to the Cubs, prospect rankings, more
- The Paradox of Dansby Swanson
- Report: Dansby Swanson to sign seven year deal with Chicago Cubs
The Phillies have about half a rotation (after Nola: Arrieta isn’t there yet and Eikoff will be nursing a lat injury through the end of May) and a very suspect bullpen that the Braves exposed for all the world to see.
If they had more hitting than just Carlos Santana, Scott Kingery and Rhys Hoskins, then maybe that’s something, but I am also wondering how some of those players will be able to get in – and stay in – a groove when they are in and out of the starting lineup so much.
Again, analytics is (are?) dictating those changes, too. You could perhaps argue that because Kapler’s team is short on star power that he needs the numbers to get the most out of them. In that case, perhaps all of this mayhem over the past 3 days can be chalked up to Small Sample Sizes and fluke events.
Maybe. But don’t forget: the Phils were an eyelash away from being swept.
So for all those guessing that Philly might be able to sneak in to 2nd place in the NL East and compete for a Wild Card spot in an otherwise weakened division… you might want to recheck your numbers.