Are the Phillies Barely Just OK?

The Phillies: where again the most promising news around the team is that Clinton Portis is banged up already.

That makes two weekends in a row where the Phillies begin a series promisingly against a winning team- first the Mets, this weekend the Reds- and promptly managed to squander any sort of resulting momentum by dropping the final two games- and thus both series. Consequently, the Phillies- who drew within one game in the loss column for the Wild Card Saturday morning- now find themselves back to four games out, chasing four clubs.

Forget the Wild Card- even a semi-decent club fighting its way to .500 has to be a little disgusted. The Mets are emphatically better than the Phillies- so last week can be excused, understood. But the Phillies, if they are even just barely okay enough to make a run at this Wild Card, just can’t drop those two games to the Reds. The Reds aren’t that good- and ran a ton of pitching slop out to the hill (it was a mystery why the Reds would acquire Ryan Ray Franklin- but after this weekend, you can see why they thought the righty could possibly help). Myers got one of the starts. They scored enough runs. The big core hitters hit well.

So maybe then the Phillies aren’t okay enough. Well, I guess we knew that already. Catagorically, if 85 wins is what is going to take to do this- then the Phillies are simply out. They cannot get that number. The bullpen is increasingly shot- movingly rapidly to scary from erratic- and you can’t be too comfortable with Gordon being a closer for a full season next year, right Pat? Similarly, the “ace” Myers looks to be making a comparable switch- but rather “from” erratic, he’s moving “to” erratic. And of course, with the insistence that Leiberthal be run out there almost everyday, means the Phillies are guaranteed sub-par offense production from the one, five, six, seven and eight hole in their everyday line-up. Seven and Eight are particularly horrible. We all knew Leiberthal stinks- but what in heaven convinced the Phillies Nunoz was an effective roll-player.

So the Phillies don’t seem to have more than this win one, lose one (or win one, lose two against good teams) in them. Probably gets them to 79-80 wins, maybe a few more if they get hot or the fact that these seven games versus New York complete the season slate versus winning teams. But the real key to Wild Card mania is continued mediocrity in the National League- keeping the bar at 82-83 wins- and thus the Phillies in it.