Everyone knew it. The Phillies knew it. The rest of the Major Leagues knew it. Even the fans knew it.
There was no way the Phillies’ offense could maintain the pace that they were on to start the 2010 season. No one thought it would crash this hard though.
In the first part of the season, the Fightins cruised against the Nationals and Astros. When facing a rival from the NL East in the Marlins however, the Phillies must have left their bats at home. Besides an 8-6 win behind Roy Halladay in the series opener, the Phillies managed to score 1 run in the next 18 innings, wasting a solid effort by Cole Hamels in the last game. While it was great to see Hamels go 8+ and only give up 1 run, the Phillies offense let him down. This offense should be able to score at least 1 run on any pitcher in baseball, not get shut down by Nate Robertson and Ricky Nolasco.
After opening the season with a string of 10 hit games, the Phillies only managed 9 hits in the last two games against Florida. While the high numbers from Placido Polanco and Chase Utley weren’t going to last, the thinking was that players who weren’t performing, like Raul Ibanez, would come around and make up for the leveling out of those early season number. Ibanez is batting .171 with 5 RBI through the first 12 games, a complete turnaround from his torrid start last season.
Even though the team overall is batting .291 and has scored 78 runs through 12 games, that wasn’t going to last. The NL East will be a dogfight this year. Atlanta has improved, as did Florida. The Marlins played very well against the Phils this weekend and only a terrific outing by Halladay on Friday avoided the sweep. The offense is going to win a lot of games for the Phillies this season, but it went flat this weekend.
With pitchers not named Halladay struggling to start the year, the offense needs to carry this team, as has been the case the past few seasons. There will be the random 1-0 & 2-1 wins for this team, but more than likely, the Phils will score more than a few runs. That has been the key to their success the past few years and will continue for the foreseeable future.
While it was a bad weekend overall, the Phillies will be fine. There will very rarely be times where they score 1 run in 18 innings. They just have to weather those times and make up for it during the rest of the season.
