Discussion - Part Deux

Philsmania 2018-09-12 14:16:53 UTC #362

Franco had a good July just as Domonic Brown had a great June in 2013. I don't think Franco turned a corner.

flyers19rw 2018-09-12 14:23:10 UTC #363

The role of the manager is to put players into situations where they would succeed. I have a difficult time accepting the idea that this is what Kapler did with this roster. Players were often used out of position; SPs pulled too early; RPs run in and out of games too frequently; questionable defensive placements in the field that broke down; the seeds of a BP collapse were sown in April and showed up in August and September; and on and on.
What we are now seeing with this club over the last 33 games has been a long time coming but it has arrived and it isn't a pretty sight. There is no way that what has happened during this season can casually be dismissed as the flaws of having a rookie manager. If Kapler is that flawed, he never should have been given the job. Actually the same can be said of Klentak since he had a great part in assembling the roster. The Phillies need to do a serious review of the last twelve months at many levels to decide where the wheels fell off the wagon and what needs to be done to get things back on the right road.

bigegypt0417 2018-09-12 14:28:06 UTC #364

if this is the new norm for Franco he isn't a problem. They have far bigger issues to deal with.

andyb 2018-09-12 14:33:39 UTC #365

Perspective - Harper is basically the same age as Rhys Hoskins. I guess we are waiting for the light to go on with Rhys too.

Harper has a 1.107 OPS in the second half. His BABIP has been unsustainably bad (226) in the first half and good (406) in the second half. The 287 BABIP for the year is below his career average of 318. The evidence out there is that Harper is a consistent 900 OPS player with a really high walk rate. In other words he is EXACTLY the type of offensive player that Klentak likes on his team.

If the Phillies got Harper I would not be shocked if they moved Williams to LF, put Harper in RF, Hoskins at 1B and.....Santana at 3B. Santana has looked pretty credible in his initial looks at 3B and we know Franco was below average (and we kind of know our GM cares less about defense).

With Quinn as the 4th OF and Kingery and Crawford pushing for playing time in the infield it is a pretty good offense even if they don't upgrade at catcher or sign Machado. Maybe they go after Patrick Corbin instead.

Lots of options and it will be interesting to see what the team does this offseason. Getting Harper will certainly be a significant acquisition. I imagine it would come with at least one or two opt outs so if Harper is not getting $400 million offers this time he'll have another chance in a couple of years. Which would be a potential win for the Phillies. Get Harper on an 8 year/$250 million deal. First 3 years are slightly less at $25 million each. Then Harper has opt-outs after 2 and/or 3 years. If he is great you get a great player for 2/50 and 3/75 and let someone else pay $40 million a year. If he is what he was this year you get him for $30-$32 million AAV which will probably be worth it. Win/win situation to me with that type of contract.

bigegypt0417 2018-09-12 14:39:07 UTC #366

Just an odd concept that he would not be a player you want on your team.

Lawman 2018-09-12 14:49:08 UTC #367

ButlerBulldog 2018-09-12 14:52:13 UTC #368

I wasn’t in the Harper camp to begin with, but I’ve opened up to the idea of signing him with the way this team has struggled over the past six weeks. Machado should still be the Phillies’ top priority, but if he chooses to sign elsewhere, they need to make a strong push for Harper, as their current outfield isn’t as good as I thought it was.

I don’t know what Harper’s ceiling is, nor do I know whether he can repeat his 2015 performance, but I do know that he’s likely to provide better production than Williams or Herrera, of whom the latter seems to be struggling in part because Kapler keeps moving him in and out of the lineup. If nothing else, Harper’s presence means that Kapler won’t be able to tinker with the lineup as much.

bigegypt0417 2018-09-12 15:10:10 UTC #369

Even if he averages his career numbers...

.280 .387 .513 .900

you have what would be one of the best Phillies hitters ever...I said ONE of, not the best.

lol

ButlerBulldog 2018-09-12 15:13:29 UTC #370

Only Hoskins even approaches that level of production, so Harper would easily be this team’s best hitter if he produced at that clip.

bigegypt0417 2018-09-12 15:19:54 UTC #371

You add Harper to the middle on the line-up and put him in front of Hoskins you have a nice 3-4 in the middle of your line-up.

DurhamBull 2018-09-12 15:21:12 UTC #372

Do you think they overplayed their talent level in the first half, or played below it in the second half? Both? Neither? Just curious.

