In 2023, I thought it would be fun to title my series previews using lyrics from Beastie Boys songs. It seemed like a fine idea until the Phillies found themselves seven games under .500 in early June. I decided that they no longer deserved me making the effort to find an appropriate song lyric. Once I stopped, the team promptly began to play better.
As you may have noticed, I had been using Guns N’ Roses lyrics for my series preview titles, and just like in 2023, it hasn’t been going very well for the
team. Therefore, GNR is being shelved, and I am switching back to the player-focused opposition research previews from last season. If the team’s fortunes turn around, feel free to thank me.
After a dreadful homestand, the Phillies will head to Wrigley Field to face the Cubs. Despite the Phillies’ success at home in recent seasons, it is probably for the best that they get away from the understandably irate hometown fans for a little bit.
After a slow start, the Cubs enter the series on a five-game winning streak, partly because they’ve had the good fortune of playing the Phillies and the Mets. One of their hottest hitters in second baseman Nico Hoerner, who appears to be adding top offensive performance to his elite defensive game.
Hoerner spent the first seven years of his career as an excellent defender (two Gold Gloves) and adequate hitter. You can do far worse than a Gold Glove middle infielder putting up an OPS over .700. But this season, he has been far more than adequate. He’s batting .325 with three home runs (his career high for a season is ten) and leads the NL with 21 RBIs.
There’s a good chance the Hoerner won’t be able to keep it up and he’ll slowly regress closer to the numbers we’re used to. But if he can find a way to continue this performance for a full season, he’ll likely find himself in MVP discussions at the end of the year.
Pennant year song battle
It’s a Mistake by Men at Work defeated Clumsy to hold on to the title.
The next contender comes from 2022 and describes how most Phillies fans feel about the team right now: I Hate U by SZA:
Vote now:
Additional thought about the series
Maybe the team really has collapsed, and the future is as bleak as some want to believe. But I still have trouble looking at the roster and seeing a bad team, despite what the on-field results indicate. It would be one thing if the older players were showing a drastic drop off, but that hasn’t really been the problem. It just seems to be a team-wide malaise in which they’ve been a special combination of unlucky and bad.
This core has gone through other awful stretches in recent seasons (Think May 2023 and July 2024) and eventually came out of it, so there’s reason to believe they will do so again. But darned if this hasn’t been painful to watch.
