The Crane Pool Forum

I don't think we gave the Kaplers their own thread earlier in the season. If we did, I'm sorry.

But right now they are crumbling down like the walls in a John Cougar Mellancamp song. They've lost six in a row, seven of their last eight in-division games, and eight of their last 10 overall. Following the tradition of first the Nationals and then the Mets, their bullpen has collapsed like a deflated moon bounce fort.

Andrew McCutcheon is out for the season with a knee injury, and with him goes a .378 OBP out of the leadoff spot, and his replacements have been little more than an automatic out ever since. So they've tried Bryce Harper in the spot, with his underperformance in the middle of the lineup leading to the change much like Curtis Granderson back in the day for the Mets. The main difference is that, while Granderson was the first high-end, long-term contract given out by the Mets in the Alderson era, Harper is being paid more than Chewbacca, and such a move in the first year of a 13-year deal is pretty dramatic.

Plus, like the Cards, they're experimenting with powder blue revisited. Nameplates, too. Everything old is new again.

An article in The Athleticnoted that they play the Mets and the Marlins a lot before the break so they have a chance to turn it around. Thanks for lumping us with the Marlins:

They have 16 more games before the All-Star break — 13 of them will come against the Marlins or Mets. Things could look better after those games. No doubt. But the difficult questions are the fair ones right now, and they are the kind of questions the Phillies’ power brokers should be asking themselves.

https://theathletic.com/1039566/2019/06 ... lfway-now/

Except that they've already lost their first two games of this weekend's series to the Marlins while scoring just four runs [1-2; 3-5]
And this is off them getting swept 3-0 in the rain-drenched Nats series scoring a grand total of six [2-6; 0-2; 4-7]
Harper had one single in 9 ABs during the series in Washington; 4 BBs vs 3 Ks