Phillies Nation

In sports, the term ‘anchoring’ refers to when fans develop an opinion based off of a specific series of events and hold steadfastly to that opinion regardless of what subsequently transpires. Most of the time anchoring occurs at the start of a season, when a hot or cold stretch can mislead fans into under- or overvaluing certain players. When preformed opinions join anchoring at the bar, lazy narratives are often born. Jimmy Rollins is another perfect example of why anchoring to early season struggles, especially when it supposedly helps confirm a preconceived notion, is folly in the world of analysis.

Yes, Rollins started off slowly. He posted a terrible .259 wOBA in April, with a poor .283 on-base percentage that was actually higher than his even worse .271 slugging percentage. His defense remained solid, but he looked mostly lost throughout his first 85 trips to the dish. Since he hasn’t exactly been an offensive juggernaut recently, and because he is past his prime, it became very easy to assume that Rollins was done; that he was washed up; that his new contract was a joke, because the Phillies were paying $11 million per season to the shortstop formerly known as Jimmy Rollins.

Don't even think about trading him.

Though many would readily admit that, under most circumstances, 85 plate appearances is far too small a sample off of which to base definitive conclusions, the mixture of anchoring to his early struggles and the preexisting belief — or fear — that he is rapidly declining, led to unnecessary widespread panic.

But then something funny happened — Rollins started hitting again. He posted a .289 wOBA in May, which, while still very poor, was an improvement. And he followed that up with a .396 wOBA in June. It may have taken him a while to get going, but Rollins has been tearing the cover off of the ball recently, and his seasonal line is right where we would expect it, even after a very poor two months to start the season.

Even before he started proving that he still has offensive talent in the tank, it would have been foolish to consider trading Rollins. Now that he has once again proven himself capable of hitting at a relatively high level, while flashing all-sport defense at the most important infield position, the Phillies shouldn’t even think twice about trading him.

Continue reading The Phillies Absolutely Shouldn’t Trade Rollins

So we’ve learned that Chase Utley probably won’t be ready for Opening Day, a reality many of us assumed but wanted badly not to hear this season.

In the last episode of Phillies Nation TV, Pat asked why Utley hadn’t yet seen an inning in the field or a plate appearance against live pitching. It was a valid question that offered more and more room for pessimism the longer you thought about it.

Sure, resting Utley was logical. But if he was going to be OK, why not give him an inning a week or a few at-bats just to catch him up to speed? Jimmy Rollins has dealt with plenty of injuries to his lower-half and he’s been out there regularly this Spring. It just didn’t bode well and on Monday, Phillies Nation (the collective, not the site), awoke to a nightmarish scenario that may turn out to be passable, but may usher in the end of the Chase Utley era in Philadelphia.

That’s the longer-term scenario we’re looking at here. Utley is 33 with a contract that expires after next season and knees that will never get better. The last part of that sentence has been stated both subtly and explicitly by Charlie Manuel and Ruben Amaro.

Utley is missing cartilage in his knee, and as Amaro put it Monday, “you just can’t grow back cartilage.” There is likely bone-on-bone friction in Utley’s knee(s), and all you have to do is imagine the feeling of moving laterally with bones rubbing each other to understand why such a cautious approach is necessary and why Utley is probably destined for DH-duty in his next deal.

This isn’t a curable condition, it’s one you attempt to manage, but the fact remains that nobody in the Phillies organization knows what is going to happen with Utley in 2012, much less 2013 and beyond. I can guarantee you that nobody in the front office is thinking about how to approach Utley’s next contract because no one knows what he’ll be 18 months from now.

It’s an incredibly sad situation. Utley was on a Hall-of-Fame pace through the end of 2009, when he was averaging a .301/.388/.535 slash-line with 32 homers and 43 doubles in full seasons while playing elite defense (top-1 or top-2 in the sport) at a premium position.

Utley was the player that separated the Phillies from other teams.

This was before Roy Halladay, and for half of 2009, before Cliff Lee. It was after Cole Hamels’ stellar postseason run but before he turned into a four-pitch demon. Utley was what was different about the Phillies. A patient hitter who could hit the ball anywhere, for power and average, reach balls to his left and right that 25 second basemen can’t glove and run the bases exceptionally.

