Philadelphia Phillies

I talked a lot last post about a possible Dodgers-Phillies matchup in the NLCS, so I think it’s only fair to overview the Phillies next. Now these predictions aren’t meant to take anything away from the Cubs or Cardinals (or even the Giants or Padres); they all have tremendous talent, and less qualified teams have gotten farther in the playoffs than at least two of those teams will. Usually when that happens, though, it’s the result of a really close race with another team, and the momentum/adrenaline carrying the weaker team farther than normal. It’s just that if the season ended TODAY, with no exciting and dramatic playoff races, I have to believe that the teams with the most talent would face off against each other. Or maybe it’s just that last year’s NLCS is still fresh in my mind and I’m eager for a rematch.

Philadelphia Phillies
61-41
NL EAST (1st place out of 5)

LINEUP
SS Jimmy Rollins
CF Shane Victorino
2B Chase Utley
1B Ryan Howard
LF Raul Ibanez
RF Jayson Werth
3B Pedro Feliz
C Carlos Ruiz

BENCH
3B Greg Dobbs
C Chris Coste
OF Ben Francisco

ROTATION
Cole Hamels
Cliff Lee
Joe Blanton
Jamie Moyer
J.A. Happ

BULLPEN
Brad Lidge (CL)
Ryan Madson
Chan Ho Park
Scott Eyre
Tyler Walker

Rodrigo Lopez

Manager: Charlie Manuel
General Manager: Ruben Amaro, Jr.
Owners: David Montgomery, Giles Limited Partnership, etc.
Payroll: $111,209,046 (8 out of 30)


So far the Phillies have had a really tough second half schedule: of the 23 games since the midsummer classic, all but four (including a single make up game against the Padres) have been against contending teams. During that span, the Phillies posted a respectable 13-10 record, despite finishing their short homestand on the wrong end of a sweep by the Marlins.

Incidentally, in the final game of that series, Phillies center fielder Shane Victorino found himself ejected from the game for showing his displeasure with a pitch that home plate umpire Ed Rapuano failed to call a strike. At 28, Victorino is the youngest player in the Phillies’ starting lineup, was named to his first All Star game this year, and played for Team USA in March’s World Baseball Classic. He’s got a fiery personality and looks to have a fine future ahead of him.

Victorino and his fellows at the top of the order represent a very similar core of players to that of the Dodgers, albeit several years later in their development than their west coast counterparts. For the Dodgers, Ethier is the oldest of the foursome at 27. The Phillies have Victorino at 28, first baseman Ryan Howard at 29, and middle infielders Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley both at age 30. Not to say that they haven’t been impressive: Rollins and Howard each have an MVP award and Utley has been a Silver Slugger at second base three years running. And Rollins has been impressive in the field as well, with two Gloves to boot (or not to boot! Get it? Like to boot the ball is to screw up in the field…? I know, I know, kind of forced).

Now, if I may, I’d like to use my dumb pun to segue into a talk about defense in general, and the Phillies’ big new offseason acquisition in particular. I’m talking, of course, about Raul Ibanez, the left-handed hitting outfielder signed as a free agent. The baseball world was abuzz with criticism of Ibanez’s 3 year, $30 million contract, especially in a recession year where teams were paying less and less for big hit, no field sluggers (cf. Bobby Abreu and Adam Dunn). Furthermore, the Phillies already had two lefty sluggers (Utley and Howard), and what they really needed was a right-handed bat to replace departing free agent Pat Burrell. Or so the experts thought.

Okay, here’s another brief aside into some basic baseball strategy: the platoon split. The general principle behind this split is that left-handed batters perform worse against left-handed pitchers, and vice versa for righties. Hence the strategy of bringing in a lefty reliever to pitch to a team’s tough lefty hitter and then yanking him after only one batter. This is the origin of the acronym LOOGY: Lefty-only One Out GuY. To make this strategy of frequent pitching changes the least effective to the opposing team, the manager wants to fill out a lineup card with alternating lefty and righty hitters whenever possible. The danger of having a lineup with three lefties in a row – for example, Utley, Howard, Ibanez – is that the opposing manager can effectively kill three birds with one LOOGY in late game situations.

