Everyone is Playing Baseball While the Phillies are Playing Basketball
Let me preface this by saying, while I was editing this, Gabe Kapler confirmed my forthcoming take. No one will ever believe me, but I’ll know. I’ll know. More on that later…
Every good basketball hater knows the only important part of a basketball game is the 4th quarter. Many games are tit for tat until late, when it gets interesting.
So, let’s do some math. A baseball game has nine innings. Nine divided by four (quarters) is 2.25 meaning the late 7th through the 9th innings are the fourth quarter of a baseball game.
As my Twitter dad/ founder of this blog, Jack Fritz, so brilliantly pointed out, the Phillies only like to score in the 7th and 8th and have been putting on a bullpen clinic in the last two to three innings (we’ll forget about Seranthony’s blunder against the D-Backs and the 6-0 stinker in the series finale).
A guideline to watching the Phillies this year:
Innings 1-6: "God this offense really sucks"
Innings 7-8: "The Big Inning"
Inning 9: Seranthony*Rinse and repeat*
— Jack Fritz (@JackFritzWIP) August 7, 2018
Naturally, we all have to assume that Gabe Kapler got some analytical information that said other teams won’t be prepared for the Phillies to attack a game of baseball like its’s a basketball game.
Or, more realistically, perhaps it is because the Phillies are second in walk percentage (9.9%) by a margin of only 0.1% to the Dodgers and they are wearing down the better starting pitching by seeing a plethora of pitches, scoring where they can, to get at the weaker bullpens.
Fantastic job by Gabe doing this and even better job by me for pointing it out.
Seriously though, Gabe continues to impress. The game against Greinke is a perfect example. They ran up the pitch count and forced him to exit early, then exploited a weak reliever like Diekman.
Whatever this team is doing though, I couldn’t care less. Wins are wins and I’ll wait until the 7th for it to get interesting every night if I have to.
P.S. Holy Moly! I typed this immediately following the middle game of the D-Backs series and as I was editing, the post-game interview with Gabe happened. He said when a team sees as many pitches as the Phillies do, they tend to have a big inning and that they wore down Grienke early…boy what a take by me, huh?