GDT 6/22/19 Miami Marlins (Hernandez, E) @ Philadelphia Phillies (Velasquez)

[Philsmania]

Also Realmuto and Segura look like great additions. Meanwhile Santana is mashing with the Indians, Crawford is putting it together with the Mariners. Alfaro isn’t much worse than Realmuto with the Marlins.

Players come to die in Philly and then take off when they leave. Some of it has to be due to our batting philosophy. We play in a hitters park, have some power hitters, and have one of the lowest homerun totals in the league.

You nailed it.

[miker]

Vince has been in the bullpen. They were probably hoping he could go five innings and he did. Analytics did not play a role.

[Philsmania]

I would welcome RAJ back with open arms right now. He brought more winning than the Dartmouth Dunce ever did.

[allentown]

We are not at the point where prospects should be traded to improve this team. This season is rapidly sliding away and the team has too many holes for a quick fix. Go all in and the team guarantees not a return of the golden age years of 2007 to 2012 but a return of the dark ages we hoped we had just left. We need to develop major league above average contributors. Realmuto has been better than Alfaro this year, primarily because he's good defensively, while Alfaro is a negative. With Segura, we got a SS for the first almost two months of the season. Since then Crawford has been the better guy. I never expected this season to be 'over' by early July, but it looks like that will be the case.

Inadequate talent on team or are we still behind the rest of baseball on analytics and what we are doing is hurting us, as it did on D last season. I still think a big FA deal this season was the right thing to do. I still think we chose the wrong guy.

I keep reading how we need to add a starting pitcher. I think the SP has been the strength of the team recently. I just don't see how a trade for a SP has any hope of rescuing this team.

[andyb]

Vince has been in the bullpen. They were probably hoping he could go five innings and he did. Analytics did not play a role.

Yeah. He was not stretched out so I think they were probably thinking 3-4 though he was good on pitch count today. 80 pitches next time and no limit the time after most likely if he stays in the rotation.

[zambonir]

Rock bottom has certainly arrived (and we may indeed have signed the wrong guy).

[HopeSpringsEternal]

we may indeed have signed the wrong guy).

Kapler instead of Wathan?

This downward spiral could have begun when McCutchen went down, but Bruce delayed it a few games. Since then, it has been a team effort to go from a 3-1/2 game lead to 5 games back in the span of 3 weeks. Cant pin it on one guy.

[allentown]

No, can't pin it on one guy. Also can't fix it with a July trade or two.

[schillingfan]

I still feel it’s partly bad luck. Great start by VV, bullpen blows game. Great start by Nola, no hitting. Two solo home runs, guys on base, no big hits to bring them in. McCutchen was a huge loss, The team is out of sync. When things are going good, confidence is high. I’m not giving up.

[julio]

I would welcome RAJ back with open arms right now. He brought more winning than the Dartmouth Dunce ever did.

This post just oozes what I think of as classic American anti-intellectualism. A pejorative nickname, mocking the fact that Klentak matriculated at an institution most Americans couldn't hope to get into, and couldn't survive at if they did. I understand you're frustrated...but this kind of sneering hostility to academic achievement just typifies the worst of our society.

[zambonir]

I was more shocked by the profanity! (Which I'm not against, just used to be impossible on old board).

I seriously can't see how Kapler is to blame for anything really. We can point to things and pretend we know that he did something wrong (handling pitchers or not benching Segura) but every manager does stuff that people don't agree with, and does stuff that costs wins while also doing stuff that works.

But at the end of the day, for now, he's not getting enough out of the talent that is here/healthy, and it's hard to see him getting a third year if there isn't improvement. Hopefully there still will be..

Angry/unhappy fans always want a scalp but there is nothing Kapler is doing that doesn't come from the GM too. If they replaced him with Wathan Wathan would still be expected to do what the analytics say. And if chemistry is an issue now why wasn't it in April or May? Losing Andrew McCutchen by itself doesn't kill an offense but the starters and relievers were already thin and now the offense is too. If the league has figured out how to get most of our guys out and they're not adjusting that is certainly on everyone to try and fix it.

It's also pretty interesting that we've read not one thing about Herrera. What the team did with the banners seems to have applied to the media too. The fact that he wasn't playing well makes it easier to ignore but you'd think it might have affected the clubhouse in some way. There are probably guys who don't ever want to play with him again but there might be other guys who don't feel like the team has his back (in that, they seem to have erased him before the process has actually played out).

[HopeSpringsEternal]

I know that Kapler isn't the one guy to blame for all this. I was reacting to the "we signed the wrong guy" comment when I responded with a question about that being Kapler. As I noted in that post, this downfall looks like a total team effort to me. Guys are pressing too hard, Harper in particular when he tries too often to take the extra base that is not there. Sometimes Kapler tries too hard too when he tries to win a game with too many calls to the bullpen. I have to admit I was somewhat turned off by the excessive celebrations during the first two weeks when things were going great. Perhaps there was too much overconfidence that now has come home to roost. Now that the pendulum has swung the other way, we need some folks to step forward and lead by example to turn things around. Who will it be?

[julio]

I was more shocked by the profanity! (Which I'm not against, just used to be impossible on old board).

I missed that, last night.

For what it's worth, that word is supposed to be impossible here, as well. There's a short list of words (added by PC, for what it's worth - I quite deliberately passed on adding some other, borderline things) that are supposed to be automatically masked. At the moment (probably because of a bug in a version upgrade) that doesn't seem to be working.

More generally, Discourse encourages communities to self-regulate. There's a "flag" icon at the bottom of each post; if you find a post to be inappropriate or offensive, you can click the flag (any logged in user can do this) and the post will be brought to the attention of the moderators. If the moderators agree (we won't necessarily - individual users could flag a post for personal reasons, etc.), the software will record the incident against the offending user. If a user gets too many such "points" (which go away over time), the board will restrict that user's posting permissions... automatically.

So for the most part, managing offensive posting is - and should be - in the hands of the community, not a couple of "police" (moderators). Of course, this only works if the community understands this, and cares enough to use the available tools. If the community doesn't care...well, that's one of the things that defines what a community is, eh?

[EDmuch]

Whatever is going wrong with this team seems to almost have to be systemic. You just can't have this many good ball players all going wrong at the same time without some common tie in.

[zambonir]

I'm not offended by the profanity. If anything it was truth-in-advertisting for the accompanying discourse.

Whatever is going wrong with this team seems to almost have to be systemic. You just can't have this many good ball players all going wrong at the same time without some common tie in.

And that's when you fire the hitting coach and nothing seems to change. I think 'slump clusters' happen. Plus it's really only a handful of guys. We don't have 8 good ballplayers, we miaybe have 6. Obviously our three biggest off-season guys are currently disappointing, but they were also fantastic for a while. Hernandez is actually hot again. Hoskins is the same as he ever was IMO, and will never be more. Kingery, go figure, is a tonic.

Assuming they have arrived at some permanent state of incompetence doesn't make any more sense than assuming they will have All-Star second halves. What's a mystery is the lack of power, all season, and that really is something the analytics and hitting coaches should be figuring out.

[julio]

I'm not offended by the profanity. If anything it was truth-in-advertisting for the accompanying discourse.

That's your prerogative, of course. On the other hand, we do have a long-established standard here - and when I receive private messages from users who are offended by a (probably inebriated) poster who is repeatedly ignoring that standard, I kind of have to respond. I'm pleased to note that it's been a long time - well over a year - since I really had to deal with such stuff.