Now, he’s a shell of that.

Continue reading The Utley Era Wasn’t Supposed to Go Like This

I didn’t actually take a vacation with Shane Victorino, but I did go on a cruise with him, Charlie Manuel, John Mayberry Jr, the Phanatic and Rich Dubee. I was surprised with a Christmas gift by my parents with this vacation, booked through AAA. It was a group of almost 400 Phillies fans on a seven day trip to the Bahamas. The destinations were Grand Turk, San Juan Puerto Rico, St Thomas, and Holland America’s private island, Half Moon Cay.

I arrived Philadelphia International Airport a day before the cruise was set to embark. At the terminal, I was greeted by dozens of people wearing Phillies apparel.

After the plane ride, where I wasn’t even able to finish the movie I was watching, we arrived at the hotel, and it was just like the airport. Phillies clothes everywhere. And there is more than one hotel in Fort Lauderdale, too. So I imagine a lot of other hotels were similar.

The next day, we arrived at the dock terminal to the sight of a sea of red. And by sea of red I mean hundreds of people wearing Phillies jerseys, hats, jackets, and pants. Now, this was curious. Why would you wear a heavy jacket in Florida? I was sweating and I was wearing a Cliff Lee shirsey and khaki shorts! Furthermore, I spotted a Brewers shirsey, a Twins hat, and fair amount of Yankees apparel. Even some Cardinals shirts. Obviously not everyone was in the AAA group with the Phillies, but come on, these people had to have felt awkward. I imagine it felt like being a Marlins fan at a Phillies-Marlins game–in Florida. But I digress.

Continue reading My Vacation With Shane Victorino

In June 2009, when I was trying to find a job after graduating college, I started writing for a small Phillies blog run by a longtime friend of mine, Paul Boye. He wasn’t doing much with it, I figured, so why not let me on board? That site, The Phrontiersman, trundled along for a while at about 1,500 hits a month for seven months. We each probably posted about twice or three times a week, and it was fun, but we knew that only a couple hundred people read our posts. That site served the purpose of helping Paul and me find our voices as sports commentators, all the while developing this strange sort of comedy double act, with me playing the role of Groucho Marx and Paul as Margaret Dumont.

In January 2010, I wrote a post trying to project the Phillies’ history if they’d kept Scott Rolen. MLB Trade Rumors linked to it, and the site blew up. A couple weeks later, Paul called me at work, saying this site called Phillies Nation had gotten in touch with him and wanted us to move over and write for them. I couldn’t say yes quickly enough, and for the past two years, I’ve written anything from a short poem about Cliff Lee facing the Mets to 2,000 words on attending the 19-inning game against the Reds this year. Over 23 months, we’ve been on a journey together, you and I, that’s featured both emotion and logic, with a touch of confrontation thrown in.

Today, that journey comes to an end. This will be my last post as a member of the Phillies Nation staff.

Continue reading Dr. Strangeglove: Saying Goodbye

Oil Can Boyd

There’s a lot not to like about baseball in the 1930s and 1940s–no television, racial segregation, and an offensive explosion that would make the Steroid Era look like the Bronze Age, thanks to joke ballparks (258 feet to the right field foul pole at the Polo Grounds!) and a set of strategic norms still adjusting to the live ball era.

But there were some things I wish hadn’t changed from then. Four, to be precise:

1. No designated hitter
2. No Atlanta Braves (though I admit that if they were from Boston I might hate them even more)
3. No New York Mets
4. Nicknames

Sure, we have nicknames on the Phillies, and while some of them are pretty good (J-Roll, assuming he comes back, Doc, Chooch), others are pretty awful, like “Polly” or “J-Bone,” which is what Steven De Fratus wants us to call his brother, Phillies reliever Justin De Fratus. Intending no undue disrespect to either De Fratus brother, J-Bone is the stupidest goddamn idea for a nickname that I’ve ever heard in my life. We can come up with something better.

