Watch enough Phillies baseball lately and the sequence has become painfully familiar.
A single. A walk. Maybe another hit.
Traffic.
Then a ground ball.
Two outs.
Inning over.
The Phillies’ offensive problem is easy to describe as an inability to hit with runners in scoring position. It feels that way when another runner reaches second base and never gets home, or when a promising inning disappears before the middle of the order can do anything with it.
But the numbers suggest something slightly different — and perhaps more troubling.
The Phillies are getting people on base. They just aren’t turning enough of them into runs.
Since the All-Star break, Philadelphia owns a .331 on-base percentage, eighth-best in the majors. That is a substantial improvement from the first half, when the Phillies carried a .303 OBP that ranked 28th.
So this isn’t simply a lineup incapable of creating opportunities.
The opportunities are there.
The Phillies keep erasing them.
Philadelphia entered Wednesday having grounded into 28 double plays since the break, the most in baseball. Then came two more in the 7-1 loss at St. Louis.
Thirty double plays in less than a month.
That is an extraordinary number of rallies ending with one swing.
Tuesday night provided the perfect exhibit. The Cardinals turned four double plays against Philadelphia in a 2-0 Phillies loss, including one with the bases loaded and nobody out in the eighth inning. Cristopher Sánchez had just thrown six scoreless innings. The Phillies still couldn't score.
That gets to the real problem.
This offense does not consistently create crooked numbers unless somebody hits the ball over the fence.
Kyle Schwarber remains the obvious exception. He enters Thursday hitting .248 with a .371 on-base percentage, a .532 slugging percentage, 35 home runs and a .903 OPS. He remains the one hitter capable of changing an inning — and a game — with one swing.
Bryce Harper has been productive, too, though perhaps without the sustained dominance Philadelphia has come to expect. He is hitting .254 with 25 homers, 71 RBI and an .871 OPS. More importantly for this discussion, Harper has hit .289 with a .411 on-base percentage and .434 slugging percentage with runners in scoring position.
So Harper isn't the easy answer, either.
Neither, strangely enough, is Alec Bohm.
Bohm's overall season remains disappointing: .231/.292/.361, 13 homers and a .653 OPS. Yet he has hit .308 with runners in scoring position. In other words, one of Philadelphia's least productive regular hitters overall has actually been one of its better hitters when runners reach second or third.
That is why blaming everything on “clutch hitting” misses the larger point.
The lineup is uneven.
Trea Turner is hitting .247 with just a .296 on-base percentage and a .693 OPS. J.T. Realmuto has slipped to .220/.295/.347 with eight homers. Realmuto's RISP line isn't much better: .234/.326/.364. Justin Crawford has provided speed and contact but only a .666 OPS.
There simply aren't enough dangerous plate appearances stacked together.
And that becomes especially damaging with runners aboard.
Think about the difference.
A harmless ground ball with nobody on is one out.
The same ground ball with a runner at first can become two.
A weak single with the bases empty looks encouraging. Three scattered singles over three innings produce nothing. And when a lineup is simultaneously grounding into more double plays than anyone in baseball, every baserunner becomes precious because Philadelphia is effectively shortening its own innings.
The problem isn't that the Phillies never hit with runners in scoring position.
It's that they too rarely extend the opportunity.
Good offenses make pitchers survive six or seven stressful plate appearances. They turn a walk into a single, a single into a first-and-third situation, and then force the pitcher to throw another high-leverage pitch to Schwarber, Harper or the next hitter.
Too often lately, the Phillies reach the stressful part of the inning and provide the escape hatch themselves.
The contrast in St. Louis was brutal.
Sánchez gave Philadelphia six scoreless innings Tuesday and lost. Zack Wheeler carried a 1-1 game through four innings Wednesday before the Cardinals erupted.
Across those two games, the Phillies scored one run in 18 innings.
That isn't sustainable for a team trying to reach October.
And the solution probably isn't simply “be more clutch.”
It is better contact. Fewer automatic outs. More productive plate appearances from the bottom half of the order. More innings in which Harper and Schwarber come to the plate because the hitter in front of them didn't erase two runners with one ground ball.
The Phillies don't need to manufacture more opportunities.
They already are.
They need to stop destroying them.
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