Phillies looking to quickly turn things around on their first road trip of the young season
Phillies manager Rob Thomson spoke the media after his team’s 4-1 loss to the Cincinnati Reds.
Well, this season has gotten off to a bumpier start than the Phillies might have hoped. Opening Day was preemptively postponed due to an unpromising forecast. The first pitch of Game 2 was delayed, due to it being difficult to play with the tarp on the field.
Game 5 went on through a steady, occasionally heavy, drizzle. Game 6, originally set to start at 1:05 was pushed back three hours with little advance notice. . .which turned out to coincide almost exactly with the moment another heavy downpour hit Citizens Bank Park. The first pitch was finally delivered at 8.
And that’s even before we pause to examine how the Phillies’ pledge to get off to a fast start has panned out during those infrequent breaks in the green radar when they’ve actually been able to follow the umpire’s classic admonition: Play Ball!
They lost to the Reds, 4-1 on Tuesday and are now 2-4. Manager Rob Thompson insists he isn’t worried and he shouldn’t be. If things don’t turn around, there will be plenty of time for that later.
“I think everybody is still locked into playing well and getting off to a good start,” he said.
Designated hitter Kyle Schwarber, who has emerged as the go-to guy for providing perspective, was just as unruffled.
“I don’t think anyone’s happy after a loss, but I think there are a lot of positive things to take away from the homestand,” he said. “At the end of the day we wanted to do better than 2-4 but we’ve got a good challenge ahead hitting the road. We’ll reset on the off day and go from there.
“I think we saw a lot of good at bats. I think we saw a lot of guys pounding the zone. So those are the kind of things you look at. You want to look at the negatives and learn from them, but also keep the good things in your head and carry those into the next series.”
What’s happened up to now matters less than what occurs from this point forward.
It’s also important to define exactly what a “fast start” entails. Opening the season losing two out of three to a Braves team coming off back-to-back 100-win seasons is nothing more than a mild annoyance. Being eight games under .500 (as they were in 2022) or seven games under (like last year) as May bleeds into June — if it coms to that — obviously does.
It’s the blanks that will be filled out in between that will tip the scales. And even though the Phils have rebounded to play deep into October each of the past two seasons and are fully-loaded to do it again in 2024 regardless, there are two under-the-radar factors that make the upcoming weeks a little more crucial than they first appear.
