And the Phillies are 3 Games under .500, 7.5 Back of the Braves for the division and 8 Back for a Wild Card Birth.
Dom Brown is red hot with 16 HR's and an OPS of .895 without walking once in the month of May. A lot of chatter these days about how Brown was handled back in 2011 a lot of revisionist history but such is life in professional baseball.
To be fair the 2011 team went on to win 102 games they clearly were operating in a window where they had a legit shot at their 2nd WS in 4 years. Dom at that time while having decent numbers clearly looked like a player that still had some things to learn about being a professional.
There are times when that teaching should be done at that level and times when it should not. That year was the latter.
Moving on, Cole Hamels worst season in WHIP was 09 1.286 which followed his 08 WS MVP season where he logged a staggering 227 IP. This season the anomaly is 1.338 compared to his career average 1.148. The K rate is still there at 8/9 so this funk must be a command issue and issue of focus.
Decisions ahead loom large. Utley is still out with his oblique and Ruiz still out with a hamstring. Delmon is coming up on 100 AB's and his OBP and OPS numbers are bad, really bad which shines a bigger spot light on how bad he is defensively. I don't see this experiment lasting much longer. Lee and Papelbon are the guys to keep an eye on. Both are pitching very well and figure to be hot commodities at the dead line with strong potential to return big league ready prospects.
I look for the F/O to return a legit right handed bat prospect that can play either right or left now. I think that can be obtained with Paps. I'd be reluctant to move Lee without getting a haul in return.
Cesar Hernandez made his big league debut going 5/19 with 1 XBH.
No comments:
Post a Comment