Not to claim foresight, or anything, but I never foresaw the platoon thing being a big issue for the Phillies. To me, it just seemed like good business sense; they found the best hitter on the market and they signed him. What concerned me was what everyone was saying about Ibanez’s defense.

The frustrating thing about defense is that you always have to rely on what everyone is saying. When you talk about a player’s offensive ability, it’s relatively easy to quantify (and thus qualify): we have statistics like batting average and OPS, home runs and RBI, etc. Likewise with pitching stats: ERA, strikeouts, wins and losses, and now even mathematical stuff like FIP. But with defense, you simply have to be there. Even something as straightforward as fielding percentage – basically, every play you made (a putout or assist without making an error) divided by the total chances to make a play – requires an eyewitness to determine whether or not a particular play should have been made (i.e. whether the batter reached base via a base hit or an error).

For a long while, fielding percentage used to rule the day in terms of evaluating a player’s defensive ability. But when experts began to give the issue some thought, they realized that it doesn’t really tell you that much about a particular player’s ability. Because there’s really no frame of reference – fielding percentage only judges the number of plays a fielder makes against the ones he doesn’t. And there’s only the subjective analysis of the official scorer to rule on whether a player should or shouldn’t have made a play.*

* And this practice can sometimes get confused when certain players make easy plays look difficult because of lack of range or poor defensive instincts. For example, when Derek Jeter makes a backhanded lunge followed by his signature jump-pivot-throw in midair, when a league average shortstop would have been able to react quicker and position himself behind the ball. Or when Torii Hunter makes a dramatic full-extension dive for a ball that a better, faster outfielder would have been able to reach on the run. Sometimes the less flashy player is actually the better fielder.

To offset this confusion, newfangled baseball thinkers/statisticians (such as John Dewan in his revolutionary Fielding Bible) got to work developing new metrics to evaluate fielding. For example, why not compare the number of times a player makes a play to the number of times the other players in the league make the same or similar plays? That way you can evaluate a player based on the league average of plays made, and not just based on how often that particular player makes an error.

Compiling all this data can be a time consuming and arduous task. There are many different methods and I don’t know how to calculate any of them. (For the braver readers among you, here and here is the logic behind one such system, ultimate zone rating (UZR). If the page looks superlong, don’t be intimidated; a lot of the length is comprised of comments.) Suffice it to say, some really smart people are doing some very insightful things regarding evaluating defensive ability, but it’s all incomplete and largely inaccessible to the lay public.

So where does all this leave us with regard to the Phillies? Prior to the season, all the fielding authorities waved their red flags around due to Raul Ibanez’s suspect Range Factor, Ultimate Zone Rating, and +/- system rankings, but his purportedly lousy defense hasn’t seemed to hurt his team much, as they currently stand atop the NL East.

If the Phillies’ lead is shrinking since they peaked in mid July, I don’t think it’s due to Ibanez taking the occasional bad route to a fly ball in left field. The recent slide may be due to the recently surging Marlins, below-average performances from some key starters, injuries running rampant through their bullpen, or just normal statistical fluctuation. With the addition of Cliff Lee shores up their starting rotation and gives them arguably unparalleled depth in that area. Closer Brad Lidge, who did not blow a save all of last season if you’ll remember, has had an awful time of it this year, currently sporting a 7.24 ERA and 6 blown saves (for only a 78% save rate). But if the back end of their bullpen and subpar defense in left field are this club’s biggest problems, I’d say they’ve put themselves in a pretty good position to make a run at repeating in October.

PREDICTION: Will be strong contenders for NL pennant. Have the possibility of getting overmatched by AL competition in the World Series.