Don Mattingly makes Trea Turner admission that might upset some Phillies fans originally appeared on The Sporting News.
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The Philadelphia Phillies have definitely been playing better baseball over the past few months, now 40-33 and just 7.0 games out in the National League East.
7.5 games in the middle of June is nothing in comparison to how bad everything could have been had the Phillies continued to play at a below-average level. While the Phillies have been playing better as a team, some players on the roster still haven’t been up to standard.
One of those guys is Trea Turner, who is hitting just .216 with a .594 OPS on the season. To make matters worse, all the advanced metrics suggest that Turner just isn’t the same player that he once was, with an xBA in the 26th percentile, average exit velocity in the 40th percentile, and a chase percentage in the 16th percentile.
To put things as nicely as possible, this is not the same Turner we’re used to seeing.
While it’s been unfortunate that he’s played at this level, and some are starting to get frustrated in Philadelphia, his skipper, Don Mattingly, isn’t one of those guys. In fact, Mattingly has a lot of confidence in him, adding that he believes his star shortstop is going to figure things out soon.
“I want to show confidence because I feel confidence. I wouldn’t say the things I say if I didn’t feel confident that Trea wasn’t going to find it and be swinging more consistently and better as we go through the season,” Mattingly said, per NBC Sports Philly.
I’m of the belief that Turner will figure things out eventually, as he typically does later in the year.
However, it’s also fair to mention some of the struggles that we’ve seen him have in Philadelphia. There have been times when we have seen him play well, and others when he’s been flat-out horrible. It’s tough to get a feel for the player he is nowadays, but I can understand the frustration from some fans.
