June 22, 2026
When he approaches the plate, I recoil. When he flails at an outside sweeper, I wince. When he walks back to the dugout after another strikeout, I use language you never heard in my years at WIP.
I cannot stand Trea Turner. He is my least favorite Phillie since Jayson Werth. Turner still has a long way to go to reach my off-the-charts contempt for Werth, a curiosity on the field and a jerk off it. The Human Hairball, I called him.
But let’s not rule out Trea just yet for that distinction. He just needs to keep sabotaging the Phillies offense the way he has during this gruesome season.
And everybody has to keep kissing his overpaid ass.
All of this moral support is making me nauseous.
Hey, I have to admit my disdain for Turner is not entirely his fault. I can trace my negative feelings back to the epic moment three years ago when the fans offered him a standing ovation as part of a WIP radio promotion that belied our reputation as a demanding sports city.
Turner was batting .236 on Aug. 4, 2023, when the fans rose from their seats and encouraged the $300-million shortstop to escape a brutal slump. It worked. He hit .337 the rest of the season. Whooppee.
My thinking, then and now, is that a player who just signed an 11-year contract at that insane number should not require further inspiration. None of the free-agent busts in Philadelphia – and there have been many – ever received coddling when they failed the way Turner did.
Nor should they have. This is Philadelphia, dammit. We don’t celebrate failure.
Fast forward three years, and Turner is back to sucking. In fact, he’s worse than before the ovation – with a putrid .227 batting average. On the other side of the ball, he’s not much better, grading out as one of the worst defenders in baseball with a Fielding Run Value of -3.
The worse part is, he’s still got seven and a half years left on that ridiculous deal. That’s seven-plus more seasons of draining $27 million a year out of the payroll.
I’m not sure what it is about Turner, but he has always gotten kid-glove treatment in a sports city that has never owned kid gloves before this.
Throughout Rob Thomson’s tenure, the manager went out of his way to speak kindly of his overpriced star, in good times and bad. Thomson was not known for criticizing his own players, but with Turner he was especially protective.
And now Thomson’s successor, Don Mattingly, has kept up the campaign of coddling.
“He’s a great player,” Mattingly said before he benched Turner for two games last week. “And he’s going to be a great player.”
Let the record show that Mattingly himself – who was indeed a great player – batted .283 or better every year of his 13-year career, except for 1990 when he dropped all the way to .256. He could have hit better than .227 with a broomstick.
But we have to be careful with Turner’s delicate psyche. The $300 million is not enough care and feeding for our sensitive shortstop.
The prevailing theme of the 2026 season has been the puzzling failure of the offense, which ranks 27th in batting average and 29th in on-base percentage. (There are 30 teams.)
This just in: It’s not so surprising when your leadoff hitter has an on-base percentage of .280.
Mystery solved.
Look, I don’t expect the gentler Philadelphia sports media to turn on Turner, but it seems to me that a good time to stop kissing his ass is, . . . uh, . . . . well, . . . . right about now.
Did it occur to anyone that the Knicks’ NBA championship exposed yet again how stupid and ineffective The Process was?
Well, it should have.
While the Sixers were sacrificing four seasons to tank their way to a talented roster of high draft picks, the Knicks were playing it honestly by trying to win the old-fashioned way, by actually trying to score more points than their opponents. Imagine that.
Then the Knicks found their own formula for winning a championship, and this is where it should get especially painful for Philadelphians. President and GM Leon Rose saw the chemistry on Villanova’s two championship teams, and he steered in the direction of replicating it.
He started by offering legendary coach Jay Wright the head job with the Knicks, to no avail. Jay is happily retired. Then Rose did the next best thing, adding to his roster former Wildcats Mikal Bridges, Josh Hart and the most important piece of the championship puzzle, Jalen Brunson.
While the Sixers were trying to reinvent the wheel – and failing miserably – the Knicks were basically using the Wildcats’ instruction manual for winning: Get good players who respond to the big moments. The key to winning is to build a roster of winners.
That’s why Brunson was holding up the championship trophy in San Antonio last week while the Sixers’ big prize of The Process, Joel Embiid, was ordering another round of Shirley Temples at the luxury resort of his choice.
Let me simplify this for you. Jalen Brunson is a winner. Joel Embiid is a loser.
Any questions so far?
Still, the Sixers have some hope for the future. They finally parted ways with GM Daryl Morey, who picked losers like James Harden to pair up with Embiid, creating a tandem of failure. Morey has never won a championship and he never will.
On the other hand, it appears that Bob Myers will have significant say in the new roster construction of the team, even though the new assistant to owner Joshua Harris hired Mike Gansey as the GM. Myers was smart enough to build the four championships he won in Golden State around perhaps the best winner of this generation, Stephen Curry.
If Owens indeed has the power, there’s no need to fret about another Process. He understands how to win NBA titles, and it’s not by purposely losing.
The first sign of this new direction will be future of Embiid here. Hopefully, the cranky center will have no future here at all. Hopefully, Owens (and Francey) will find a sucker to take on the horrific Embiid contract that figures to impede the team for years to come in the cap-controlled NBA.
If Embiid is still here next year, you can expect more seasons like the one that just ended – filled with drama, weighed down by angst and ending in disappointment.
Winners win. Losers lose.
Bob Owens knows this. Now comes the hard part. He has to do something about it.
A few more thoughts. . . .
- I have watched more soccer in the past week than at any point in my long life, and I am now convinced I will never understand the appeal of this insanely overrated sport. Eighty percent of the “action,” is a group of players kicking a ball back and forth waiting for . . . . what? Then there are all of the blatantly obvious flops in the hope of a free kick or a yellow flag. Ugh. The only redeeming feature I can confirm is the intensity of the fans. They really, really care. About what, I have no idea.
- Follow-up questions are becoming a lost art, a case in point being the curious comment by Phillies pitching coach Caleb Cotham last week when pitcher Andrew Painter was sent back to the minors after a 1-8 record and 7.06 ERA. “We’re going to help him,” Cotham said of the organization’s top prospect. The follow-up, of course, is: “Now you’re going to help him? What have you been doing all season?” As far as I can tell, the media dutifully recorded the quote without any further inquiry.
- Arguably the two greatest third baseman of all time were sitting next to each other in the broadcast booth when the Phillies hosted the Mets last Thursday night. Mike Schmidt and George Brett represent two very different approaches to the game. Schmidt was a Hall of Fame slugger. Brett was a Hall of Fame contact hitter. Wouldn’t it have been fascinating to hear them talk about how different the philosophy of hitting is today from in their heyday? Sorry. The topic never came up.
- Among the players under consideration as the Flyers prepare for a very important draft next week is Jack Hextall, a distant cousin of elite goaltender and lousy GM Ron Hextall. If they draft the center, let’s hope the Flyers get a player as great on the ice as the goalie, with none of his obnoxious attitude off the ice as the GM.
- After last season, Dave Dombrowski had the brilliant idea to replace criminally overpaid right fielder Nick Castellanos with the oft-injured Adolis Garcia. In fact, the Phillies GM was so eager to make the move, he agreed to pay off the final $20 million on Castellanos’ contract and then add another $10 million for Garcia. Last week, Garcia was ruled out for the season with a torn lat that requires surgery. That’s $30 mill in right fielders so far this season. Now guess what’s near at top of the list of needs before the trade deadline. Yup. Another right fielder.