What you saw from Phillies is what you'll get

YOU CAN TALK yourself into most any lineup this early in the season. Opening Day is Opening Day because of the hopelessly optimistic hypotheticals it allows. The right amount of bunting and beer can make you believe in pretty much anything for a day. Yet no matter how many scenarios you spin in your head, you still can't get this Phillies lineup to a place where it is anything other than what you saw in yesterday's 8-0 loss to the Red Sox: a parade of strikeouts and groundouts interrupted by the occasional single.

Afterward, there was the usual talk about this being only one game, about it being way too small of a sample to make any definitive judgments. Usually, these are sensible proclamations grounded in reality. But what you saw yesterday out of the Phillies is really what you are going to get. It is the same offense you saw all spring, which is pretty much an extension of the offense you saw last season, except minus two of their most productive hitters.

"There'll be a chance to have some different lineups and try some different things with some different looks," manager Ryne Sandberg said, "but I'm just looking at this on the offensive side of things as one game out of 162."

Thing is, there isn't much Sandberg can do. Three of his eight regulars - including two of his three outfielders - are singles hitters with below-average base-reaching ability and no power potential. Another four are aging veterans whose decline phases started 3 or 4 years ago. The only upside in the lineup - at least until Dom Brown returns from a sore Achilles' tendon - is at third base, where Cody Asche is 25 years old and entering his second full season in the majors. Otherwise, it is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which somebody breaks out with the kind of unexpected production required to prevent games like yesterday's from playing out on an endless loop.

Sandberg talked a lot this spring about small ball, about stringing together singles and hitting behind the runner and making productive outs, and that's all well and good, because a manager has to talk about something. But the reality of the game is that even three .300 hitters have only a 2.7 percent chance of stringing three singles together, which is why the guys who can get a team two or three or four bases with one hit are paid the way the Red Sox paid Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval this offseason. The Phillies simply do not have that kind of talent. Batting second for the Phillies was Rule 5 pick Odubel Herrera, who had never played a game above Double A before yesterday's start in centerfield (a position he began playing this winter). Batting second for the Red Sox was Dustin Pedroia, who smacked two of the four home runs Boston hit off Cole Hamels.

Expectations for this team are so low that when Ryan Howard broke up a no-hitter with a two-out double to left-center, you might have been surprised to learn that it was only the fourth inning. The Phillies finished with three hits and a walk off Clay Buchholz, their only serious scoring threat coming in the seventh inning when they were trailing, 4-0. After back-to-back, one-out singles by Carlos Ruiz and Grady Sizemore, Pedroia made a spectacular backhanded stab of a sharp one-hopper by Asche to prevent a run. Freddy Galvis then struck out to end the frame.

"It's one game," Ben Revere said, "161 to go."

It sounds more like a warning than a reassurance. It usually takes the baseball season at least a month to destroy all of the ifs you can formulate for a lineup, but when you looked at the dry-erase board in the press box yesterday and saw the Phillies' batting order sitting next to the Red Sox', all you could do was shake your head.

"We're just going to have to grind out at-bats, battle at-bats and make the most out of baserunners," Sandberg said. "The games that we played well and won in spring training, we would do that and do some other things to advance some runners. We need to hit more. We need to take walks if we can get them."

Yet walks will be hard to come by, because pitchers are not scared to feed this team fastballs, because this team can't do to fastballs what the Red Sox did. Which is why you likely will see plenty more performances like the one authored by Buchholz, who was brutally efficient in throwing 65 of his 94 pitches for strikes in seven scoreless innings.

The good news is that nobody has ever actually died from boredom. The bad news is you have 161 more opportunities to become the first.

On Twitter: @ByDavidMurphy