Phillies fall to Braves in front of record-low crowd

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If two bad baseball teams get together on a holiday evening for a game, does anyone care?

If the Phillies have a game scheduled at the same time as the Eagles season opener, will anyone show up?

These are the questions you find yourself pondering while the Phillies dropped their 85th loss of the season on Labor Day to the equally awful Atlanta Braves.

Freddie Freeman launched Aaron Harang's 10th pitch of the night over the left field fence for a home run to help fuel Atlanta to a 7-2 victory over the Phillies on Monday. The loss was the fifth straight for the Phillies and their 11th in their last 14 games.

Freeman's line-drive, two-run home run, his 16th of the season, clanked off an empty seat just beyond the left field fence.

The odds were pretty good the ball would land in an unoccupied blue chair at Citizens Bank Park, though. There were nearly 29,000 of them.

The latest sleepy loss in the Phillies forgettable 2015 season was played in front of an announced crowd of 15,125, a new low attendance record for Citizens Bank Park, which has hosted 1,203 games since 2004.

Monday night marked the fourth time the Phillies had set a new low for the 12-year-old ballpark.

"It's really different - it really makes a difference," said manager Pete Mackanin, who was a coach on Charlie Manuel's staff when the Phillies were regularly selling out games with crowds nearly three times as large as the one the Phillies played in front of on Monday.

"When we were in Boston (this weekend) they had a packed house and, let's put it his way - it's more fun," Mackanin continued. "It's more fun when you win.  You've got to win, you pack the house."

Prior to 2015, the Phillies had hosted less than 20,000 fans just twice, in back-to-back games against the Colorado Rockies in April of 2006. They have hosted fewer than 20,000 four times this season.

Ryan Howard, the only player on the current Phillies roster who played in those games in 2006, had about as much interest in talking to the media on Monday night as fans had in coming to see his team play.

"I really don't have anything for you guys tonight," Howard told a reporter as he walked out of the clubhouse for the night.

Monday's crowd wasn't just a new low - it was a nearly 2,000 lower than the previous record (17,097 on April 23 against Miami). There's a fair chance the Phillies will experience another considerable drop in six days.

The third leg of the current, 10-game homestand begins when Washington arrives to Citizens Bank Park on Monday. That game begins at the same time the Eagles kick off their regular season at the Georgia Dome against the Atlanta Falcons.

"We just have to keep moving forward, put every day behind us," Mackanin said. "We don't see a lot of positives, but we'll find a positive in every game we play and build on that."

Monday's positives could be neatly packaged into one paragraph. Hector Neris pitched two perfect innings in relief of Harang, Cesar Hernandez had two hits, Brian Bogusevic hit a pinch-hit home run in his first plate appearance in a Phillies uniform, and Aaron Altherr continued his strong play on both sides of the field.

Altherr is hitting .259 with an .835 OPS in his first three weeks with the major league team this season; nine of his 15 hits have gone for extra-bases. Altherr tripled in his first at-bat on Monday, drove in the Phillies first run with a sacrifice fly in his second at-bat, and made an impressive leaping grab near the fence in right field in the eighth inning to begin an inning-ending 9-3 double play.

"I have no reason to believe he won't succeed at this level," Mackanin said of his 24-year-old rightfielder. " I'm anxious to see him play a little bit more."

Altherr was the good. The sea of blue seats was the ugly. Aaron Harang continued to be the bad.

After beginning the season brilliantly, with a 2.02 ERA entering June, Harang allowed at least five earned runs for the seventh time in his last 14 starts on Monday night. Two innings after serving up Freeman's two-run home run, Harang gave up a pair of run-scoring doubles, the latter a two-run, two-out, two-base hit to Hector Olivera that put the Phillies down 5-1 in the fourth.

The Braves, meanwhile, came into the game having lost 19 of their last 20 games.

"I felt like the only bad pitch I threw was the 1-0 fastball to (Hector) Olivera, the double he hit," said Harang, who needed 93 pitches to get through five innings. Everything else was ground balls. … I looked back and watched the video, and I felt like that was the really the only mistake I made."

His manager didn't necessarily agree.

"I sound like a broken record, but it always boils down to location and command of your stuff," Mackanin said. "Aaron made a few bad pitches."

Harang has a 5.02 ERA in 25 starts this season. On Monday night, he became the seventh Phillies starting pitcher this year (min. five starts) to have an ERA over 5.00, joining Jerome Williams (5.99 ERA in 25 games), Sean O'Sullivan (6.08 in 13 starts), David Buchanan (9.00 ERA in 10 starts), Severino Gonzalez (7.92 ERA in seven starts), Chad Billingsley (5.84 ERA in seven starts) and Kevin Correia (6.56 ERA in five starts).