Like Gabe Kapler, firing Joe Girardi won’t help the Phillies

Every columnist has a little grab bag of gimmicks that he or she can pencil in depending on the time of year. Some use Thanksgiving as an opportunity to write about things to be thankful for. Others mark New Year’s Day with a column about resolutions. Me? I wait for Memorial Day, when everybody wants to fire the Phillies manager, and I write that they shouldn’t.

Truth be told, I feel a little guilty dipping my bucket in this well as often as I do. But I also think that there is some value in periodically reminding ourselves that Joe Girardi bears as much blame for the Phillies’ current level of mediocrity as Gabe Kapler and Pete Mackanin and Ryne Sandberg and Charlie Manuel did. The Phillies are a mediocre team because they have a mediocre roster, and they have a mediocre roster because that’s the best roster a team can assemble when it goes a decade-and-a-half without drafting and developing talent at a functional level.

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Girardi? He’s irrelevant, just like every competent manager. The incompetent ones are bad, sure. The great ones might win you a playoff series the way Bruce Bochy did for the Giants back in 2010. But Bochy himself was 62 games under .500 in his first 14 seasons on the bench. And he was 58 games under .500 in his last three seasons. The guy was a manager for 25 seasons. You do the math.

Nine times out of 10, firing the manager is nothing more than a coping mechanism. It’s a way to fool yourself into thinking that the immovable object might yet budge. In the Phillies’ case, the object in question is a roster with the same exact holes as the ones that plagued the previous manager. More on that guy later.

First, though, it’s important to make sure we’re all on the same page about the nature of the holes. A lot of people are starting to point fingers at a lineup whose run production has far underperformed its preseason hype. Among those people are the man who assembled that lineup.

“I’m surprised we haven’t scored more runs on a consistent basis,” president Dave Dombrowski told reporters in Atlanta on Monday. “But I do think we’re going to score more runs on a consistent basis as the weather warms up and some of the guys get their swings back.”

He’s right. The Phillies will score more runs. Baseball is a fickle sport, even more so before the weather turns consistently warm. But no amount of offense is going to save the Phillies from underachieving as long as the status quo remains in the bullpen. And no amount of managerial prowess is going to save that bullpen from being itself.

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It’s sad. It really is. An unreliable bullpen is a storm cloud that hovers over every move that a team makes. You heard it in Bryce Harper’s voice on Tuesday after the one-run lead he gave the Phillies in the top of the ninth lasted exactly four batters.

“We can’t keep doing it,” Harper said after the Braves answered his two-run home run by scoring two runs off of Nick Nelson in the bottom of the ninth to claim a 6-5 win. “We’ve got to win games. Baseball happens, you win, you lose. It’s part of the game, but a game like that — we’ve got to win a game like that.”

There isn’t a motivational genius in the world who can counteract the suffocating despair that a late-game meltdown inflicts. And before you blame Girardi for those meltdowns, take a hard look at the options at his disposal and ask yourself how things might have gone any differently.

Sure, in a perfect world, Girardi would have gone to one of his two competent late-innings relievers instead of Nelson, who entered the season with a career ERA of 6.43 and a career average of 6.9 walks per nine innings. But that’s a world in which Seranthony Dominguez isn’t coming off a two-year layoff and didn’t spend the first month of the season pitching once every three days and hadn’t pitched three times in four days only once all year. It’s a world in which Corey Knebel pitched on back-to-back days and wasn’t already nine appearances away from his highest single-season total since 2018. It’s ludicrous to think that Girardi ran Nelson out there because he thought Nelson was the right guy for the job. He ran Nelson out there because Nelson was the guy that he had.

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Again, look at Girardi’s options. Of the nine relievers on the Phillies’ active roster, five entered Thursday having given up at least one run in their most recent appearance. In their first three games in Atlanta, Phillies relievers were charged with eight runs in nine innings and allowed another three inherited runners to score. There are really only two scenarios: Either Girardi consistently puts a guy in the one situation where he will not succeed, or he consistently faces situations where none of his guys will succeed.

Three things suggest the latter scenario. One is that Girardi’s results are more or less the same as the guy he replaced, who is currently managing a team that is six games over .500 one year after finishing with the best record in the National League. Two is that Girardi proved himself an excellent bullpen manager during his time with the Yankees. Three is that the Phillies bullpen includes exactly two players whom they acquired as amateurs, putting the unit in the same position as the rest of the team.

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The Phillies spent big money on Zack Wheeler, Nick Castellanos, Kyle Schwarber, J.T. Realmuto and Harper to compensate for their inability to develop top-of-the-order talent and top-of-the-rotation arms. The $10 million they spent on Knebel isn’t nearly enough to make up for their dreadful inability to manufacture talent in the minors.

Girardi isn’t the problem. He’s just the one who is paid to deal with it. It’s a story that is as old as the last decade-and-a-half. At least it makes for an easy column.