Phillies

[PhillyPhreak54]

Well that sucked.

[ice grillin you]

Oooooh boy gonna be a long decade plus with Brycie

[MDS]

bryce had no chance, couldnt pick up familia at all

baseball sucks i dont know why i like it

[ice grillin you]

bryce had no chance, couldnt pick up familia at

match ups yo

[MDS]

there are some replay truthers out there right now...same people who think alec bohm touched home in atlanta

the ball hit the railing. couple inches higher, its tied. i mean matt moore was coming in for the 10th so really all this wouldve done was given me a 5-5 fantasy week instead of 4-5, which is frankly more important than the stupid phillies.

[ice grillin you]

max scherzer had another baby....the Phillies aborted another game

[MDS]

ive been watching the phillies pretty religiously since the mid 90s and that is up there in ridiculous regular season losses

the orioles one last year where segura stormed in for the pop up....the late night game in dc in 06 that ended their season.....heyward slam off morgan....the biggio bomb off wagner....they lost a game in milwaukee when corey hart robbed victorino of a homer....the marlins game 2 years ago where wilkin castillo -- who hadnt played in 10 years -- got a huge 2bi double.

wow what i have done with my life

[ice grillin you]

trust me it's not top 100

[MDS]

not debilitating just ridiculous

of course theyve had far worse l's

[ice grillin you]

Days before minor-league camp opened in late March at the Phillies' complex in Florida, the organization did something rather unusual. It removed Rafael Chaves as its director of pitching development and promoted, on an interim basis, a coach with one year of experience in professional baseball.

Travis Hergert, who joined the Phillies in December 2019 from North Iowa Area Community College (NIACC), is now overseeing the organization's pitchers as interim pitching coordinator. The decision was made at a time when nothing is certain in player development — specifically within the Phillies organization — after the entire 2020 minor-league season was lost to the pandemic. New president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski has decided he will be less an agent of change, at first, and more an observer to determine what is working and what is not. The minor-league season begins Tuesday.

The Phillies have spent the better part of three years reimagining how they develop players, and that has often led them to emulate Driveline Baseball, the Seattle-based think tank that has wielded influence across the sport. Jason Ochart, who simultaneously holds high-ranking roles with Driveline and the Phillies, is the club's minor-league hitting coordinator. Hergert adopted Driveline's training programs while coaching at NIACC, and even wrote blog posts for the company's website.

The Phillies, now, have signaled they are all-in on that approach. The club never announced the change.

"It's a big move at kind of an odd time," Phillies assistant general manager Bryan Minniti said last week. "And I get that. I think at the end of the day, though, these days are precious. Look, we just lost the whole year. Every day with our players is precious. It was just a decision to make a change and go for it. Go for moving those things forward and not wait. It had as much to do with the collective decision to try something different as anything else."

But the team's transition to a Driveline-based approach has generated friction within the player-development ranks. Numerous club sources indicated that disagreements about the farm system's direction sometimes created conflicting messages to players. The Phillies have purged longtime minor-league instructors to hire less-experienced coaches with college backgrounds.

Hergert's style could appeal to Caleb Cotham, who was hired last offseason as Phillies pitching coach, and the team envisions a more cohesive approach up and down the organization. The Phillies are not alone in prioritizing collegiate and data-driven principles in their player-development program; this is a trend throughout baseball.

Dombrowski was hired more than two months into the offseason. The immediate budget situation — dictated by the pandemic — combined with a lack of minor-league season to analyze prompted him to adopt a wait-and-see approach. It's possible those who oversee the minors view this as a season-long pitch to Dombrowski to convince him the farm system is headed in the right direction. Rather than straddle two strategies, the Phillies veered into one.

Chaves, 52, has more than 30 years of experience as a player and coach in professional baseball. He was a big-league pitching coach in Seattle from 2006 to 2007. He was one of the few high-ranking holdovers in player development; he joined the Phillies while Joe Jordan still ran the farm system. The Phillies have continually praised Chaves and even promoted him in 2019 with a fancier title. Other teams had requested to interview him.

"Rafael Chaves is a phenomenal human," said Josh Bonifay, the team's director of player development. "We as an organization decided it was time to make the move at that particular time. That was really it. As a group, we decided that was the timing when we needed to make that change."

Chaves declined to comment for this story. He remains employed by the Phillies, although his current role is unclear.

"We're still working through that," Minniti said.

