Everybody and his mother knows that Jimmy Rollins has gotten off to a very poor start this year at the plate. As a result of this, a good deal of personal criticism has been leveled against Rollins, the content of which I won't repeat here -- suffice it to say it's been unfair. But the underlying facts aren't open to debate. Right now, Jimmy is pulling down a slash line of .229/.295/.283 for a wRC+ of 66. That's bad, and it's probably cost the Phillies at least one win in the early going.

This has attracted some recent gloom-and-doom commentary from some respectable non-idiot sources: for example, the estimable David Hale and the generally-okay Fangraphs. But the timing of this is curious, because if you look closely, Rollins hasn't been swinging the bat that badly of late.

This is one of the errors you'll see systematically from commentators (sabermetric or not) who purport to be able to cover all of MLB at once just by looking at players' season stats. I'm obviously talking about Fangraphs more than Hale here. The basic story of Rollins' season is that he got off to an unimaginably awful start in April, but has been better at the plate over the last couple of weeks. A national sabermetrics writer seeing Rollins' awfulness in April would have known to discount them due to sample size. But if Rollins' numbers are awful on April 30, then his season stats are obviously still going to be awful on May 23 -- expecting otherwise would mean falling for the gambler's fallacy. Yet the same national sabermetrics writer will invariably parachute in on May 23, look at Rollins' stat sheet, and say: "Hey, the overall sample size is bigger now, so now I can draw some conclusions!" When in fact, it may be the case that no new supporting data has been generated since April 30, when the same writer would have thought those conclusions to be premature.

Back to Rollins. The first question we need to ask is: if Rollins isn't cooked, then what should his offensive numbers looks like? This question is harder to answer than it sounds, because Rollins has been a completely different hitter at some points of his career than at other points. I'm not even talking about his 2007 MVP season, which is clearly an outlier that we can throw out for present purposes. Before 2007, he was a low-walk, high-strikeout, moderately high-BABIP doubles-and-triples hitter. Ever since 2007, his walk rate has risen (except in 2009), his strikeout rate and BABIP have plummeted, and his XBH stats have yo-yo'd back and forth. But I would say that the best baseline for Rollins would be some sort of amalgam of his numbers from 2008, 2010, and 2011.

Basically we're looking for a walk rate near 10%, a K rate under 10%, and an ISO around .140. If he gets those peripherals down and his BABIP doesn't drop to anything ridiculous, his results at the plate will be fine. Especially when you consider that the overall run environment in MLB is more pitcher-friendly in 2012 than it was in any of those years.

So far in 2012, Rollins has a 8.6 BB%, a 16.2 K%, and an .054 ISO. The BB rate isn't too far off, but the other numbers are. And yet, things have been improving recently. Eyeballing his game log, I think the most recent low point of Rollins' season came on May 4, when he went 0 for 5 and struck out 3 times against one Stephen Strasburg. Here's what his splits look like through and since that game (SSS).

I don't want to oversell these numbers. Clearly, he still isn't where he needs to be yet. But his BB rate is where it needs to be (better than that, in fact). Meanwhile, his K rate and his ISO are at least getting closer. If not for the dropoff in his BABIP that has coincided with the improvement in his other stats, then his improvement would have been more noticeable.

But wait, you might say -- Rollins has had a BABIP around .250 before, in both 2009 and 2010. Why should we assume that his recent .255 BABIP has been unlucky? To see that, take a look at his batted ball stats.

The formula seems pretty straightforward. The higher Jimmy's LD rate goes, the higher his BABIP goes. That correlation has held true in each of these splits -- until this year. So I don't think his BABIP will stay down if he keeps swinging the bat like this.

In short, yes there's reason to worry about Rollins, but there's also reason for hope. What he's been doing recently hasn't been too bad. He just needs to bring his power numbers up another tick, and his strikeouts down another tick. If he can do that, his rest-of-year stats will be fine.

The Phillies haven't been completely clear on their reasons for demoting Domonic Brown to AAA this year, but the reason why they should have demoted him is to have him work on his defense there. Defensive metrics are imprecise, but all the data that was available in 2011 said that Brown's defense was really bad. That's why his 2011 fWAR was 0.0.

Iron Pigs beat writer Michael LoRé recently tweeted that Brown has looked good in the field so far in 2012 (h/t TJE1343). This should be taken with a grain of salt since it's only one guy's opinion, but it's an encouraging data point nonetheless. Maybe Brown has solved his problems.

