For better or worse, the 2024 Phillies season looks very familiar.
I said it all off-season. If you liked the 2023 Phillies, then you are going to love the 2024 Phillies.
There were no major changes this off-season. The biggest moves made by team president Dave Dombrowski was to sign Aaron Nola to a seven-year contract and ink Zack Wheeler to a four-year contract extension. Smaller moves like Whit Merrifield, Spencer Turnbull and others will likely have some kind of impact this year, but the everyday lineup, the majority of the bullpen and the starting rotation are all the same.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised that the ‘24 Phillies season is starting almost exactly the same as the ‘23 season and, in some ways, the 2022 campaign that began with Joe Girardi at the helm.
For nervous Phillies fans, there is a mantra that we all utter every April as the team goes through their annual early-season struggles.
It’s still early.
For the first four months last year, the Phillies frustrated us with a sputtering offense that often struggled to hit with runners in scoring position, only finishing with a .259 batting average in those situations thanks to a blistering August and September. That .259 average was still just 13th in MLB.
Through the admittedly small sample size of just nine games, the offense is hitting a meager .238 with runners in scoring position, 21st in baseball.
It’s still early.
Trea Turner is off to another slow start, but at the plate and in the field. After leading all shortstops in errors last season with 23, he’s already committed three in nine games, on pace for a whopping total of 54. Of course, he won’t commit that many and, even if he did, would fall well short of the MLB record held by Billy Shindle, who made 119 errors (!!!) back in 1890. But it would be the most since Al Brancato committed 61 errors for the 1941 Philadelphia A’s, which would be an interesting Philly call-back, wouldn’t it?
Turner is also hitting just .222 so far on the season, with a .282 on-base percentage and .278 slugging percentage. He has more errors (3) than RBIs (2), and extra-base hits (2). He has also struck out nearly 31% of the time this year, a big jump from last year’s 21.7%.
It’s still early.
To be fair, it looked like Turner had tied the game in the top of the 9th of Sunday’s 3-2 loss to the Nationals with this blast that he said, “I thought it was 100% a homer.”
As a whole, the team is struggling to score runs and hit consistently in the early going. Same as last year.
It’s still early.
The Phillies have also been a mess on the bases. They’ve been caught stealing six times already (11-for-17) and have also made an additional six outs on the bases due to a combination of stupidity and/or over-aggressiveness. On Sunday, Kyle Schwarber was doubled off first base because he misread a simple Bryce Harper fly ball to center field.
This isn’t a new issue. In fact, last season the Phils’ baserunning was atrocious as well. They ran into nine outs through their first 13 games and were on pace to run into 97 outs on the bases. They are on a similar pace this season, an issue we addressed on the latest Hittin’ Season podcast.
Last year, the Phillies turned it around, going from 20th in a certain baserunning metric to 9th best from June 1 onward.
It’s still early.
Through nine games last year, the Phils were 3-6. This year, they’re 4-5. So, progress?
The parallels are eerie. We come into every season with expectations raised that the Phils will be able to do things differently at the start of the season, and every year, with some exceptions here and there (Schwarber is off to a strong start at the plate after two straight MIAs in April and May the last two seasons), they do the same things.
A zebra cannot change his stripes, and the same appears true with your Phils.
Even if it is still early.
