-
-
This site is way too hard on Ryan Howard.Comment
-
Hey, I ain't hating on him for signing it, any more than I hate on Werth for signing his deal with Washington.
But the fact is that the Howard contract is a whale that is affecting the Phillies ability to expand/improve their team. And he's not playing up to that contract.The king was shaken. He went up to the room over the gateway and wept.
As he went, he said: "O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom!
If only I had died instead of you
O Absalom, my son, my son!"Comment
-
Ryan Madson MUST be signed. There's no need to go out and splurge on a closer when we have one at home.
Lidge Ibanez and Oswalt should be gone. I honestly think that Rollins shouldn't be a priority, since his MVP season....he just isn't the same anymore. Plus we need a true lead off, I am sick of the swinging for the fences mentality at 6 of 8 spots in our line up.
Comment
-
.224, 3, 28 against LHP.
That's what should concern Phillies fans as far as Howard is concerned. He's still a .900+ OPS guy against RHP.
If you go back to 2010, Howard actually had a much higher HR% vs. LHP than RHP, and only a slightly lower OPS (.826 vs. .876). His sharp decline vs. lefties this year is a problem, and he should probably be taking a seat more often against tough lefties moving forward.
Look, he's not a $25M player, but sometimes in sports you pay for past production. He wasn't a $10M player when he was hitting 50 bombs and driving in 150.
Howard has "old man skills" so he will probably not see much more of a decline until maybe the tail end of the deal. I don't think a 125 OPS+, 35 HR first baseman is the problem. The team won 102 games, they don't really have any problems.Comment
-
I don't want to hear this nonsense.
They've 'expanded and improved' their team every year for the last 5 years. They just won 102 games with the best SP staff we've seen in decades.
The Phillies have the highest payroll in the league, and usually go out and get whatever player they want.
28 teams would love to have their 'problems'.Comment
-
Great post W2B. Particularly like the bolded part, as it is what I generally argued in support of Howard.
But yes, his hitting against lefties and his approach in general better are both frustrating. I think we've seen the best we're going to get against lefties, but I would like to see him learn to hit a breaking ball at some point. If Pedro Cerano can do it, why can't he?Comment
-
Galvis is the same as Rollins, he can hit but he doesn't take walks at all. Only has played 33 games at the AAA level and he struck out 18 times while only walking 3 times. If he starts a full year, I would project him batting something like .240, even though Rollins isn't a true leadoff hitter, that's a huge step down. I honestly have no clue what we will do at SS if Rollins leaves us. I guess we would be forced to try Galvis out because no one is on the market besides Reyes and we can't afford him.
Comment
-
According to Todd Zolecki (Phillies Beat writer) twitter:
Rollins looking for 5 years or 4 years with 5th year as a player option.
Comment
-
Joe Posnanski on the Howard deal, and other bad contracts:
The Ryan Howard deal is a looming disaster, and it hasn’t even started yet. He turns 32 in November, and players with his skill set sometimes take a precipitous fall in their early 30s. The truth is, with Howard, the decline started a while ago. For four years — from 2006-2009 — he crushed a lot of home runs. This fed his whole game. It gave him impressive RBI numbers. It sparked teams to intentionally walk him a lot, puffing up his on-base percentage. The last two years, his home runs have dropped, he didn’t even slug .500 in 2011, and managers no longer fear him as much. His inability to hit lefties has become a defining quality. The Cardinals in these playoffs intentionally walked the perfectly fine but hardly intimidating Hunter Pence in order to FACE Ryan Howard.
The last game of the Cardinals-Phillies series, the announcers kept making a big deal about how St. Louis’ Chris Carpenter needed to get a succession of outs so that he would not have to face Ryan Howard in the ninth inning. Carpenter did not quite get those outs, and so the announcers went on and on about how this meant Ryan Howard would come up one more time, there was no avoiding it, Mighty Casey would get one last at-bat. And all I could think of was that those words — Ryan Howard would get one more at-bat — would make me happier if I was a CARDINALS fan than a Phillies fans. Howard ended the game by hitting routine ground ball and he blew out his Achilles going to first base.
Howard has been a fun player, a marvelous slugger, the sort of player that Philadelphia could rally around and there’s a lot of value in that. But he’s basically becoming a one-tool slugger who can’t hit lefties. That contract — even if Howard can somehow get and stay healthy and regain his power — is like that Robert DeNiro attempt to bring “Rocky and Bullwinkle” to the big screen. Even before it begins, you know it has no chance.Comment
Tweet
Comment