Phillies Stat Notes: 100 Games In

Since peaking at 24-17 through May 18th, the Phillies have lost 38 of 59 games, the worst record in the NL over that time.

NL Standings and Key Stats

Phillies pitching is still among the best in limiting walks, ranking 3rd best in the NL in both BB/9 and BB%.

Good to see the Phillies' offense is consistent. Only the Braves' offense is as uniformly bad (and the Nationals' pitching is as uniformly good).

Comparing Phillies Stats to Last Year, and to the Marlins

Hitting

The only areas where the Phillies aren't at are very near the bottom of the league are in home runs (11th) and overall power (ISO, 10th). Strikeouts are relatively low, but that goes along with a league-low walk rate and generally not running deep counts. Their BB/K ratio is the worst in the NL (and all of MLB).

Their baserunning is surprisingly non-awful other than their SB success rate, and even that has been improving lately.

Pitching

It's been a roller coaster ride, as may be expected from a young staff, but overall this year they've been around the middle of the pack, ranking 8th in ERA, FIP, and total runs allowed, a somewhat better 6th in xFIP (which forgives some of the Phils' gopher ball issues by assuming a league average HR to fly ball ratio).

Phillies Hitters

Ryan Howard has at least gotten his OPS back over the .600 mark for the first time since May 21st, and in fact has hit better over the last 30 days, although in only 38 PAs.

Howard isn't walking as much the last few years, but his next BB will make him the 7th player in franchise history to walk 700 times. Of the 23 players in team history with 5000+ PAs, Howard has the 7th highest walk rate.

Here is how each starter's OPS has progressed to where it is today:

Former Phillie News - Utley

Chase Utley had his 11th multi-HBP game, last month, the 5th highest total of multi-"hit" games since 1913. His 187 HBPs rank 10th all-time, and 7th most since 1900.

In other Utley news, after stealing 18 straight bases without being caught dating back to May 10, 2014, he was caught twice in a row in late May. What that means is that for the first time in six years, Utley at the moment is not the all-time leader in SB%.

His SB% has dropped to 87.8%, in second place all-time (i.e. since CS was first tracked officially in 1951), just behind Alexi Casilla’s 87.9% (Casilla has only 91 attempts, but enough to make that list which has a very low minimum of 80). In third place by the way is our favorite Grizzly Man.

Tonight's lineups

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Definitions...
wRC+

Similar to OPS+, Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+) measures how a player’s wRC compares with league average after controlling for park effects.  League average for position players is 100, and every point above 100 is a percentage point above league average. For example, a 125 wRC+ means a player created 25% more runs than a league average hitter would have in the same number of plate appearances. Similarly, every point below 100 is a percentage point below league average, so a 80 wRC+ means a player created 20% fewer runs than league average.

Runs vs. Average

Fangraphs converts all of a player's stats to the number of runs those stats would typically generate, all else being equal. The runs in each main category (hitting, baserunning, fielding) are then compared to the average. The graph above also prorates all of these to 600 PAs for easier comparison of players with different amounts of playing time.