Who would have
thought that at the beginning of July, the baseball world would be applauding
three teams from the National League West while remaining vexed with four teams
from the National League East?
But here we are,
and the Los Angeles Dodgers look strong and deep; the Colorado Rockies have
been the hottest team in baseball for the last month; and the San Francisco
Giants have pitched their way to the top of the N.L. Wild Card race.
On a different
coast, the Philadelphia Phillies lead the East merely by default; the Mets are
spending more time in the doctor’s office than the clubhouse; the Marlins
aren’t doing anything more than treading water by playing .500 ball in a
sinking division; and the Braves are underachieving with one starter hitting
over .300.
It’s a baseball
paradox of Philly cheese steak proportions, and with so many questions
involved, who knows how it will shake out?
We don’t really,
but there is one guy in the division who could change all of that, and that is
Jimmy Rollins.
Who?
Yeah, Philly
fans haven’t seen him this year, either.
But that’s
exactly why Rollins holds the key to such an unstable division. The Phillies
haven’t had ‘Jimmy Rollins’ in their lineup once this season; they have had
some Fathead portrait of the guy who once captivated the entire city at
shortstop.
After hitting
.211 with six home runs and a .254 OBP through 68 games of the season, Phillies
manager Charlie Manuel decided it was best to sit his relentless shortstop last
week and allow Rollins some time to clear his head and get back to the player
that he ought to be.
Rollins is set
to return to the Phillies’ lineup when they open a three-game series in Atlanta
on Tuesday after taking four games off to do nothing. Manuel didn’t even want
Rollins taking batting practice. In fact, the less thinking about baseball the
better.
“I want him
to sit down. I want him to kind of get away,” Manuel told the Philadelphia
Daily News last week. “I told him if he didn’t want to, he doesn’t have to
take BP. I want him to just get away for a couple of days and sit and watch and
hopefully just relax and try to get his thinking back and the way he feels and
everything.”
Which is smart,
because Manuel knows that the division is there for the taking and another deep
October run could be theirs when they aren’t playing their best ball and are
surviving with smoke and mirrors on the mound.
Remember, it was
only two seasons ago that Rollins became one of four men since 1871 to join the
20-20-20-20 Club by accumulating 20 or more doubles, triples, home runs, and
stolen bases in a single season.
Who are the
other men?
Curtis
Granderson did it the same year as Rollins with the Detroit Tigers. Then we
have to go back to Willie Mays in 1957 with the New York Giants, and Frank
Schulte in 1911 with the Chicago Cubs. That’s it.
So we know what
type of dynamic player Rollins is and can be, and the Phillies are just waiting
for that same guy to come back. This is already a club who ranks 1st
in the N.L. in home runs and 2nd in the league in runs scored.
With a normal
Rollins batting leadoff in Philadelphia and a healthy Raul Ibanez in the middle
of the order, the Phillies lineup is one of the meanest gauntlets in baseball
when you add Shane Victorino, Ryan Howard, and Chase Utley to the
aforementioned two. Even Jayson Werth is better than most other outfielders the
Phillies will see come August and September.
If Rollins
doesn’t bounce back to his career levels at least, then it becomes a wide-open
division again if only because Philadelphia’s pitching staff has a larger crack
than the Liberty Bell.
The Phils rank
15th in the N.L. in earned runs, so we can fairly assume that it
can’t get much worse. But where is the improvement going to come from?
Cole Hamels must
pitch better than his 4.44 ERA, Jamie Moyer isn’t fooling anybody with his ERA
hovering above 6.00, and Joe Blanton hasn’t had the type of success in the N.L.
that the Phillies thought he would have when they got him from Oakland last
summer.
Sure, Citizens
Bank Park is a hitter’s park, but a sinkerball pitcher shouldn’t be getting
knocked around like Blanton is.
Brad Lidge spent
some time on the DL with a sprained knee in early June and hasn’t been close to
the same guy he was in ‘08 when he converted every save opportunity for the entire season.
What’s been
Lidge’s problem? You could make a number of cases, but I would look at the 5.6
walks per nine innings he is averaging. With stuff that good, Lidge just needs
to let it fly in the zone and see what happens.
Phillies GM
Ruben Amaro Jr. will be one of the most active men on the trading front for
starting pitching as the deadline approaches, but with so many teams looking
for arms and so few quality arms available, there just aren’t many upgrades to
be had.
“We have
interest in a lot of guys and we have talked to several teams about pitching
across the board,” Amaro Jr. told MLB.com. “But a lot of it just
depends on which pitching becomes available. And if they do become available,
if we have the right fits for them.”
“When you
have this many teams in the race it’s very thin,” Amaro said. “It’s
always thin. Again, there were three teams who got pitching last year. Three
teams out of 30. That’s 10 percent.”
And, in reality,
that may be the tipping point for the Phillies. The lack of pitching available
via trade combined with the thin pitching staffs within the division could make
the N.L. East a summer slugfest. If that’s the case, Philadelphia already is
the team to beat and will be even more so when Rollins joins the party.
None of these
teams look real pretty in comparison with the Dodgers, Cardinals, or Brewers.
But in the end it doesn’t matter because none of those teams are in the
division.
What matters is
that the Philadelphia Phillies are the only team in the N.L. East with a
positive run differential (i.e. have scored more runs than allowed) and that
certainly isn’t because they are carving teams up on the mound.
Thus far,
Rollins has merely been a caricature of himself sans the flesh, blood, and
heart.
We won’t know
for a few games what Rollins has emerged from his mini vacation.
But if the old
chatty and swaggering J-Roll rides into the batters box to leadoff the ballgame
down South, we will know one thing.
The golden key
to the East will be dangling from his neck.
Teddy Mitrosilis is the author of Ballpark Banter. He also writes for Bleacher Report. You can reach him at tm4000@yahoo.com.
