Jake Thompson raises his hands in the air, yesterday as the Phils lost 17-0
Somewhere Ryne Sandberg is sitting back and reading these Phillies headlines and quietly shaking his head. The Phils haven’t really improved all that much, despite a slightly higher win total this season, and suddenly my thoughts have changed to why we are all giving Pete Mackanin a free pass at every turn in the season.
The Phils suffered the worst defeat in their modern era of baseball yesterday in New York at Citi Field by a score of 17-0. Pundits were quick to look up other shut out losses, Phillies VP, Larry Shenk, tweeted out that the Phils actually lost 28-0 back in 1883. That was then, and this is now Larry, the Phils haven’t been beat this bad in the modern era since 9/4/99 when the Phils lost to the Cards by a 22-3 score, that wasn’t a shutout but it was a bad beating at Veterans Stadium before 16,357 fans.
Back to my original point, if Ryne Sandberg had still been managing this team yesterday, the headlines would have been how his job is in jeopardy. There would have been people calling for his firing after the season. Pete Mackanin has been with this team for many seasons now, including when Ryne was here and he’s getting a free pass.
Pythagorean theory has this team at 60-96 on the year, with the numbers the team has put up, that probably should be the record that they are at. This stat says that the team got lucky on 10 games during the season and that is why they are at 70 wins right now. So, is this Phillies team actually a better team than last year?
What has this team accomplished this season? We’ve seen we have some players that have some potential. We saw Ryne Howard, who the Phillies have paid a $25M season to, take the bench quite a lot this season. We’ve seen an anemic offense, arguably the worst offense in terms of numbers in the league.
Maybe there is a reason that Mackanin hadn’t been given the chance to manage a big league team in all those seasons he was coaching except for filing in from time to time. There doesn’t seem to be many good reasons to talk about why he is still the Phillies manager at this point. The team has played very lackadaisical at various points in the season and couldn’t even execute basic baseball plays too. He has had his chance to run with this team and it’s turned into what we saw yesterday, a 17-0 loss without much to show for it.