Phillies Offensive Woes Continue as Honeymoon Phase of Don Mattingly Era Coming to an End: ‘Our Righties Just Got to Solve that Problem’

The honeymoon phase of the Don Mattingly era seems to be over, and the true version of the Phillies offense seems to be back in full force.

Before heading out west for Memorial Day, the Philadelphia Phillies wrapped up their six-game homestead with a matchup against the Cleveland Guardians. They had previously dropped two of three against the Cincinnati Reds and went into a Sunday rubber match against Cleveland with a chance to avoid dropping back-to-back series. Unfortunately for Philadelphia, their offense continued to disappoint, losing the finale to the Guardians 3-1.

It was an embarrassing series, mainly from an offensive standpoint, one in which the team scored just four runs the entire series, going scoreless in 24 of the 27 innings played.

“Well-pitched series on both sides. There’s not a lot to say other than those types of games are games that are playoff-type games,” Mattingly said after Sunday’s loss, saying that this series had a playoff-type atmosphere with runs and hits tough to come by. “When you get pitching like that, bullpens are good, it’s gonna be the little things that we’re able to do, scratch for a run here or there, that are gonna make a difference. In this series, we didn’t do it.”

Now, yes, pitching was great from both teams this series, with starting pitching tossing 39 combined innings, allowing only 27 hits, five earned runs, and striking out 37 batters. However, whether you call it a playoff-type atmosphere or not, the at-bats and the approach from the Phillies’ offense have to be better. This past weekend, the Phillies hit .185, totaled only 31 hits in total during their six-game home stand, and didn’t hit a home run for the first time in a full series at home since 2023.

Too often this season and past years, the Phillies’ offense goes through this dry spell where they can’t buy a run, a hit, or even a baserunner, going multiple innings at a time where nothing happens from them offensively. Their sluggish philosophy, and once one guy gets going, the rest will follow, is worn out and has clearly run its course during the past five years with this team.

Right now, it feels as though Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber are the only two real guys that they can rely on when the going gets tough, and they need a clutch run or hit. Others this year have produced, like Brandon Marsh, who’s batting .320 on the season, and Bryson Stott, who currently leads all of baseball in RBI’s in May with 20. But it’s not enough, and it’s shown over these last few games, that when Harper and Schwarber have non-difference-making series, and are not hitting extra-base hits after extra-base hits, the team isn’t producing.

Now there’s even a common denominator with those four guys, and it’s the fact that every one of them is a left-handed batter, showing you what is likely the major problem with this Phillies team this season. The right-handed everyday at-bat players have not and cannot produce any sort of offense right now.

Along with Trea Turner, J.T. Realmuto, Alec Bohm, and maybe the worst of all, Adolis Garcia, three of those four batters have recorded over 175 at-bats this season (Realmuto being the lone exception due to missing time on the injured list), and the four have combined for an average batting average of .215. Realmuto is qualified, but the other three have the worst three averages, slugging percentage, OPS, and on-base percentage on the entire team.

Realmuto has been hurt for a lot of this season, but that doesn’t excuse his sub-.300 slugging and on-base percentage, and his .572 OPS. Bohm stunk for the first month and a half of the season and has improved mightily, but old Bohm still comes out every once in a while.

Turner’s 11-year, $300 million contract continues to look worse as the years go on, and Garcia, while his defense is miles better, is just another version of Nick Castellanos at the plate. Garcia has just one hit and 21 strikeouts in his last 46 plate appearances.

When asked postgame about the right-handers potentially pressing for hits, and not producing against not only right-handed pitchers, but lefties as well, Turner essentially brushed off the question:

“That’s been a big statistic this year, but I don’t know, I don’t really think about that,” Turner said. “When you’re up to bat, it feels like you’re just competing, and I think that’s more of a coincidence than anything. I think we got the guys to hit left-handed pitching. I think we can score against them, we just haven’t.”

The Phillies right-handed hitters went 1-for-17 in the final game of the series against the Guardians against left-handed pitching. This season, Turner is batting .206 against left-handed pitching, the worst in any season of his career, with 13 hits and 13 strikeouts.

Right-handed batters this season are batting .169 against left-handed pitchers; meanwhile, left-handed batters against left-handed pitching are hitting .238. Right-handed batters have 63 hits while lefties have 55, but the right-handed batters have had nearly 100 more at-bats.

“I’m looking at it like, okay, how do we get our righties going? It’s kind of game to game, it’s guy to guy,” Mattingly said. “What challenges does our guy bring against righties and lefties? Our lefties, actually, I felt like handling better than the righties [Sunday]. [Stott] had good at-bats, Schwarber had good at-bats, Harper had good at-bats, Marsh had good at-bats. So our lefties were good [Sunday]. Our righties just got to solve that problem.”

Not to knock the job Mattingly has done, but this stretch of terrible at-bats from players just shows you that Rob Thomson was the fall guy for this team, and it wasn’t all the manager’s fault. Right-handed production has felt like a need for this team for years now, and every season, it feels as though the Phillies do very little to actually try to fix that issue.

The righties also don’t deserve all the blame, as there’s been plenty of time where the entire offense is terrible, no matter who’s on the mound, and it seems like no difference can be made. However, when you have a rotation that’s been as good as any, where in a series they give you a 0.90 ERA, allowing just two runs, and pitching 20.1 of the possible 27 innings, you have to be able to provide something.

Series like the Guardians and Reds ones are the type of series that the Phillies put on when the light seems to be brightest in October, and year after year, we’ve seen the disappointment when it comes to playoff baseball.

Will this problem ever be fixed with this group? I have no idea, but if performances like the recent ones continue, people will be losing their jobs, and it won’t just be coaches this time around.

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