I mean, I don’t know.

In a normal year, it would be fair to get after the Phillies for their 1-3 start. Hell, even in 2020, the most abnormal year of them all, it would probably be fair to get on them a little bit had they not just sat on ice for a week. After all, this is a veteran team with legit postseason aspirations.

But they did sit on ice for a week.

For reasons beyond their control, the Phillies missed workouts on Monday and Tuesday last week and then again on Thursday and Friday. Some guys hit off of tees in their yards and some threw at local fields between daily trips to Citizens Bank Park for COVID-19 testing. But let’s be real here, the Phillies were stuck in neutral for seven days as most of the league rolled on.

As much as you wanted them to step on the field and hit the ground running tonight, that wasn’t likely to happen.

So while I totally understand if you are frustrated with what you’re seeing from the Phillies at the moment, I urge just a little bit of patience following a loss to baseball’s best team, who, by the way, happened to trot out one of baseball’s best pitchers.

I don’t want to entirely write off an underwhelming start that portends trouble. Andrew McCutchen and Scott Kingery are scuffling. The situational hitting has been poor. The bullpen. Woof.

But I believe the above disclaimer is necessary before we proceed, and now that I’ve gotten it out of the way, let’s sort through what was an expected yet frustrating night in the Bronx.

Jake Arrieta: Actually Decent

I’m not swooping in to come to the defense of Jake Arrieta, but I think people need to realign their expectations for him just a bit.

Arrieta hasn’t been very good since joining the Phillies. He’s had some moments, but he certainly hasn’t had enough of them–definitely not enough to justify the three-year, $75 million contract he signed prior to the 2018 season.

I also wasn’t a fan of how he handled a few of his postgame sessions back in 2018. You know, the ones where his finger was pointing in every direction but at himself.

 

But Arrieta is a 34-year-old pitcher who is on the downside of his career. He is not the pitcher he was during his final seasons with the Cubs, but he’s also not out there mailing it in. You may recall that Arrieta stepped up and pitched through an uncomfortable elbow injury for much of last season before he was finally forced to shut it down.

Now healthy, I suspect that he’s going to do enough when he takes the ball to keep the Phillies in games this season.

That’s what he did tonight.

Arrieta surrendered a leadoff homer to DJ LeMahieu and missed badly over the middle of the plate on an RBI single by Aaron Hicks.

Still, he was otherwise stellar over five innings of work in his first regular season start in 358 days. That includes the opposite-field homer he surrendered to Brett Gardner, one that had an xBA (expected batting average) of .240.

After the game, Arrieta wasn’t interested in making any excuses.

“I felt pretty similar on both of the home runs. Both not very good pitches, to be honest,” he said. “They just caught enough of it to sneak out.”

After failing to miss a single bat early, Arrieta struck out the side in the fourth inning, effectively breaking off some sharp sliders. He retired seven of the last eight batters he faced and exited the game after 78 pitches.

Afterward, Joe Girardi called Arrieta’s performance “gutsy.”

“I thought he pitched really, really well. I thought it was the best we saw him pitch during the spring trainings that we had,” he said.

We’re not going to see vintage Jake Arrieta in red pinstripes. It’s not happening. But he was decent tonight, and I thought it something to build on for when the situation isn’t totally stacked against the Phillies.

The Bullpen

I know I’m taking a forgiving tone tonight, but I’m going to discard it for this next part. The Phillies bullpen was not good enough going into the offseason, and it was inadequately addressed during it. I’m going to write this at least 20 more times this season–if there are 20 more games.

Baseball is funny in that sometimes it takes awhile for a suspected deficiency to definitively emerge. That is most definitely not the case here.

For those of you keeping track at home, Girardi has gone to Ramón Rosso, Cole Irvin, and, most recently, Deolis Guerra as the first guy out of the bullpen in games that were, at the time, competitive contests. All three guys crashed and burned.

Guerra began the sixth inning by offering a slew of non-competitive pitches to Aaron Hicks before walking him and plunking Giancarlo Stanton.

Two batters later, the game was effectively over:

“I think it’s really hard to judge our bullpen right now just because we haven’t played in a week,” Girardi said.

Allow me, Joe. It’s not very good–at least not on the front end.

The back end of the Phillies’ bullpen may be decent, but it’s going to be virtually impossible to utilize the small number of the club’s effective relievers if the manager can’t find at least one decent bridge option.

It’s clear that Girardi doesn’t know who that guy is right now, and I’m not sure that he is currently on this roster.

Is that the fault of guys like Rosso, Irvin, and Guerra, or is it the fault of the front office that created this predictable reality?

I know the answer, but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

The Lone Bright Spot

Some really good shit here from Jay Bruce–and not just because he happened to pop a homer that briefly tied the game at 1-1.

Bruce worked his way back from an 0-2 count against Gerrit Cole, impressively spitting on a 2-2 slider that finished a hair down and in. That zone awareness allowed him to lock in on a 98 mph fastball from, which he turned around for his first homer of the season.

 

Bruce also stayed off some tough pitches in his subsequent at-bats to work a pair of walks.

Some Bad Luck

You probably don’t want to read about the Phillies having some bad luck in this one, but…the Phillies had some bad luck in this one.

Cole allowed only one run through six innings of work, but the Phillies put together some good swings, especially in the sixth inning. Check out this sequence, per MLB Statcast:

  • Rhys Hoskins: 101.2 mph exit velocity, .640 xBA
  • Bryce Harper: 103.4 mph exit velocity, .670 xBA
  • J.T. Realmuto: 106.4 mph exit velocity, .660 xBA

Didi Gregorius also just missed a game-tying two-run homer on a ball that hooked foul before eventually popping out.

Those swings combined to produce…an infield single. The Phillies didn’t even get a runner into scoring position in the sixth.

That’s just bad luck, something this team is all too familiar with lately.