The 2021 series on team offense continues with the the Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies finished tied for fifth in the majors and fourth in the National League in 2020 with 5.10 runs scored per game.
I am using RotoChamp as a source of default lineups. That Joe Girardi order is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. For the pitcher slot, I used the Phillies numbers from 2017-2020. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):
- Best lineup: 4.84
- Probable lineup: 4.65
- Worst lineup: 4.23
- Regressed lineup: 4.37
Joe Girardi and the LAT are in perfect agreement on the four, five, and six hitters, J.T. Realmuto, Rhys Hoskins, and Didi Gregorius. They also agree that Andrew McCutchen, Alec Bohm, and Bryce Harper are a good sequence, but the LAT puts them 9-1-2 instead of 1-2-3. The fifth best order agrees on who should make up each third of the lineup, it just disagrees on the order within two of those thirds.
The Phillies order does put five very good hitters together at the top of the order. All of them get on base, all of them except McCutchen project to good slugging percentages. Other than the pitchers batting, Scott Kingery is the only batter who shows weakness both in on-base and slugging percentage.
Offense should not be the problem for the Phillies. They will need to see if a good offense is good enough for the pitching staff.
You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.
Previous posts in this series: