Blame it on London?

People will always look for a reason. You can just say this is a normal and meaningless slump, and the 21-22 stretch a fairly expected regression. But it would be foolish not to think that London (not just London but the cumulative travel around it) didn't cost them a couple games, and so did the injuries, and so did the All-Star breaks. If you believe in momentum.

Or it's the Merrifield Curse, which will be completed when he gets the GW hitting in the NLDS.

I do not blame the London trip for the team's decreased performance over roughly the last 40 games.

I think it is a combination of normal regression, tougher schedule, injuries and now integrating new teammates which leads to different roles.

The team were off to a historic start that was going to be very difficult to sustain over the full 162 schedule. The pitching especially was lights out, but the offense was also deadly with RISP.

Injuries have played a part. Walker, Turnbull and Suarez have been out a long with Realmuto, Turner, Marsh, Harper and Schwarber for periods of time.

Only Bohm, Stott, Rojas and Casty have stayed healthy for the full term so far and three of those hitters have struggled at the plate.

The competition in June and definitely July has been better. We have a tough west coast swing coming soon. We do get the Marlins & Nats after that, but then have to play a tougher August stretch. We'll earn the division for sure as neither ATL or NY are going to back down.

We now have Hays and Estevez to integrate into the lineup and staff. Rojas has been benched. SAD is gone. We'll also get guys back from injury and have to see if going with a 6 man rotation can work and how the lineup produces.

My worry of course is that Hays is simply not that good against right-handed pitching so we might as well play Rojas and get the improved defense. 3 days is too small a sample, but it has been over a year (first half of 2023) since Hays was good enough to play without a platoon.

Exactly why I was underwhelmed by that trade, but we'll see over a larger sample. DD was chasing him for several seasons so hopefully there is gold there somewhere..

Doesn't appear to have made the Muts worse ....

I don't think Hays will be playing against RHP by September 1 if he can't hit it. Seemed like a bad idea to begin with... just like Merrifield was.

If we don't make a trade today I assume we'll see Clemens or Dahl pretty quickly if Hays continues to struggle.

Well, I don't think that really matters, it's more about playing Rojas every day and Marsh in LF against RHP. But sure, once a week another lefty bat could play LF with Marsh in CF. Maybe twice if their defense isn't to bad.

Either way, they could use that second lefty bat over Wilson. I think it will certainly be Clemens. I don't imagine Dahl will get back on the 40 before September, if ever.

Is it 6pm yet? (it's actually past it where I am).

If we blame rest for how they fared after London, and after the AS break, maybe it's in our best interests to not win the division or at least not to win the playoff round bye.

Also wonder how much postseason runs take out of you. Wheeler and Nola pitched an extra two months it feels like the last two years and those extra games weren't exactly low-stress. And as for the hitters, maybe there was a bit of a letup once they got the big lead and knew how many more games it'd take to just get to the playoffs already. Don't think they live and die with each regular season result anywhere near as much as we do.

Plenty of people have advanced just that theory about playoffs, to the point where changes were proposed and teams practiced differently. Of course we need about 30 years of evidence to really draw a conclusion about that specifically. I don't know if momentum is real but players can get cold or lose their rhythm and you see the same thing with guys coming back from injury, where it's more than just recovering from the ailment. And they eventually get hot again... Unless it's October.

But in this case with the Phillies it was lack of rest, not more rest. An insane amount of travel over many time zones and many weeks, both before and after the UK trip, further compounded for the All-Stars a few weeks later. Rest disrupts routine but so does extra travel and lack of rest