Major League Baseball

Halladay & Co. need serious help

Published Apr. 30, 2012 1:00 a.m. ET

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Even in their most discouraging moment, as Ryan Howard hobbled desperately through the chill of an October night and Chris Carpenter laid their playoff run to waste, the Philadelphia Phillies were never forced to confront the fundamental truth about their experiment.

They had poured everything into compiling the best pitching staff on the planet, maybe one of the best of all-time, with the singular mission of winning a World Series. But when it didn’t happen last year, it was seen less as a failure than a dream deferred. The St. Louis Cardinals had been just a little better, the margin between them just 1-0 in a deciding Game 5, and who knows what might have happened if that first-round playoff series had gone just an inch the other way.

That’s what the Phillies told themselves through a what-if winter, comforted by the knowledge that their rotation — sans Roy Oswalt — would be back and another division title would be for the taking in the rebuilding National League East.

But 2012 has revealed a concern that somehow got overlooked last fall, when Carpenter shut down their lineup in the game that mattered most. The Phillies can sure pitch, but they still can’t hit, and it’s starting to look like they’ll never do it well enough to be the team they were supposed to be.

After Sunday’s 5-1 loss to the Chicago Cubs, the Phillies are 10-12 this season, ensuring their first sub-.500 April since 2007. And though it might be too early to write them off from making the playoffs, it’s not too early to panic.

Because the Phillies’ issues, while perhaps not fatal, are not completely correctable, either — not to the level that can carry them to a championship. That’s plainly obvious now.

The Phillies aren’t a good offensive team struggling to score runs. They’re a bad offensive team that has been overly reliant on the creaky knees of Chase Utley and the consistent presence of Howard — neither of which is available to them right now and may not be for some time. And when you pull back the curtain, you get a lot of games like Sunday when they started the first inning with a bloop single off Matt Garza and then didn’t threaten to score again until the ninth when it was way too late.

“We didn’t hit any balls hard,” manager Charlie Manuel said. “At times you can have some lucky hits and things can go your way, but you’ve got to hit some balls hard in the game consistently at the major league level to win.”

But this is who the Phillies are. This is the narrative they’ve earned, and it’s possible that neither Utley nor Howard, who tore his Achilles on the last at-bat of the playoffs last fall, can dramatically turn it around if and when they return.

Baseball is a numbers game, and the numbers are indefensible. The Phillies have scored two or fewer runs in 12 of their 22 games. They’re 14th in the National League in both on-base percentage (.288) and in runs scored (70), better than only Miami and Pittsburgh. And they’re not just bad, they’re impatient, too. Philadelphia sees fewer pitches per plate appearance than any team in the league.

“As an opposing guy you always had that thunder in the middle of the lineup,” said veteran outfielder Juan Pierre, who signed with the Phillies as a free agent in the offseason. “And now you just have to create more runs and you have to be on base and go from there. With this [pitching] staff, you get a couple runs and you have a pretty good chance of winning. You can’t say that with a lot of teams, but it should be less pressure for the offense if we can just get two or three runs.”

But that’s what makes the April record so troubling. Though starting pitcher Cliff Lee is on the 15-day disabled list with a minor injury, the Phillies have pitched well. With Lee, Roy Halladay, Cole Hamels and Joe Blanton, their top four starters are just about averaging seven innings and two runs allowed per outing. Even Kyle Kendrick, who’s basically the fill-in guy, gave them a solid start Sunday with three runs (two earned) allowed in six innings.

“It’s early,” Kendrick said. “We’ve been through struggles like this before and bats came through. I think guys will start swinging it and we’ll be fine.”

Maybe, but it’s an awful lot of pressure to put on Halladay and Hamels, knowing the Phillies are digging a deeper hole every day while getting nothing from the leadoff spot (Jimmy Rollins is hitting .222), almost nothing from outfielder Hunter Pence (he’s hitting .253 with 22 strikeouts) and relying on lifetime .265 hitter Ty Wigginton to bat cleanup.

“It’s going to take a few of us getting hot. It’s going to happen,” Pence said.

But while the Phillies wait for it, their pitching staff has to be nearly perfect just to stay in the NL East race, which won’t be easy against the dramatically improved Washington Nationals, who are 14-8. After all, April was supposed to be the one of the easier months for the Phillies, who play the majority of their games in May and June against teams currently with winning records.

“The teams that we feel like we’re supposed to beat, we’re definitely not beating them,” Manuel said. “We’ve got to play a lot better and we can’t get far behind. But I know we have to pick it up if we’re going to do that.”

That’s a far different standard than the Phillies carried through last season, but it’s where they are now. A slow start is one thing, but a significant roster problem is another — and the Phillies are decidedly trending toward the latter. When Howard and Utley are healthy, they may eventually be good enough to get back to the playoffs. But with each frustrating plate appearance and each quality start wasted, the team they were supposed to be becomes more of a memory and less of a possibility.

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