Reason for optimism: It's a lot more fun watching pitchers Aaron Nola and Vince Velasquez lead your team to a 73-win season than Aaron Harang and A.J. Burnett.
Reason for pessimism: Dig into the results from last season, and 73 wins looks a lot more like a ceiling than a floor for the 2017 squad.
The Philadelphia Phillies scored 39 fewer runs last year than the team with the second-worst offense in the majors, the Atlanta Braves. Strip away the effects of sequencing or cluster luck, which benefited some bad offenses (most notably San Diego's) while penalizing the Phillies, and it was still the worst in baseball. The root cause for the offensive ineptitude wouldn't seem easy to change without a complete roster overhaul. Philadelphia stood 29th in walk rate, 26th in strikeout rate, and 29th in on-base percentage.
However, a roster overhaul did not occur in the offseason, and in Philadelphia's case, perhaps some patience is warranted. The Phillies had the youngest offense in baseball last year, based on the at-bat weighted age of its hitters, and that was with a pair of 37-year-olds, Ryan Howard and Carlos Ruiz, getting nearly 10 percent of the team's plate appearances. The last two links to the Phillies' glory years have since departed, though, so it's truly a team of youngsters, which has fans dreaming of upside. Just how young are the Phillies? Left fielder Howie Kendrick is the only everyday player on the projected Opening Day roster with an MLB at-bat before Tiger Woods won his last major.
