For the 18th time this year — and the tenth time since the All-Star Break — Freddy Galvis homered last night. With 18 games to go, he seems a decent bet to make it to 20 homers this season, which would make the unexpectedly-sparked Galvis just the third Phillies shortstop to ever reach such a mark, after future Wall-of-Famer Jimmy Rollins (four times, including a 30-dinger campaign in his '07 MVP season) and the immortal Granville "Granny" Hamner (21 in '53). It would be doubly notable for Freddy to hit 20 this year, considering 20 is how many he had in his entire four-season, 322-game career up to this point.
As notable an achievement as that would no doubt be, it's still be a stretch to say Galvis is actually having a good season. His slugging is up from past years — though not as much as you might think — but that's been mitigated by his ungodly on-base percentage of .270, which is under his career average and second-lowest among Phillies regulars. (Even J-Roll, so often criticized for not getting on base enough as a lead-off man, had an OBP over .300 every year but one of his Phils tenure.)
He's run well enough (13 steals in 18 attempts) and he actually rates as an above-average defender this year, according to Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference. But he's struck out over five times as much as he's walked (120 to 23), and even his improved power numbers seem less impressive in a year when offense is up across the league — OPS+, a stat that rates hitters against league averages (with 100 being about even), rates Galvis at a mere 77, even lower than he was last year.
The improved power and defense may be enough to suggest that the erratic Galvis may have a future with the Phillies, even beyond the inevitable call-up of SS super-prospect J.P. Crawford. But really, what this season makes the case for is Galvis as a platoon player. Of Freddy's 18 long balls this season, 16 of 'em have come against righties, and his OPS against lefties in 136 plate appearances is a ghastly .504 — a trend that's been present, in slightly less extreme variations, throughout the infielder's career. A Galvis that never hit against southpaws would be a legitimate weapon for the Phils; a Galvis that has to hit against everyone barely breaks even.
Impressively, Freddy would not nearly be the worst all-around Phillies hitter to break 20 in the homers department this season. That would of course be Ryan Howard, our once-fearsome and still sporadically upsetting slugger, who has gone deep 21 times this season. Ryno may actually finish with more round-trippers than walks this season — he only has 22 of the latter — and he's currently looking up at the infamous Mendoza Line with his .193 batting average. It's a power season that would make late-career Dave Kingman blush, and frankly, it looked like it was gonna be even worse than this for most of the year.
So yeah, the Phillies' offense is probably the NL's worst this season —15th of 15 in OPS, total bases, and runs — but at least we've gotten to see the ball go over the wall a bunch. It's like Domonic Brown never even left.