But that still doesn't mean he should be brought up immediately, and no it doesn't matter that the Phillies' offense is struggling in his absence. There are three inescapable facts that people need to grapple with here.

1. Brown is a LF.
2. John Mayberry, Jr. is a LF, though he can also play a little 1B.
3. Ryan Howard is probably going to return in a few weeks.

Which means that if Domonic Brown is here when Ryan Howard comes back, the Phillies will have three guys occupying two positions. I will refer to the Pauli exclusion principle to suggest that this will be a problem, and not necessarily one of them good problems. It will have one of the following three results.

1. All three guys will stay on the roster, but one or more of them will start less than 70% of the games.
2. Brown will be re-demoted.
3. Mayberry will be demoted.

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In a season characterized so far by weak offensive performance, the Phillies came up with arguably their weakest effort yet, with a shutout at the hands of the freshly nose-jobbed Jonathon Niese and two Mets relievers. Only seven Phillies reached base all game, on six singles and one walk.

It's hard to come up with much else to say about this thoroughly dull and depressing game. So far, these hitters have neither been hitting with power nor getting on base. They haven't been striking out a ton (six today), but their BABIP has been low. I'd like to criticize them for failing to work counts or draw walks, but today at least, it didn't seem like they were chasing a whole heckuva lot of pitches out of the strike zone until they were already down 0-2 or 1-2. Niese was just throwing a lot of strikes and getting ahead in the count. The only way out of the quandary was to swing early and do something to those early strikes. But when they swung, they couldn't do any damage.

Niese deserves some credit for this, as he was throwing quality strikes that were rarely in the middle of the plate. It's not as if the current edition of the Phils' lineup is the first one ever to have problems with Niese, and most pitchers are not going to have the command he had today. But if the strategy of opposing pitchers is going to be to fearlessly shove strikes down the throats of the Phillies' batters, at some point the batters are going to have to do something to stop it before they can start working counts.

The two best scoring opportunities of the day came in the first two innings. In the first, Placido Polanco and Jimmy Rollins both singled with one out, but Hunter Pence promptly grounded into a double play on the first pitch he saw. In the second, after Freddy Galvis singled with two outs, Brian Schneider hit a deep fly ball to right-center just to the left of the out-of-town scoreboard, but Mets centerfielder Kirk Nieuwenhuis tracked it down after a long run (see photo above).

Phillies starting pitcher Vance Worley didn't pitch his best game today, but most of his mistakes were confined to the fourth inning. He cruised through the first three, making only one bad pitch (a down-the-middle, get-me-ahead-in-the-count fastball to David Wright in the first inning, which Wright hit out to dead center for a solo homer). In fact, Worley struck out the side in the third and looked great doing it. But in the fourth, he gave up a leadoff walk to Daniel Murphy and was unable to hit his spots for the rest of inning, which culminated in a two-run homer by Lucas Duda. Worley regained a bit of his composure and pitched two more scoreless innings, but the Mets had all the runs they needed by that point. He ended the day with five strikeouts, four walks (one intentional), and four runs allowed (all earned) in six innings.

David Herndon and Antonio Bastardo combined for two scoreless innings after Worley departed. Bastardo threw a lot more breaking balls than usual, but they were very effective. Michael Stutes walked two batters and allowed the Mets to score their fifth run in the ninth.

Cole Hamels will lead the Phillies in trying to avert a sweep tomorrow afternoon against BIG PELF.

Much of the hand-wringing we've seen lately across various media has gone like this: the Phillies haven't improved since last year, so they're doomed. This is half right, but all wrong. It's probably true that they haven't improved -- in fact, they're probably worse. But that's nothing to be upset by. If anything, we should be happy about it.

Before getting to why, let's first recognize that expecting a 102-win team to improve is kind of unrealistic and unfair. How much better could they have gotten?

Of course, the inevitable counterargument is, "So what if they won 102 games? They weren't good enough when it mattered, and they haven't fixed that!" But just because the Phils lost to St. Louis doesn't mean they had some sort of fatal flaw that required fixing. In baseball, anyone can win or lose any postseason series. So the Division Series loss isn't a proper baseline. It was just a semi-random event that could easily have gone the other way even if replayed with the exact same personnel.

