As latest lost season ends, Phillies’ Bryce Harper ready for a reset

Before Day 1 of their 10th consecutive offseason without a playoff game was to commence, before a season-closing 5-4 loss to the Miami Marlins supplied the final mercy blow, the first of what should be a bevy of changes came down for the Phillies.

Perhaps as unjust reward to what should be the first Phillie to win the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 14 years, the Phillies announced Sunday that hitting coach Joe Dillon, who was brought in by then-new manager Joe Girardi in 2019, and infield coach Juan Castro had both been relieved of their duties.

Right there, perhaps in owner John Middleton’s mind if not everyone else’s, was an essentially immediate, symbolic correction of what primarily was wrong with the team in 2021. Bryce Harper would essentially sign on to that opinion also, even if he did acknowledge a close working relationship with Dillon.

“Me and Joe have a great relationship. He did a good job for us in his role,” Harper said. “I thought working with him every day, personally, was really good for me. But as an offense, I don’t think we did our job enough to really warrant anybody’s success, right?

“It’s just part of how the game works,” Harper added. “It’s part of the business side of the game. It’s part of the process of, if you’re not winning, if you’re not doing well, then sometimes that happens. There’s nothing much more to say than that.”

Not that it wasn’t deserved. Just for a slice of corroborating evidence for the cuts: The Phillies showed generally mediocre hitting (13th in runs per game at 4.53; 18th in team batting average at .240) and were a daily embarrassment in the field (23rd at 0.60 errors per game). And if they ranked mental mistakes … well the Phillies couldn’t go any farther south there.

Of course, it’s far from everything that has gone wrong over the past 10 years. Over the course of an ensuing 10-minute stream of questioning conscience, Harper tried to address everything else.

“As a whole team, you can’t pinpoint one thing that needs to get better,” he said. “I think it all needs to get better. We’ve seen that all year long. I really think as a whole we need to get better; situational hitting, hitting with two outs. … And whoever comes in to replace Joe Dillon, we definitely need to have a top guy coming in here and mix well with us and mold us well.”

This from a guy in Harper who entering the season’s final game was hitting .308 with 35 home runs, 100 runs scored, 84 RBIs and 99 walks, with an OPS of 1.039. And a whole lot of opinions of what has to come next.

“We need guys to come up from the minor leagues that can have success for us, that’s huge as well,” Harper said. “When guys aren’t having success from the minor leagues to the big leagues, that hurts us, also. We just need to be all-around better, as a team, as an organization, with our hitting plan and everything else that comes with that.”

Everything else? Untimely hitting and unsightly defense are two pretty big problem areas. Pitching wise, losing Zach Eflin at the height of summer didn’t help, and not knowing what former ace Aaron Nola is going to come up with outing by outing is enough to drive a fanbase crazy.

But the late-season revelation of lefty Ranger Suarez in the rotation bodes well for the immediate future, and then there is Zack Wheeler, who is very much part of the NL Cy Young conversation.

Of course, there is also the bullpen. It fared better than in a historically hysterical 2020 but will need much more work going forward. As Harper pointed out, it’s likely that late-season pickup Ian Kennedy will be moving on, and likely Hector Neris, too. So …

“We might need a closer, right?” Harper said with a slight laugh. “We’ve said that before.”

It’s not the only team upgrade he’s talked about … and is still talking about.

“We can’t just keep going out and buying and buying and buying. We need homegrown talent and when you look at teams with home grown talent those are the teams that have success,” Harper said. “As a whole we need our minor leagues to be better. We need guys to come up from the minor leagues and be successful, not have to keep going up and down. We need right-handed bats on our bench, we need a good bench, guys that can play every single day. We need dogs, man. We need some dogs, some guys that can come in every single day and that can play and play hard, play physical.

“And want to play every day.”

Consider that as close to an indictment as Harper was going to say on this first offseason interview day.

“We can’t just keep going and pulling guys and spending all this money in free agency,” Harper added. “You need to have a mold of a team with guys that are making minimum (salary). Guys coming up that are making minimum. Not guys on crazy two- or three-year deals making a substantial amount of money; we need to have a really good sense of where our money’s going to be at.”

Seems a bit ironic that the Phillies’ all-time king of free-agency dollars is talking about building from within rather that adding. But he’s not wrong, either.

Outside of Rhys Hoskins and Neris, who took the franchise lead in strikeouts by a relief pitcher (520) Sunday, there hasn’t been much help from the farm. And as Middleton and team president Dave Dombrowski – who last week hired a new farm director in Preston Mattingly – it doesn’t promise to get much better anytime soon.

“We’re a little behind in the minor leagues right now. I think you guys know that, I think I know that, I think our fans and everybody else know that,” Harper said. “But I want to come in next year and compete. We all want to compete. We want to be better and do our jobs to the best of our abilities. We want to end that (10-year) drought.

“There are a lot of things that are unanswered right now. We don’t know who our leftfielder’s going to be, we’re not sure about center right now, and third base … we have a lot of things to look at. But I’m excited about this offseason. I’m ready to … I mean, you guys know, my wheels kind of turn. That’s why I’m blabbering a little bit, because my wheels turn. I want to be better, I want to get better. I love this team, I love this organization. I want to be so good for them and the city of Philadelphia.”