yuck: Pirates 2, Phillies 1

It’s not going well

You know, it’s really hard to advise people not to overreact sometimes. This is a smart community of baseball people that we have cultivated here. Most everyone in this community knows that baseball is a marathon, we can’t have a football season mentality to each game, blah blah blah.

But sometimes, the Phillies make it difficult to not overreact to what we’ve seen on the field.

Seeing its offense go dormant yet again, the Phillies dropped another game to the lowly Pirates, giving up the series and putting themselves in the position to have to beat one of the better pitchers in the game to have avoid the sweep.

The highlights were few and far between today for the Phillies. Ranger Suarez was very good yet again, making it difficult to say that he should be the one to move to the bullpen in the near future. The game got off to a decent start when Kyle Schwarber destroyed a baseball to give the Phillies a brief lead.

The Pirates answered with a triple and an RBI single by Andrew McCutchen to tie it in the bottom of the inning, but that’s where it stayed for quite the while.

Which is disappointing because there were chances.

The seventh is where the struggles for the Phillies were personified. Alec Bohm began things by doubling off of Andrew Heaney, then scampered to third on a wild pitch. If you’re scoring at home, that means the Phillies had a runner on third and nobody out. And what happened? That’s right, nothing. Not a hit, not a sacrifice fly, not an RBI groundout, nothing. A huge chance squandered.

You know what happens to the Phillies next in those situations.

A shame because Suarez was good today.

Listen, here’s the part where we talk about patience with this team. They are all struggling now, all the hitters, and now they are without their best hitter for the next few days. They’re going to be fine, likely to make the playoffs with games to spare. But it is bad baseball right now. Bad offense, bad defense, just tough to digest on a nightly basis. It’ll be over soon and they’ll be back to playing well, but this is a difficult watch right now.