That’s what was so great about the interwar years–they put thought into their nicknames, which is how we wound up with The Splendid Splinter, Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons, Goose Goslin, and a litany of awesome sobriquets for Babe Ruth. And because we weren’t afraid of hurting people’s feelings, nicknames weren’t limited to things you might call your golden retriever or the third-line center on the squirt hockey team you coach on the weekend–you couldn’t really be mean, but you didn’t have to be complimentary, either. You could call someone “Losing Pitcher Mulcahy” or “Three Finger Brown” and no one would accuse you of being an insensitive pig. We need to think outside the box here, which is why I’ve been trying so hard to get “Exxon” and “Tony No-Dad” to stick.

It’s also why I need your help.

Continue reading Dr. Strangeglove: Nicknames

Because it’s finals week at universities across North America, I’d like to encourage everyone to do the following: if there’s a college professor who impacted your life for the better whom you never thanked, go back and do that. For me, it would be Dr. Gordon Smith, Director of the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina and one of American academia’s foremost experts on Russian politics. My junior year of undergrad, I took his Russian foreign policy class because 1) I needed an international relations elective and 2) my girlfriend, a Russian major, was taking it.

That class was the first impetus for my choosing to attend graduate school for political science–international relations in particular–and Dr. Smith was a fabulous teacher. I wasn’t one of the star students, and I figured that if Dr. Smith remembered me at all, it would be as the sleepy-looking bearded guy who sat next to KTLSF in the back row–she was one of the star students–and thought it was funny to characterize the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko as “in Soviet Russia, tea drinks you!” But more than a year after our last class meeting, he spotted me on the street, called me by name, and we talked for several minutes about life, the universe, and everything.

This post was made possible because of one word–gerontocracy–to which Dr. Smith introduced me that semester. I’d like to dedicate this post to Dr. Gordon Smith, who, I’m sure would be proud to know that one of his students got just enough out of his class to spot the parallels between Ruben Amaro Jr., general manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, and Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union.

Continue reading Dr. Strangeglove: Leonid Brezhnev, GM

From 2005 to 2008, I probably paid less attention to to the day-to-day operations of the Phillies than at any other time, owing mostly to spending more than half of the baseball season living in a place where there was no local MLB broadcast among people who considered baseball season as nothing other than that awkward time between when the Gamecocks lose to Clemson and when the Gamecocks lose to Georgia. Thankfully, that second modifier no longer holds true. Eat me, Dabo Swinney. Of course, by “paid less attention” I mean “checked the standings online every day rather than spending every spare moment imagining a Hamels-and-Howard for Cain-and-Belt trade.”

Anyway, because I wasn’t watching as much baseball back then, Scott Mathieson was this mystical figure to me. He was some dude who showed up in the rotation in mid-2006 and totally sucked, not to put too fine a point on it, then got hurt and seemingly disappeared back into the woods of British Columbia like Sasquatch evading an enterprising photographer. I always liked him, because as a young guy who threw hard, he conceivably had some value to the Phillies. Also, because of my well-documented and long-running man-crush on Jeff Francis, I have a soft spot in my heart for enormous pitchers from British Columbia.

Since then, Mathieson’s had a fascinating career with the Phillies, which came to an end this week when he was granted his release. I felt a strong personal affinity for Mathieson over the years, maybe because he was the Phillies’ sleeper relief ace every year for the past three seasons but never got the chance as the Phillies relied on the likes of Danys Baez and Mike Zagurski to fill the gaps, a sort of proto-Domonic Brown. Nevertheless, for someone who only pitched 44 innings in red pinstripes, he generated a lot of ink before he was traded for a hot dog eater. In that vein, it’s appropriate to remember everyone’s favorite perennial closer-in-waiting and what our own Jay Floyd called his “strange odyssey.”

Continue reading Dr. Strangeglove: The Ballad of Scott Mathieson

Mother died today.

