The thing we thought could only maybe happen totally happened: Marlins 6, Phillies 4

The Phillies are the narrative-givers. Every team that beats them gets to begin anew, the first chapter of their next success story as the squad that took down Bryce Harper and the team that gave him hundreds of millions of dollars. For the Marlins, they seem to be falling ass-backwards into the “scrappy misfits can accomplish anything if they just believe in themselves” narrative. Good for them!

The Phillies continued their “sucking” narrative, in which they suck, and we all talk about it. Go ahead and diagnose it if you want to—they can’t hit fastballs, they swing at bad pitches, they can’t rely on their pitching, the manager is doing it wrong, the front office isn’t doing anything at all, there’s nobody out there for them to get, there’s nobody internally who they can swap in; somehow, they’ve wound up in a position where every part of the team needs a move and yet somehow no move is the right move.

So what happened today? When the Marlins, a real bad team, finished sweeping them? At home? On Chase Utley celebration weekend? Both Starlin Castro and someone named “Cooper” each had three hits. The Phillies had four total. Remember yesterday when that guy who hadn’t had an MLB hit in ten years got his next one? I totally get where the “misfits” narrative is coming from, it’s basically writing itself.

I forgot to mention the “depth” problem in that second paragraph. A point to make about the Phillies’ pitching depth is that when your triple-A rotation offers you Enyel De Los Santos when you want to make a change, and he only lasts four innings against one of the worst teams in baseball, and Edgar Garcia came in and didn’t really help at all, then it isn’t really depth, is it? It has to be viable, it had to be effective. This... is not that.

Of course, we all know what happened in the Mets clubhouse today, so we can only assume what will continue to happen as the pair of chaos storms rumbling toward each other for four games this week. Maybe it’ll be when the Phillies turn things around! Or maybe everyone on both coaching staffs will be fired. Let’s look forward to the week ahead, when something will occur.