Phillies can’t do anything except wait for a frustrated Nick Castellanos to turn his season around

If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, media criticism can’t be far behind.

On Sunday, when Nick Castellanos took a break from answering for his three-strikeout performance to offer a critique of a reporter’s question, he was following a playbook that has become a canonical text in the realm of human underachievement. Shooting the messenger has a long and storied tradition in the public square, from Cleopatra’s reaction to the news of Marc Antony’s marriage (”I’ll unhair thy head!”) to the American colonists’ occasional reaction to royal tax collectors (tar, feathers, etc.). In medieval England, harming a town crier was punishable as treason. Like all laws, there is a reason that one was put on the books.

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In the modern age, shooting the messenger is mostly a diversionary tactic. And, hey, it’s an effective one. Instead of sitting here thinking about the failures that prompted the questions to Castellanos, we are sitting here talking about the questions themselves. This, despite the fact that the incident in question is something that happens multiple times per season in every locker room in America. A reporter asked Castellanos if he’d heard the home crowd’s boos. Castellanos called it a stupid question: of course he’d heard the boos. What ensued was a back-and-forth unique only by the standards of somebody who has not spent much time attempting to talk to professional athletes about their failures. Being a beat writer can be a thankless job, as can being a right fielder with a .659 OPS. Occasionally, the professional pressures of those two jobs collide in the heat of the moment, and then everybody moves on.

Whatever you think about the question that rankled Castellanos, or his reaction to it, the interaction doesn’t come close to rising to the level of meaningful drama. The only reason it was noteworthy at all was that it was caught on camera and then edited in a way that would maximize its titillative power over a public that might otherwise spend its entire afternoon binge-watching “Love Island.” Viewed in its entirety, the video shows nothing more than two proud professionals reacting as proud pros sometimes do when they are on the defensive.

Naturally, my sympathies lie with the reporter. But it is possible to feel some empathy for Castellanos. Everybody knows what it feels like to be bad at something. Now, imagine suddenly being bad at something that you’ve always been good at, and imagine that somebody has just paid you an obscene amount of money to be good at the thing that you are currently bad at. And then imagine having somebody else ask you the same question that you are already asking yourself every night:

Why am I so bad at this?

I know self-loathing when I see it. I play golf. Castellanos is clearly a guy who has a firm understanding of how bad he has been. And that’s good. The first step toward fixing a problem is understanding that you have one. But the more important step is the next one: caring about it. The guys you have to worry about are the ones who aren’t bothered by the boos. If you are going to manufacture any sort of takeaway from the video, let it be that Castellanos is a guy who has some level of pride in his performance.

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That being said, pride can only take you so far. Baseball is a confounding game. In 10 major league seasons, Castellanos has never been as bad as he has been over the last 66 games, with a .557 OPS, .255 on-base percentage, and 15 extra-base hits in 278 plate appearances. To put that last factoid in perspective, Phillies rookie infielder Bryson Stott entered Tuesday with seven extra-base hits in his last 31 plate appearances. Then again, Stott began the season with eight extra-base hits in his first 204 plate appearances. As a wise man once said, it’s a funny game.

Phillies manager Rob Thomson has maintained a steady message regarding Castellanos, who entered Tuesday hitting .248/.292/.367 with eight home runs in 397 plate appearances, one year after hitting .309/.362/.576 with 34 home runs in 585 plate appearances. Thomson said this weekend that at the end of the year people will look at Castellanos’ baseball card and see a stat line that jibes with the rest of his career.

“Like I’ve said all along,” Thomson said on Monday when addressing his decision to move Castellanos down in the order, “Nick is hitting the ball hard, at least once a game, sometimes twice a game. So we’re seeing improvement. Last night, he smoked that ball to right field, first at-bat, it’s a good sign. And then you get a couple of 6-3s after that. But I do see improvement and he’s working at it and he’s getting there.”

Again, though, it’s a funny game. In 2019, Cody Bellinger won the NL MVP award at the age of 23. Since then, he has hit .199/.274/.367 with a .640 OPS. That same year, 27-year-old Christian Yelich hit 44 home runs in 580 plate appearances. Since then, he has hit 29 home runs in 1,121 plate appearances.

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One year into a five-year, $100 million contract, the Phillies have little recourse but to hope that they will look back on Castellanos’ last four months as an aberration, one of those maddening stretches that plenty of players have bounced their way back from. Until then, we’d all be wise to remember the placard that Oscar Wilde once spotted in a Colorado saloon.

Don’t shoot the pianist. He’s doing his best.