Stephen A. Smith Sets the Record Straight

Yesterday I said the Phillies still had a shot in the NL East despite playing half of the season like baseball's version of the New Jersey Nets. Do you find solace in the Phils' star power, Stephen A.?

Howard's a stud, not a one-year wonder. Rollins is playing some exceptional baseball. And Utley is fully worthy of his $85 million deal and fully capable of feeding a city's baseball aspirations (with Howard and Rollins) for years to come.

Those guys are great baseball players. Certainly can't blame them for the team's lack of success.

Any team would want these players. Any team would be respectable with these players. Any team would put quality players around these players and, dare we say, win with these players - even if it meant having to pull off a deal for some quality pitching before the July 31 non-waiver trading deadline expires.

Ok, so without those three guys, the Phillies are basically the National League's answer to the Kansas City Royals. I can see the similarities.

Any team but the Phillies, it seems.

You know, I don't think the Phils aren't that much different from the Mets, either. Both have potent offenses (Philly's is slightly better). Both have one young top-of-the-rotation stud (Hamels/Maine). Both have roughly two reliable starters behind that stud and have been scrambling all year to find warm carcasses to put on the mound for those fourth and fifth days. Both have 2-3 reliable arms in the bullpen. The only difference at the moment, as I see it, is that the Mets have a closer, and the Phillies don't.

Damn you, Billy Wagner.

And I know Pedro is due to come back sometime in August, but he's pushing 36 and hasn't pitched since last September. He's at a point where even the greatest arms usually level off, even when pitching regularly in real games. Should he still be enough to scare the Phillies into dealing for one more starter for the stretch run? Perhaps. But I predict you'll see Freddy Garcia on Celebrity Fit Club before that happens.

Perhaps there is a plausible explanation for losing 12 of 17 one-run games. For still being mediocre at 44-44 despite leading the NL in runs scored (456), possessing one of the most potent offenses in the game with a three-headed nucleus to guide this franchise.

I just can't find one.

He's got me there. Besides multiple injuries to front-line pitching, a highly competitive division, AL-dominated interleague play, the unbalanced schedule (only five games against Washington so far), and just being the goddamned Philadelphia Phillies, there's absolutely nothing to explain their misfortune.

"Don't sleep," an enthusiastic Rollins kept saying. "We're still hanging around, and Flash [Tom Gordon] and Brett [Myers] are coming. We're still here."

True. But so is Adam Eaton and whatever no-names called up from the minors.

So go ahead and enjoy the second half of the season. Be my guest.

That's it everybody. Go home. There's no reason to watch the rest of the games. Stephen A. Smith, the epitome of infallibility, has spoken. There is no hope.

Quite frankly, that's BS.

Phillies Are Still Believers, But Why? [The Guy Who's Always Yelling]

Meet Me Halfway, Wes Helms

Around this time of year, a lot of people like to fete baseball's best and brightest with fake half-season awards. And while there seems to be a consensus about the Phils' respective MVP (Utley) and Cy Young (Hamels) whom, I wonder, is the real "First Half Phillie"?

I don't mean the player who has contributed the most to the team in the first half; rather, it's the player most symbolic of the 2007 Phillies up to this point. That is, which player best embodies the whole experience of the team's first 88 games?

Pat Burrell, with his all-or-nothing approach to batting and penchant for disappointment, is an obvious contender for this and any year. Brett Myers' schizoid season--from starter to closer to the DL--and massive stroke of bad luck also seem like a good fit.

I humbly nominate an overlooked component of this years Fightins: occasional third baseman Wes Helms.

He's a name you know but don't necessarily trust. He had a terrible start to the year despite batting .284 in April, then .218 in May and .200 in June, and didn't hit a home run until June 13. He seemed to turn it on again right before the All-Star Break, though no matter how high he ultimately flies, everyone is waiting for him to crash right back down to earth. And he's getting paid over $2 million to be mediocre.

In other words, Wes Helms is the personification of the frustration, streakiness, and inconsistency of your Philadelphia Phillies. Just when you're ready to give up on him, he gives you a reason to believe in him. It's a maddening a trait players seem to acquire only when they get to Philly (Helms hit .329 in 140 games with the Teal Bastards last year).

Projecting a Helmsian mediocrity for the rest of this season, I'd say the Phillies will achieve somewhere between 83-86 wins, and put us out of our misery by early September. No more stringing us along until the last weekend of the season, ok guys?

One problem: that pitiable sum might be enough to win the division (according to PECOTA).

You gotta believe?

Phillies Notes: All-Star Roundup

It was a rather quiet All-Star Break for the Phillies involved in the festivities.

The Big Guy could muster only 3 dingers in the Home Run Derby, though the one to deep center was pretty impressive. The Derby used to be a lot more fun to watch when there was no shortage of "enhanced" sluggers hitting 50 homers per year. Nowadays, they're so short of participants that they throw line drive hitters like Magglio Ordonez out there and they get guys like Garret Anderson winning the title. Lame.

It's time to either turn the contest into an exhibition of surrogate DHs--the Adam Dunns and Jack Custs of the world, regardless of whether or not they are "All-Stars"--or take the pageantry and prestige of the Derby down a notch.

