PHILADELPHIA -- No pressure on Andrew Painter, but the Phillies need somebody to step up on Tuesday.
Manager Rob Thomson said before Monday night’s 13-2 loss to the Nationals at Citizens Bank Park that he would be thrilled to get six innings from Painter in his highly anticipated MLB debut on Tuesday. Left unsaid, Thomson would love to see a few zeros, too. The Phillies have played poorly in the past three games, falling to 1-3, and they need something to go their way.
“It’ll happen,” Thomson said.
It’s easy to overreact to the first four games of a baseball season. It’s happened before. The Phillies started 4-11 in 2007. They won the National League East. They started 8-10 in ‘08. They won the World Series. They started 4-8 in ‘22. They won the NL pennant. They started 4-9 in ‘23. They made it to the NL Championship Series. They started 2-4 in ‘24. They won the NL East.
After each of those slow starts, there were varying levels of doom and gloom.
“You always try to stay off that roller coaster,” Kyle Schwarber said. “We keep going about our work, and we keep trying to get better on a daily basis and keeping even-keeled, not getting too emotional about anything. The more that you can be very objective, and for yourself, just undress the top to bottom and look at it and go from there and try to work for the next day.”
But fan frustration is real because these last three games have not been pretty, and those games have stoked fears about future failures.
The Phillies haven’t had a lead since Opening Day on Thursday. Rafael Marchán’s two-run homer in the fifth inning on Monday represented Philadelphia’s first runs in the first five innings of a game since Opening Day.
Trea Turner, Bryce Harper and Schwarber are batting a combined .120 (6-for-50). The entire team is batting .189 (25-for-132).
Phillies right-hander Taijuan Walker allowed seven runs (six earned) in 4 2/3 innings on Monday, the most runs allowed by a Phillies starter since Jesús Luzardo allowed eight runs in Toronto on June 5.
Walker wasn’t hit hard. Six of the 10 hits he allowed had exit velocities of 89 mph or below. Only two starters last season allowed more hits with exit velocities of 89 mph or below in a game: Hayden Wesneski (seven on April 25) and Logan Webb (seven on April 29).
“I felt like I was executing,” Walker said. “Just one of those games. … It’s not the way I wanted to start it.”
Walker allowed four runs in a wild first inning that culminated with Thomson getting ejected after a replay review overturned a call at first base and put a runner, who was tagged out, at third base.
But by the ninth inning, Phillies utility player Dylan Moore was pitching. It was the first time Moore had appeared in the field for the Phils. It was the earliest in the season a Philadelphia position player had pitched in a game since Josh Harrison took the mound in the second game of the 2023 season.
The optics haven’t been great.
But maybe it’s just four games. Schwarber is trying to remain objective about it.
“Everyone knows their capabilities,” he said. “Everyone knows what they feel is good for them, what they feel is wrong for them. And feeling like that, you can kind of look at success, you can look at failure and you can figure out a way to learn from that. And that's what this is about. It's not saying that we're complacent by any means. I think it's more the fact of trying to stay, like I said, [with] that level head and get to work and show up to the field the next day, get ready to work and expect to win a baseball game when you walk out.”