June swoon for the Phils

The Phillies have lost 6 straight for the first time since the 2006 season. That's the bad news. The good news is they are still in first place by a game over the Florida Marlins. Their last 13 games have been played at a 3 - 10 clip. Since their sweep of the Braves in Atlanta, they have lost 4 straight series. Even worse, they have only scored 1.4 runs per game during their six game losing streak.

So why the sudden loss of offense? Well, they had to play back to back series against the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (who the hell came up with that mouthful?). Simply put, those 2 teams have great, young starting rotations that no team from the NL can really match.

You say that the AL teams have to face the Sawks and the Angels frequently, and their offenses don't go right off the deep end as a result. Well, that's a good point, but the lineups in the AL face these pitchers regularly, and that is a big advantage for the offense. Combine the oppositions great pitching, and the fact that the Phillies' hitters haven't really seen them much, and you have all the ingredients for an offense going into a slump.

Relax Philly, they just need to face a couple of lousy pitchers, and the offense will be fine. If even one player was hot right now (Utley or Howard for example), they would be something more like 2 -4 in their last six, or even 3 - 3. Lets also not forget that the Phillies have been terrible in the first half of the year and great in the second half in recent years. If they have a similar second half record to the last couple years, they will run away from the rest of the NL East and hide.

If we delve a little deeper into their offensive problems, we see that they have really struggled this year against quality pitching. Last year they weren't very good in those situations either, which really ended up biting them in the playoffs when they faced a couple of tough lefties from Colorado.

They don't need to beat good pitchers to get into the playoffs or win their division. However, they do need to beat good (and great) pitching to win in the playoffs. It was great to just make the playoffs last year, but now we want even more. We want a winner so we don't have to hear about the "100 straight seasons of losing" crap any more.

The bottom line is that the Phillies need to figure out a way to beat quality pitching at some point before or during October. They still have 84 games left in the year to prepare themselves for the playoffs. Whether or not they will finally be capable of beating the best pitchers that baseball has to offer remains to be seen, but we know that at the very least, they'll make it interesting. This is Philly after all, and winning the easy way just isn't going to happen. At this point, we'll take it any way we can get it.