Believe it or not, I find that the Celebrity Softball Game is doing a better job of giving the TV viewer more bang for his or her buck. What started out as a goofy cavalcade of pudgy former pros and wannabe Hollywood athletes has year by year escalated into an Armageddon of massive celebrity egos and barely veiled disdain in the grand tradition of Battle of the Network Stars. This year was a major turning point. James Denton gave a smug sideline interview. Kenny Mayne absolutely robbed Jimmy Kimmel of a home run. Even Rob Scheinder brought his A-game, for Christ's sake. And Mayne's team just kept piling on the runs in a manner reminiscent of an epic beer league mismatch. Fantastic television--why doesn't it come on until after midnight?

And the game itself? Ho-hum, another American League victory, but for once the AL's closers were almost as shaky as the NL's. Take that, Billy Wagner.

It was a rather inauspicious showing for the Phillies as well. Cole Hamels pitched an inning and avoided giving up a run thanks to Russell Martin's ungodly agility behind the plate. Enjoy those knees while they last, Russ!

Neither Utley nor Rowand collected a hit, though Chase made a nifty defensive play on Carlos Guillen in the 6th inning. Rowand, one of the best in the league with runners in scoring position this season, came up with a chance to win the game in the bottom of the 9th and promptly flied out, thus introducing a nationwide audience to the basic tenets of Phillies baseball.

Not that the Phils needed that World Series home field advantage anyway.

10,000 A Second Time Around?

One of the things I love about blogging is thrill of "being there"--writing about stuff either as it happens or shortly after.

Last night (or early this morning, depending on how you look at it) was definitely a "being there" experience, though all I meant to do was get a few thoughts down about the Phillies' historic 10,000th franchise loss and do a post later examining how this milestone makes me feel.

Well, I had to put that on hold after glancing at the paper this morning. Apparently, the Phillies "official" count was still at 9,999 after last night's surrender to the Rockies. I went into a full-fledged panic. I flew to my computer and frantically started checking the several sites tracking the total number of losses.

Celebrate 10,000 was all nines. PhillySucks was 9,998 as of July 8th--corresponding with the "official" total. Wikipedia still had a tally of 9,999 losses, which was strange, considering the page displayed the same number after the extra-inning loss on Friday night.

I had checked my math on Saturday morning to make sure that the next loss would indeed be the 10,000th, using Wikipedia as my source. Now, fearing a calculation error, I did it again this afternoon--it added up to 10,000. Wishing to corroborate that information with a different source, I added up the figures posted by Baseball-Reference--which added up to 9,999.

Completely frustrated and on the verge of pulling a Larry Bowa-style freak out, I compared the records, season-by-season, between the two sources. It wasn't long before I found my deviation.

In 1890, the Phillies finished the season with a record of 78-54. This appears to be an officially sanctioned record as it appears almost everywhere: Wikipedia, Baseball Almanac, ESPN, even the Official Site of the Philadelphia Phillies.

There is one place I have found where the record is different--Baseball-Reference. The site lists the 1890 record as 78-53, citing a game on May 23, 1890 against the Chicago Colts (forerunner to the Cubs) that was ruled a no-contest but somehow went in the books as a Phillies loss. A little more research revealed that Phillies PR did indeed address this discrepancy a couple weeks ago, noting that the franchise does not consider the May 23rd game a loss despite what the numbers say on its own official website.

I processed all of this in two distinct phases:

1) I felt horrible for (a) getting the number wrong and (b) somehow letting the PR story slip by me. I try to keep up with the newspapers and press releases, but most of my writing comes from observations gleaned from the information on baseball websites and the games themselves. This isn't meant to be a fast-breaking news blog, after all. Still, an official statement on the subject of the 10,000 losses should have been a target of my commentary. At this point, I seriously considered scrapping my most recent post and acting like it never happened.

2) I kept thinking about it over lunch and finally found some self-sympathy. I've been running these numbers on my own since the beginning of the season. And when every site I used to compile those numbers at the time (this was sans Baseball-Reference) says that the Phillies lost 54 games in 1890, I'm going to take that at face value. I'm just a Joe Schmoe blog--I don't have easy access to 19th century copies of the Spalding Guide. I wish I did, but I just don't. It's easy for me to miss certain minutiae.

Moreover, I looked at the specifics of why the May 1890 Phillies-Colts game was ruled a no-contest. There was an apparent substitution dispute; the umpire wouldn't let the Phils put in reserve outfielder Bill Grey for some reason. The records still say the Phillies eventually lost the game 10-8. I assume that they finished the game under protest and, miraculously, won redress from the National League. Maybe it was more common in those days.

Anyway, I looked up Bill Grey's statistics out of curiosity. I wanted to answer the question: had be been able to play in the game, would the Phillies have won? I don't have the benefit of a complex computer simulation, but the equation Little-Used Reserve Outfielder + .242 Lifetime Average seems simple enough to me. Who knew that the gamesmanship surrounding this incident would be replicated over a century later?

Obviously, the denied substitution didn't seem like a big deal to most people after the fact, hence the 54 losses listed almost everywhere. This information plus my mistrust of the Phillies' PR motives (wouldn't you like the chance to remove losses from your favorite team's record?) went a long way in putting my mind at ease. I won't go so far as to call it a cover-up, but I'd like to think I inadvertently penetrated the Phillies' weird statistical voodoo tactics, kind of like Napoleon's troops stumbling upon the Rosetta Stone out of pure dumb luck.

But if the Phillies want to celebrate their 10,000th loss for a second time, that's just fine with me. Who knows? Maybe they'll find a way to keep that one off the books, too.

Here's How Phils Got the Number [Philly.com]