By PATRICK GORDON | Managing Editor
June 21 2015, 10 AM EST.
@PGordonPBR
The 2015 Phillies are a bad baseball team. You don't need fancy statistics or some advanced level of baseball knowledge to tell you this, you already know it.
But just how bad are the 2015 Phillies?
Well, to answer that question quickly we're going to look at a pair of numbers.
A few years back I created a sabermetric-based formula that was meant to assist in the ranking of every major league club dating from 1900 to present. Using a regression and correlation analysis I found the three statistics that most closely relate to wins were OPS, WHIP, and run differential per game (RDpG).
Looking at run differential per game, the Phillies enter Sunday with a mark of -1.84. That figure is the second worst of the current century, falling behind only the 2003 Tigers mark of -2.08. Overall, dating back to 1900, the Phillies -1.84 ranks as the 30th worst in baseball history. That 30th worst ranking comes out of 2,400 teams.
That's right, the 2015 Phillies rank 30th worst of 2,400 clubs dating back to 1900 in run differential per game.
Going a step further, if we look at how the 2015 Phillies compare to the 2,400 other clubs using the combined metric I created using OPS, WHIP, and run differential per game we find a team that ranks 2,369th out of 2,400 clubs.
X = .503 + (.095*RDpG) + (.089*OPS) + (-.049*WHIP)
For perspective, the 1925 Phillies rank ahead of the 2015 Phillies and that '25 club (50-104) is often categorized by experts as one of the top-10 worst clubs in baseball history.
We may be in for a historic summer if the downward spiral continues at Citizens Bank Park.
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