The Phillies have had player-development successes in transforming low-bonus, undersized pitchers into viable prospects and, even, big-league arms. Chaves, who joined the Phillies before the 2015 season, was responsible for implementing a program that emphasized lower-body strength. But some of the team's middle-tier pitching prospects plateaued once they reached the upper levels of the farm system. The Phillies have struggled to produce homegrown starters. Whether that was because the pitchers lacked enough talent and were exposed or because the team's development process was flawed is subject to debate.

Chaves was well-respected among players and coaches in the organization. He was a constant presence during big-league spring training in February and March. The Phillies interviewed Chaves last November for their vacant pitching coach job that ultimately went to Cotham.

But Minniti said the team's decision to remove Chaves from his influential post in the minors had been contemplated for some time. While the Phillies spent 2020 doing routine remote checkups and instruction for their farmhands, Minniti said the downtime was spent on coaching coaches.

"There was some advantage to getting an opportunity to regroup and really spend time talking together and learning about each other," Minniti said. "Learning things and investing in what you want it to look like and be. And so out of that came some thoughts of, 'Maybe we need to really streamline your ideas and thought processes.' ... We spent a lot of time as a pitching group, as a front office, talking about how we wanted things to be."

Cotham, who wielded influence over Cincinnati's minor-league program while he served as assistant pitching coach in the majors for the Reds, has achieved similar status with the Phillies. Minniti said Cotham's arrival was not the impetus for the club's decision to rethink its pitching development.

North Iowa was considered one of the more analytical junior college teams in the country. MLB teams had attempted to lure Hergert before the Phillies swayed him. The Yankees and Twins hired away two of Hergert's coaches while he was at NIACC.

Minniti downplayed that as a factor in the restructuring.

"I think it was less about Travis and more about deciding to have a different process and structure going forward," Minniti said. He added: "We didn't hand him the title outright. I mean, we think a lot of him, and I hope he does well enough to seize it. We think he has a chance to do a really good job."

Hergert, in 2017, authored a lengthy post for Driveline's website in which he detailed a three-year-long implementation of the company's training philosophies. "I came across articles from Driveline Baseball and I was hooked," Hergert wrote at the time. "I saw the use of weighted balls and how to reach in and tap the ability to throw the ball harder."

The 2,000-word post was filled with internal data on North Iowa's pitchers, collected by Hergert and his coaches, that showed velocity gains across the board. North Iowa won a lot. "Driveline protocols work, period," Hergert wrote. There was a reason, he said, to measure everything.

"I get asked all the time, 'How does this help them execute pitches and compete on the mound?'

"To me, through the ability to shape the arm path through the training elements, pitchers are able to not only develop velocity and arm strength, but overall feel for stuff."

Chaves, described by peers as a wise pitching mind who was more traditional but not always rooted in "old school" ways, had pushed back against some of the more extreme training methods, according to sources. The Phillies, before the pandemic, had entered an agreement to send more than a dozen pitchers to Driveline for assessments in the offseasons. Chaves and the player-development staff targeted specific pitchers who might benefit from different thinking.

Now, the Phillies plan to apply that on a wider scale.

"Approaching today's players is different than it was five years ago, or 10 years ago," Minniti said. "And a lot of our changes in player development have really been reflective of that. It's a response to what's happening in amateur baseball and the real world, in a lot of ways. Today's kids are different. And youth baseball is different. How these kids train and go about things is different. The information they seek is different."

So much about how the minor-league season will unfold is unknown. A lost season of development could have untold costs. The Phillies view it as a blank slate, and that nudged them to apply a consequential change at an unusual time.

"I want us, as a big-market club that has resources, to be able to have coaches that are able to reach all types of players," Minniti said. "Because the reality is we have players coming from all places in the world with all different types of playing backgrounds, education backgrounds, training backgrounds. We have to be there for the kid that comes in with no plan and it's just raw ability. We have to be there for the kid that comes in and is used to looking at an iPad every time he throws a pitch. And we have to find ways to help these kids, get them to the big leagues and give them the chance to be good players."

[PhillyPhreak54]

The OF tonight is 1997/1998 bad.

[MDS]

bryson stott is so bad is he still in A ball at his age 23 season

that pretty sums up the phillies. their first round picks are worthless and the ones that are good enough to make it (bohm) are fundamentally flawed players with 1-2 tools.

[PhillyPhreak54]

Maybe Maton turns into something. Joe said he may play him in CF when Segura comes back.

Vinny is doing Vinny things

[MDS]

Maybe Maton turns into something

lol j i love you but come on

[PhillyPhreak54]

You never know goddammit! One of these years they'll get lucky on a guy