DJ Spinoza
Registered User
- Aug 7, 2003
- 25,524
- 4,025
I think it's frustrating, but the cliche in baseball that a team is never as good as its high points and never as good as its low points is basically ironclad in my opinion. It's difficult to imagine literally anything going right for this team given the past several games. The finale in New York was already a laughable joke and then it just kept repeating and somehow getting worse through yesterday, up to the point where I fully expect Jones to get bombed and end up out of the game by the second inning in an ugly blowout.
That said, I think the biggest problem is more whether the early stretch was really the high points where we aren't that good. We had some great fortune to face a bottom barrel Marlins team whose entire season has been our last 5 games on repeat, and we got lots of great bounces going our way.
Add it up and you get a team that's around a 75-win team that needs a torrid stretch to flirt with more than that and is also susceptible to being torpedoed by any of the other slightly better mediocre teams in the division (with the lone exception of the Cardinals, perhaps). It's what they went into the season embracing and there doesn't seem to be an easy fix, even on the assumption that the offense will get it going a bit better lately.
To me, the most frustrating thing has been how badly we squandered the great start. It's not a nightmare in terms of the standings, though a 4 game sweep at home against the Brewers will start to make it just that, but it's really that we didn't seize the moment and set ourselves up to conquer April in the way that we could have. All we needed was a little bit of grit to turn three of these recent games behind and we'd be in a perfectly fine situation. It's just returned to being a massive grind rather than any kind of great opportunity.
Just to play it out on the back of a napkin, if we were 14-8 instead of 11-11, we'd be able to try to hold serve for a split here at 16-10 heading into a stretch of 12 extremely winnable games to cap off the month and the first week of May. Grab 8 or 9 of those and then you are 10 or 11 games over .500 with Paul Skenes' debut imminent. There'd still be a whole lot of season left, but a team that's so far over .500 six weeks into the season has a different prognosis even if you still bank on them being a 75-78ish win team the rest of the way.
That all feels like a pipe dream right now. We have 16 games against Milwaukee, San Fran, Oakland, Colorado, and LAA. I think we've got to find a way to at least be .500 at the end of it, but even that feels like it will be difficult, and these are three of the worst teams in the league. If we can get some separation, then the conclusion will be that our prognosis shouldn't really be much better than any of theirs (save Milwaukee and San Fran, who are in a different tier obviously).
That said, I think the biggest problem is more whether the early stretch was really the high points where we aren't that good. We had some great fortune to face a bottom barrel Marlins team whose entire season has been our last 5 games on repeat, and we got lots of great bounces going our way.
Add it up and you get a team that's around a 75-win team that needs a torrid stretch to flirt with more than that and is also susceptible to being torpedoed by any of the other slightly better mediocre teams in the division (with the lone exception of the Cardinals, perhaps). It's what they went into the season embracing and there doesn't seem to be an easy fix, even on the assumption that the offense will get it going a bit better lately.
To me, the most frustrating thing has been how badly we squandered the great start. It's not a nightmare in terms of the standings, though a 4 game sweep at home against the Brewers will start to make it just that, but it's really that we didn't seize the moment and set ourselves up to conquer April in the way that we could have. All we needed was a little bit of grit to turn three of these recent games behind and we'd be in a perfectly fine situation. It's just returned to being a massive grind rather than any kind of great opportunity.
Just to play it out on the back of a napkin, if we were 14-8 instead of 11-11, we'd be able to try to hold serve for a split here at 16-10 heading into a stretch of 12 extremely winnable games to cap off the month and the first week of May. Grab 8 or 9 of those and then you are 10 or 11 games over .500 with Paul Skenes' debut imminent. There'd still be a whole lot of season left, but a team that's so far over .500 six weeks into the season has a different prognosis even if you still bank on them being a 75-78ish win team the rest of the way.
That all feels like a pipe dream right now. We have 16 games against Milwaukee, San Fran, Oakland, Colorado, and LAA. I think we've got to find a way to at least be .500 at the end of it, but even that feels like it will be difficult, and these are three of the worst teams in the league. If we can get some separation, then the conclusion will be that our prognosis shouldn't really be much better than any of theirs (save Milwaukee and San Fran, who are in a different tier obviously).
