Reason for optimism: It's a lot more fun watching pitchers Aaron Nola and Vince Velasquez lead your team to a 73-win season than Aaron Harang and A.J. Burnett.
Reason for pessimism: Dig into the results from last season, and 73 wins looks a lot more like a ceiling than a floor for the 2017 squad.
The Philadelphia Phillies scored 39 fewer runs last year than the team with the second-worst offense in the majors, the Atlanta Braves. Strip away the effects of sequencing or cluster luck, which benefited some bad offenses (most notably San Diego's) while penalizing the Phillies, and it was still the worst in baseball. The root cause for the offensive ineptitude wouldn't seem easy to change without a complete roster overhaul. Philadelphia stood 29th in walk rate, 26th in strikeout rate, and 29th in on-base percentage.
However, a roster overhaul did not occur in the offseason, and in Philadelphia's case, perhaps some patience is warranted. The Phillies had the youngest offense in baseball last year, based on the at-bat weighted age of its hitters, and that was with a pair of 37-year-olds, Ryan Howard and Carlos Ruiz, getting nearly 10 percent of the team's plate appearances. The last two links to the Phillies' glory years have since departed, though, so it's truly a team of youngsters, which has fans dreaming of upside. Just how young are the Phillies? Left fielder Howie Kendrick is the only everyday player on the projected Opening Day roster with an MLB at-bat before Tiger Woods won his last major.
Youth is great for upside, but the reality is many of Philadelphia's youngsters aren't very good.
Sure, center fielder Odubel Herrera and second baseman Cesar Hernandez are excellent cornerstones to build an offense around, but after that the roster is littered with replacement-level talent. Somewhat alarmingly, although effective defense is often associated with youth and last year's team improved from the truly historically bad effort in 2015, the Phillies still ranked 27th in 2016 in my adjusted defensive efficiency ratings. (FanGraphs' 2016 ranking of defenses, which has the Phillies listed as possessing the fifth-best defense in baseball, is so laughably and aggressively wrong it calls into question their wins above replacement calculations overall. Think I'm out of my lane? Read on.)
On the other hand, the all-under-30 rotation the Phils unveiled last year gave fans something to dream about. Nola and Velasquez looked dominant across many of their starts despite ERAs that would suggest otherwise. To give you an idea of how much defense behind a pitcher can cloud your opinion of him, consider these 2016 skill-based readings for 23-year-old Nola and another 26-year-old NL pitcher:
Nola's composite skill set translates to an expected ERA (SIERA) of 3.29 while our unnamed pitcher's SIERA is 3.68. Under all circumstances, you'd rather have Nola on the mound than the other pitcher in 2016. Pitcher A is Kyle Hendricks, who led the NL in ERA at 2.13 and finished third in Cy Young Award voting, while Nola had an ERA of 4.78. That's how much defense matters, and it underscores both how incredible the Cubs were and how abysmal the Phillies were.
Honestly, even that shortchanges the Phillies' pitching staff a bit because SIERA is calculated after the effects of pitch framing. It improved last year to merely below average from much lower depths in prior years, but suffice it to say, the pitching staff is not aided by its battery mates when it comes to limiting walks and increasing strikeouts.
Defense aside, the rotation will provide one roster spot of nearly guaranteed improvement this year. Clay Buchholz arrives in Philadelphia via a trade with Boston, essentially being asked to replace the 21 starts of last year's fifth starter, Adam Morgan. Improving on Morgan's production shouldn't be difficult; Morgan had a ghastly 6.43 runs against during his time on the mound in 2016. Philadelphia's bullpen had an ERA over 5.00 -- an MLB reliever's equivalent of the Mendoza Line -- but once again, defense clouds those results.
Collectively, the bullpen flashed a skill set just under 4.00, and while I intensely dislike a closer with a strikeout rate as low as Jeanmar Gomez's, the bullpen isn't where the Phillies' front office needs to concern itself for 2017. It needs to find players who can get on base and hit for some power so that from a standings perspective, there are leads that need protecting as the season progresses.
It may have escaped the eye of in-season power ratings authors, but thanks to their 28-23 record in one-run games, the Phillies' win-loss record all season looked considerably better than the actual talent on the field. As a result, Philadelphia soared over its total wins hurdle of 64.5 and that sets up a value bet on the "under" this year. With this year's total at 72.5, I'll confidently fade the expectation of continued improvement from this roster.
2017 projection: 66-96 (fifth, NL East)
Bet recommendation: Under