So, fine, the Phillies didn't "need" to improve. But how could it be a good thing that they didn't? Wouldn't it at least have been nice if they had? Not necessarily, and here's why. For nearly every action taken to acquire players, there is a somewhat-close-to-equal and opposite reaction. Acquisitions have costs as well as benefits. In trades, you give up value to get value. In free agent signings, you spend money that otherwise could be allocated elsewhere. There are no (systematic) free lunches.

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Public relations-wise, it's been a bit of a tumultuous off-season for Phillies 3B Placido Polanco. He took a fair amount of understandable, if somewhat unfair, heat for the Phillies' playoff loss to the Cardinals, after going only 2 for 19 in the series. Then, over the next few months, rumors of varying levels of credibility swirled that the Phillies were trying to replace him with Aramis Ramirez or David Wright. Thankfully, we're now on the eve of the regular season, and Polanco is still right where he left him: with the team, as the starting 3B.

A lot of what I have to say about Polanco, I already said in two articles from the offseason: "Placido Polanco Is Good at Baseball" and "In Baseball, Positions Matter, But Roles Don't". The shape of things is pretty clear:
• He isn't a particularly good hitter anymore
• His fielding metrics are strong
• Since joining the Phillies two seasons ago, he's been injury-prone
• He's now 36 years old
• He's set to make $6.25 million this year, which is peanuts (get it? peanuts? waka waka)

So there you have it. To what extent that basket of goods is a strength for the team depends largely on whether you prefer Fangraphs WAR or B-R WAR. If you're on Team Fangraphs, then Polanco has been a very substantial boon for the Phillies and he should continue to help them in 2012 (as long as he experiences only a normal amount of age-related decline, and as long as his health isn't worse than it was in 2010 or 2011). If you're on Team B-R, then Polanco hasn't been that big of a strength, but he hasn't been a weakness either.

So, the one-sentence summary of Polanco's second tour of duty in Philadelphia is that, if the fielding metrics are accurate, then his defense has been so good that it has outweighed his deficiencies as a hitter.

I get the impression that some people have a hard time accepting that concept. Intuitively, I can kind of understand why, but if you think about it, it doesn't make rational sense because (in my view) very few would have the same difficulty accepting that a shortstop's great defense can outweigh his weak offense (think of guys like Brendan Ryan or Alcides Escobar). One might argue that "SS is more of a premium defensive position than 3B is, so defense is less important at 3B," but that's a fallacy and we need to push back against it. Defensive ability is less important at 3B, but defense (which I'll define here as how good you are at stopping runs relative to your peers) is not less important at 3B, or even, for that matter, at LF or 1B. To the contrary, defense is equally important at every position on the field. The only thing that differs from position to position is the standards.

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Ever since it became clear a few months into the 2011 season that Vance Worley was going to be sticking around for a while, the more sabermetrically inclined sectors of Phillies fandom have gone to great lengths to explain who Worley is not -- namely, he is not the next edition of 2007 Kyle Kendrick or 2009 J.A. Happ. Even though Worley's rookie-year ERA certainly benefited from a low-ish .283 BABIP and 7.2% HR/FB, his peripherals were much better than those of his predecessors and so, his chances of maintaining his success going forward are much greater than theirs were. The numbers clearly back this up:

But enough about who Worley isn't. What we really want to know is who Worley is. And that's a really tough question to answer, as Worley is one of the most difficult guys on the whole team to project.

A brief history: Because 2007 third-round pick Brandon Workman had elected not to sign and because Aaron Rowand had left in free agency over the following winter, the Phillies found themselves in June 2008 with two first-round picks, two second-round picks, and two third-round picks. They responded by implementing a high-risk/high-reward draft strategy, going (almost) all-in on a number of very raw, talented high school players: Anthony Hewitt, Zach Collier, Jason Knapp, Anthony Gose, and Jonathan Pettibone (though Collier and Pettibone were considered to be a bit less raw). They also picked current top prospect Trevor May in the fourth round.

The only exception to that strategy was Worley, a 20-year-old from Long Beach State University. I have a vague recollection that most people were disappointed with the pick at the time, feeling that it was an overcorrection to the ultra-risky picks that had preceded it. Worley was too far in the other direction -- he wasn't risky, but his ceiling was just too low, not unlike his former college teammate, Drew Carpenter, whom the Phillies had drafted two years earlier.

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