-Opening line of Albert Camus’ The Stranger

The Phillies re-signed backup catcher Brian Schneider yesterday. I get worked up about a lot of baseball-related things that don’t matter, as you may know by now, and the Phillies overpaying for Jonathan Papelbon and sending Jonathan Singleton packing for Hunter Pence sent me into a blind homicidal rage that could only be sated by drinking the tears of a thousand Mets fans and the blood of a hundred innocent fawns. But when the Phillies re-signed their backup catcher to a one-year, $800,000 contract, I felt no greater emotional response to the transaction than Meursault did to his mother’s death in Camus’ 1942 masterwork.

Brian Schneider was a patently terrible offensive player last season. In 1962, the Mets acquired catcher Harry Chiti from Detroit for a player to be named later. In 15 games with New York, Chiti posted an OPS of .452 and, six weeks after the trade, was returned to the Tigers, making him, at the time, the only player in major league history to be traded for himself. Schneider was only marginally better than Chiti: a .502 OPS and, taken in concert with his defense (though an defensive rating based on 300 innings in the field is next to worthless, particularly for catchers) was nearly a full win below replacement.

But since $800,000 on a catcher to the Phillies is, proportionally, about what I’d spend on lunch, bringing Schneider back isn’t really an unwise expenditure of capital so much as it represents the inexorable march of time and the ultimate triumph of the absurd over humanity’s desire to find higher meaning in life. Continue reading Dr. Strangeglove: Albert Camus and the Backup Catcher

Apparently the rules of the world now include a moratorium on all sports discussion on the internet that doesn’t involve some sort of anger at Joe Paterno and Penn State. I apologize for violating that moratorium.

The good folks over at The Good Phight have a device called the Ruben Amaro, Jr. Smug Advisory System, a machine that does exactly what the name would suggest. I bring this up because on Monday Rube produced possibly the most smug, self-satisfied utterance ever attributed to a major league general manager. Asked about his pursuit of a closer, Amaro said the following:

“I do not characterize my negotiations.”

Oh, snap.

I imagine Amaro sitting around a long table with reporters and other Phillies brass while making this statement. In fact, I’ve illustrated my mental image of the scene for you:

But when that statement was followed by rumors of a four-year, $44 million contract extension for Ryan Madson, I had an idea. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with RAJ refusing to characterize his negotiations. He’s doing his level best to construct a winning team and it really shouldn’t matter to him what we think. I actually kinda like the arrogance. I’m actually looking forward to the day when this happens at a press conference. In fact, I am so inspired by his refusal to characterize his negotiations that I’m thinking about doing the same.

Continue reading Dr. Strangeglove: On Not Characterizing One’s Negotiations

“…for as far back as I can remember I have loved two kinds of teams more than any other. The first, of course, were the hometown teams, which for me were Cleveland teams, the Indians and Browns and Cavaliers, those heartbreakers I had inherited because my father found a job at a factory there before I was born.” –Joe Posnanski, “Game Six,” Oct. 28, 2011

I read that passage, in a typically-outstanding blog post by Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated, the dean of the kind of rambling, introspective, analytic form of sports column I love most. The post itself had little to do with the genesis of Posnanski’s own Cleveland fandom, but it got me thinking about how much my happiness is tied to the employment status of a 32-year-old man from Oakland, whom I’ve never met and probably never will.

I’m a 24-year-old man with a driver’s license and a postgraduate education, so I’m an adult by proclamation, if not so much by behavior, and for the first time since I had terrible acne, a squeaky voice, and thought Blink-182 was cool, I’m faced with life without my favorite baseball player on my favorite team. Jimmy Rollins has been a constant in my life for 11 years, a period of time in which I’ve graduated from middle school and high school and collected bachelor’s and master’s degrees. A period of time in which I had my first kiss, first girlfriend, and first bad breakup, and got engaged to a person who, at the time of Rollins’ major league debut, I wouldn’t even know existed for another five years.

In spite of my quest to be objective in my baseball analysis, I hope the Phillies re-sign Jimmy Rollins above all else, and while I’d be thrilled if he’d sign a contract with favorable terms to the team, deep down I don’t care what the cost is.

And the most unsettling part of all of this is that I feel so strongly about Rollins, more than anything else, because no one was building much of anything in North Carolina in the early 1980s.

Continue reading Dr. Strangeglove: My Relationship with Jimmy Rollins