LoneStarPhan 2018-09-12 15:22:30 UTC #373

That is IF Kapler consistently uses a fix traditional lineup. I can see Harper leading off in a Kapler lineup.

andyb 2018-09-12 15:27:26 UTC #374

I would wait a bit until they are almost officially eliminated, but I would not mind seeing a week of Kingery/Crawford at 2B and SS at the end of the season.

bigegypt0417 2018-09-12 15:30:58 UTC #375

Agreed.

The Phillies have some major things to decide...in my mind one of the biggest is figuring out if Roman Quinn will be someone you can depend on. There is no doubt if he's healthy he's probably your starting CF and an excellent table setter but he's just never been healthy. At some point you'd hope his luck would change.

Squire 2018-09-12 15:55:22 UTC #376

Well... at least they are acknowledging we've got an issue. I think I said about a week ago either there is something very flawed in the way we are identifying amateur hitting ability (Johnny Almaraz and his scouting staff) or there is a problem with our minor league hitting instruction. Its hard to have this bad of results given the resources devoted to drafting hitters.

Austinfan 2018-09-12 15:59:11 UTC #377

You people obsess on age, experience matters, after 7 ML seasons, it's not like Harper is suddenly going to figure out ML pitching.

Age only matters in two dimensions, physical maturity and experience, Harper is physically mature and he certainly has lots of ML experience. So where does being 26 give him additional upside?

Whereas Rhys at 26 has little more than 1 year of ML experience, so a couple more years of learning how to handle ML pitching means he still has an opportunity to improve.

My lineup is the "base" the Phillies have to work with, as we saw last season, it is the talent on the roster that determines your fate, free agents aren't going to make you a championship team if you're only a .500 team without them. Before the Phillies added free agents they were probably a 75 win team coming off 2017, so the free agents and TDL additions might get them to 81 wins this year. They fell short because the talent base fell short. You simply can't buy enough WAR in free agency to make you a 90+ win team unless you have a base that's better than .500 to start.

If the base isn't good enough, overspending in free agency will just make the next rebuild that much harder.

Austinfan 2018-09-12 16:01:48 UTC #378

The good news is they're not doing it the Phllies way, keep all the "good ole boys" around and tinker around the edges.
Right or wrong, they know what they want to do and will hire instructors to teach that.

ButlerBulldog 2018-09-12 16:15:53 UTC #379

I don’t know what this means. You’re speaking as though Harper’s not a productive player when his numbers suggest otherwise. While I don’t believe Harper’s as good as ESPN would have us believe, he’s clearly established himself as a very good Major League hitter. If he produces the splits shown earlier in this thread, he’ll help the ballclub.

The Phillies need to do more than add Machado or Harper to contend, but let’s not pretend Harper signing would be a step back. I’ll admit to feeling differently earlier in the season, but that was before this slide intensified and Herrera suddenly became a platoon player. I don’t want the Phillies to break the bank for Harper, but if they’ve a shot at him, they need to do everything they can to sign him.

allentown 2018-09-12 16:20:35 UTC #380

The organizational churn continues. It is taking way to long to put the final management team in place. That is a problem. All of these changes are an admission that our position-player prospect development efforts are subpar. We are doing well with pitchers, not so well with hitters. It may be scouting or development. For a rebuilding team, step #1 is to trade out the vets for prospects, step #2, which should be almost concurrent, is to make sure you have the scouting and player development talent needed. We have been slow in executing each of these steps.

allentown 2018-09-12 16:30:20 UTC #381

A bit of both. They managed to cover their weaknesses in the first half with starting pitching and perhaps more than a little bit of luck. In the second half, I think some guys played below their talent level and that adversity led to panic. This was not a deep organization in terms of MLB-ready talent, so the injuries had a major impact. I know it sounds dumb, and it contradicts what I believe about team chemistry being only a minor factor, but I think the deadline additions and subtractions hurt team chemistry and had a bigger negative effect than I would have believed possible. I do believe that young players are fragile and management has to somewhat pamper and avoid dissing them. I think Eflin's troubles are partly due to his demotions to the minors. We can say it shouldn't matter, he should be mentally strong enough not to let this bother him, he should recognize that the plan for the year didn't have him in the majors until September anyway, so his early call-up was bonus time, but players are human and younger players often are not mentally tough. The Phillies have always babied the older players and expected the young to tough it out and pay their dues. Kapler in a way is new age, but as a former player, I think he also is a 'pay your dues' guy. I think the foot injury to Hernandez has been huge. The impact on offense between first-half Hernandez and second-half Hernandez has been big, in my opinion. He probably should have been DLed. The Pythagorean, which I confess to skepticism about, did say our great first half was flukey. I think less flukey than good pitching over-coming iffy offense in a lot of close games. In close games, bad defense will eventually catch up with you and it has done that.