The Philadelphia Phillies generally have thrived on offense while winning eight of their first 12 games this season.
The major exception to the team’s solid start at the plate is third baseman Alec Bohm, who is 1-for-23 over the past five games, dropping his average to .160. He hit .280 with 15 homers and 97 RBIs last season.
The Phillies would like to get Bohm back on track during the three-game road series that opens Friday against the St. Louis Cardinals.
Philadelphia manager Rob Thomson moved Bohm from cleanup to No. 7 in the order against the Braves in Atlanta on Thursday, and Bohm finished 0-for-5 as the Phillies lost 4-2 in 11 innings. Nick Castellanos took over in the No. 4 spot.
“I’m just trying to take a little heat off of Bohmer, and Casty’s swinging the bat good,” Thomson said. “That’s really what it comes down to.”
The move came after Bohm went 0-for-5 with four strikeouts on Wednesday as the Phillies beat the Braves 4-3.
“(He’s) probably disappointed,” Thomson said. “He likes hitting where he’s hitting. But I think he also realizes that he’s not swinging the bat the way he normally does.”
Castellanos didn’t justify remaining in the cleanup spot, as he went 0-for-5 with five strikeouts on Thursday.
The Phillies will open the weekend series with Aaron Nola (0-2, 6.35 ERA) on the mound. He met the quality start metric while allowing three runs in six innings during a 3-1 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers in his latest outing.
However, Nola wasn’t thrilled after allowing seven hits, two of them homers, in the Saturday setback.
“Ball was up today,” Nola said. “(I) struggled to get the fastball down in the zone, especially my four-seam. Curveball was not that sharp today. They took some good pitches. I made some good pitches when I needed to, with guys on base, but other than that I was kind of off today.”
Nola is 8-3 with a 2.56 ERA in 13 career starts against the Cardinals.
St. Louis, which started the season by sweeping a three-game home series against the Minnesota Twins, has gone 2-7 since — with four of those losses coming in extra innings.
The Cardinals went 1-5 on their just-concluded road trip to Boston and Pittsburgh. They capped that journey by taking a frustrating 2-1 loss to the Pirates in 13 innings Wednesday afternoon.
“(We’ve) played a lot of extra-inning games,” Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said. “Unfortunately (we’ve) come up on the wrong end of some of those. But I like the way we’ve game-planned going through, and the guys’ execution has been really good. I feel like it’s heading in the right direction.
“Do you want to win more games on this road trip? Absolutely. But if you look under the hood, there’s a lot of positives, so you’ve got to keep building on those.”
Now the Cardinals face a challenging six-game homestand, split between the Phillies and Houston Astros. They will open with Andre Pallante (1-0, 3.86) starting on Friday.
The right-hander has worked just 9 1/3 innings in his first two starts. Pallante struck out six batters in 4 1/3 innings of two-run ball in St. Louis’ 5-4, 10-inning loss at Boston on Sunday. However, he walked three batters and needed 92 pitches to get 13 outs while consistently getting into deep counts.
Pallante is 0-1 with a 7.45 ERA in six career outings against the Phillies, including one start.
