Well that was a hideous Phillies loss. Nick Castellanos gets thrown out at home, the Phillies can’t plate insurance runs in the 10th, then the Mets walk it off against Jordan Romano, who will be known as “Ray Romano” until he gets it together on the mound.

But it’s early. It’s April. We’ll try to be pragmatic until the wheels begin to fall off.

That being said, a silver lining for a team struggling to score runs. They aren’t swinging at garbage. The Phillies’ chase rate is still very good:

So the offensive problem is what exactly? Looking a little further, the RISP numbers are okay. They’re batting .251 with runners in scoring position, which is 13th overall, top half of MLB. They drop a bit with RISP and two outs, falling to 22nd overall at .188. The strikeout percentage is 21.4, 11th-best in the league, and they’re taking the second-most walks behind the Arizona Diamondbacks.

They’re middle of the pack in extra-base hits and bottom ten in home runs, but getting on base at a top-five rate. One thing they haven’t done well is play in extra innings, losing three of the four games that have gone past the ninth. And their run production has been a bit of a feast-or-famine thing, this Mets series, for instance, scoring just eight runs total after a Marlins series in which they knocked in 23. It seems like the variable shifts have been extreme through the first month of the year. They could certainly use more plate production out of guys with sub-.650 OPS, like the slow-starting Alec Bohm, J.T. Realmuto, and now-injured Brandon Marsh.


More than anything, we could simply look at the home/road splits. They’re 9-4 at Citizens Bank Park but 4-8 away, coming off a season in which they won 41 road games.