An imaginary slump and a weird schedule: Math and common sense say the Phillies will be fine

Bryce Harper has not been nearly as bad as his top-line numbers. Nor have the Phillies. Don't panic. Yet.

Bryce Harper stands at home plate after striking out to end the first inning of the Phillies' loss to the Yankees on Wednesday.Read moreElizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer

Published Aug. 2, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

Baseball season can be a lot of fun. It also can be a daily reminder of the emptiness of human existence and the futility of our attempts to exert control over our fates. Hey, I guess that can be fun too, if you’re like Jean-Paul Sarte or something. But not if you are Bryce Harper!

You may have heard that Harper is in a slump. Technically, it’s true. In the 17 games since he returned from the injured list, the Phillies superstar has posted a piddling .589 OPS in 75 plate appearances. That’s roughly 400 points lower than his pre-injury OPS. It’s also a prime reason the Phillies have lost 10 of 13.

Thing is, Harper’s slump kind of is a bright spot. It’s one of the many reasons to believe the Phillies will snap out of their funk in time for October. It’s a good thing, in a weird way. Because it’s a weird slump. One of the weirder ones you’ll see.

Look at what’s going on beneath the hood. It’s strange. Although Harper is just 10-for-67 since returning from the IL, his strikeout, walk, home run, and extra-base hits rates have remained more or less the same. If they are down, they are down only marginally, well within the polling error for any given stretch of a season. He has walked eight times in 75 plate appearances with 15 strikeouts. He has four home runs and two doubles.

The only real outlier in Harper’s “slump” is the number of batted balls landing for base hits. He is like a 31-year-old bachelor at a suburban dinner party: no singles in sight. Of his last 46 batted balls in the field of play, only six have landed for hits. Two doubles. Four singles. Forty outs.

The fate of batted balls is not entirely up to chance. Bad luck is a crutch too often leaned upon when evaluating baseball performance. In Harper’s case, it is a legitimate rationalization. Most slumps see a dramatic uptick in strikeouts coupled with a dramatic downtick in walks. They don’t see six extra-base hits in 75 plate appearances. In each of those categories, Harper’s percentages during his “slump” have been better than the MLB average and roughly in line with his overall season numbers.

Here’s the point. If you assume Harper’s batting average mostly is a result of factors outside of his control — hitting a ball at a fielder rather than an open patch of grass — you can project that the Phillies would have scored four or five more runs during these last 17 games in a more neutral-luck environment. Keep in mind, they’ve lost four games by one run. I won’t show you the math so as not to infect you with my sickness. Believe me, though, I did it.

Hey, look, I get it. They don’t let you bring champagne into the clubhouse to celebrate all the runs you should have scored. Man is not judged on the things that would have happened had he encountered better luck. Nobody attends a projected parade.

But luck does turn. It will turn for Harper and for the Phillies. They are amid a stretch of schedule that looked like a bull trap way back on opening day. The Phillies weren’t a 115-win team when they were winning games at a 115-win pace. They were doing what a team needs to do to survive periods like this. Given the bifurcated nature of the schedule, they would have been screwed if they didn’t rack up the wins in the soft part of the season. They are barely midway through a stretch of 19 straight games against the top 11 teams in MLB. Things could get worse before they get better. But they will get better.

Take comfort in the math. The Phillies have 21 games remaining against teams that sold at the trade deadline. If they win two of every three, that’s 14 wins, which leaves them at 79 on the season. Which means they could go 11-21 in the rest and still get to 90 wins. A 16-16 record would get them to 95. If they go 16-5 against the bad teams and 19-13 against the good ones, they’ll finish with 100 wins.

Long story short, the Phillies’ skid wouldn’t seem so severe if the opponents they’ve been losing to were more evenly distributed throughout the schedule. They are only a 100-plus win team when Ranger Suárez is pitching like a Cy Young candidate and Bryson Stott is hitting like an All-Star. When neither of those is the case, the Phillies are a 90-to-100-win team, which is still better than what they were the last couple of seasons, which was an 85-to-95-win team.

Fear not. Now is no time to panic. We have next week for that.