BALTIMORE – Shortly before the Philadelphia Phillies took the field Friday, July 31, desperate to slow their second-half free fall, owner John Middleton and Sam Fuld, their president of business operations, took a tour of Camden Yards’ new amenities, guided by an Orioles official.
The Phillies have big plans for their own Citizens Bank Park, the success of these past five seasons making a refurbishing of their lovely ballpark a well-timed venture.
Down on the field, interim manager Don Mattingly was searching even harder for upgrades.
The Phillies had lost nine of their last 12 games since hosting the All-Star Game, the fourth and fifth spots in their rotation still unreliable, the ennui spreading through the lineup and bullpen. Fresh out of ideas and the trade deadline still three stultifying days away, the Phillies returned promising but erratic right-hander Andrew Painter to the major leagues, not because they envision him immediately locking down a rotation spot.
“He gives us the best chance,” Mattingly said of Painter, 1-8 with a 7.06 ERA his first time up, “to win a game tonight.”
Painter was up to the smaller task at hand, shutting out the Orioles for five innings after a shaky two-run first. He gave them a chance to win. Yet the rookie was powerless to cure every other area failing the Phillies, a notion apparent immediately after he left the game.
This time, it was relievers Orion Kerkering and Tim Mayza forfeiting a two-run, seventh-inning lead Painter hand delivered them, flipping the result of a game that will reverberate throughout the major leagues on this crucial weekend before the trade deadline.
Their failures were a boon to the Baltimore Orioles, who, thanks to a two-run double by Christian Encarnacion-Strand off Kerkering and a two-run, left-on-left triple by Gunnar Henderson off Mayza, registered their most important win of the season, a 6-4 victory before 31,857 at that refurbished Camden Yards.
The Phillies, now 57-53, were never supposed to be in the ambiguous buy-or-sell state so many teams find themselves in as the Aug. 3 trade deadline bears down. And they’re still not: Baseball operations president Dave Dombrowski’s urgency to add relievers, a starting pitcher or two, a right-handed bat only keeps spiking.
Yet the Phillies are in trouble.
They are 3-10 since the break, losers of eight of their last nine games. Their franchise player, Bryce Harper, just finished one of the worst months of his career, batting .172 with a .625 OPS and two home runs.
And the bullpen has a 4.64 second-half ERA, their pratfalls testing the patience already running short around the room.
Kerkering posted scoreless outings in 10 of his last 11 appearances, but the red lights were still blinking: He’d walked 10 in 10⅔ innings, a performance that suggested his good fortune might soon run out.
It did so in disastrous fashion in the seventh inning.
Jackson Holliday got him for a hard-hit single and after Coby Mayo struck out, the base-on-ball reared its head again as Colton Cowser reached, putting the tying runs on.
The plan against Encarnacion-Strand, catcher J.T. Realmuto said, was to get him to chase, to fire a sweeper far out of the zone for a whiff. Kerkering indeed got it out of the zone, Realmuto said, just not far enough.
The two-run double ignited Camden Yards, and Kerkering’s night ended after he hit Pete Alonso with a pitch, leading to Mayza’s fateful match with Henderson.
Kerkering minced no words when asked the level of frustration with his poor location.
“It pisses me the (expletive) off,” Kerkering said. “Yeah, it’s frustrating because you can’t give the team a chance to win, almost, it feels like. It pisses me off a lot.
“I just got to figure it out.”
He’s not the only one. The Phillies hit the break 54-43, two games behind Atlanta in the NL East. They were a half-game out of the No. 1 wild card.
Now? They are eight games behind Atlanta and holding on to the No. 3 and final wild card slot, just a game in front of San Diego and 1½ ahead of Miami.
Could these Phillies, this veteran group that’s made October their playground every autumn since 2022, miss the playoffs?
“This, too, shall pass,” Mattingly insisted.
He was speaking more specifically about the bullpen, but it could apply to the grander canvas. Dombrowski remains among the most aggressive GMs in the game, and his presence is hard to miss, physically and otherwise, at the deadline.
The postgame scene was appropriately muted. Middleton strolled quickly through the clubhouse, stopping to tell Kerkering, “Don’t worry about it.”
Outside the clubhouse, Dombrowski huddled quietly with Harper, who, in something of an annual ritual, called for roster improvements by the deadline.
Perhaps Dombrowski was assuring him something was coming. Reinforcements will almost certainly be here by Tuesday.
Shoring up what they already have would make a bigger impact.
“This is not the brand of baseball we want to be playing,” says Realmuto, who hit his eighth homer. “We’ve got the guys in this room to win. We know that. We just have to play better.
“We’re just not doing enough things, particularly late in the game. I feel like when it really matters, we’re not making pitches we need to make, not attacking guys, and that’s getting us in trouble.
“We have confidence in this group. But at the same time, we know we have to do it. We can’t just talk about it. We just need to change our mentality late in the game, get some confidence and run with it.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Phillies are in trouble. And the trade deadline can't fix what's ailing them | Opinion
