The 2014 Phillies: The unwatchable team

Sorry, Nat King Cole, but I don't wish that summer could always be here. Not this one, anyway.

The most enduring images from these lazy, hazy, crazy days will always be those videos of horror and death.

No one, of course, would compare real-life tragedies to a baseball season. Yet when it comes to things that made Philadelphians cringe this summer, the complaint I've heard most often is about the Phillies.

"I can't watch them anymore," has become something of a Phillies fans' mantra, one aired as frequently as those annoying "Take SEPTA to the Game" commercials that mar the team's already troubled telecasts.

The 2014 Phillies aren't the worst team in franchise history. Not even close. But, for reasons both athletic and aesthetic, they might well be the least interesting.

Except for the August surge of Ben Revere and the back end of their bullpen, these Phils have been exactly what their record and the steep declines in attendance and TV ratings suggest: virtually unwatchable.

And it can't all be blamed on losing.

Bad teams aren't necessarily dull teams. Losers can be interesting, exciting, promising. They might employ intriguing strategy or intriguing characters. They might, like the last-place 1992 Phillies, occasionally dirty a uniform, bloody a nose, or knock down an opposing batter.

For most of the 2014 season, the Phillies have been none of those things. Instead, they seem to have assumed their manager's phlegmatic nature.

They aren't feisty or hard-nosed. They don't hit for power. They don't hit for average. They don't hit-and-run. Sometimes they don't hit or run.

The reason for their overall ineptness, especially on offense, is no secret - an aging core and a conspicuous lack of talent surrounding it. But what makes these Phillies especially unappealing is not so much that they lose but how they lose.

Their hitters are maddeningly impatient. Their innings while at bat are too quick. Their rallies are few. Their fundamentals are flawed. Sometimes they look complacent or, worse, resigned to their fate.

And without a vibrant - or at least an interesting - baseball team to follow, summer in Philadelphia has seemed a whole lot emptier.

To be fair, it's not simply a disdain for the product on the field that has caused this disaffection. The team's telecasts haven't helped much.

Just three seasons ago, the Phillies had the highest in-market TV ratings for any major-league team, an average of 276,000 households per game. This year, according to Forbes.com, that number has plummeted to 102,000.

Phillies games, in other words, have become so unappetizing that in 174,000 Philadelphia-area homes, viewers would rather watch American Ninja Warrior or MasterChef.

The implications of the ratings decline go far beyond reduced fees for advertisers.

In an increasingly fragmented world, watching the Phillies has been one of our few shared civic rituals. For the elderly and homebound, in particular, those telecasts are welcome entertainment, the broadcasters close companions.

It's not easy to shred those electronic connections. Sports-mad Philadelphians, after all, have been bred to follow their teams win or lose. But these Phillies have managed it.

Management and Comcast Sports Network didn't do Jamie Moyer and Matt Stairs any favors by debuting them in this sinkhole of a season.

Baseball broadcasters share an intimate relationship with viewers. For six months, they're nightly visitors in our dens. They're like old slippers: No matter how worn or irritating they get, they provide a certain comfortable familiarity. But it takes some time to break them in.

When the team's going good, the announcers might as well be anonymous. But when a team struggles like the Phillies have, a popular broadcast team can hold the audience together.

That's why there are so few changes in TV booths. No matter how good or insightful a new voice might be, it's initially going to sound strange and grating. There's going to be resistance.

If the Phillies were contending, fewer would gripe about Moyer and Stairs. Breaking in with a dreary, last-place team, though, the bull's-eyes on their foreheads are a little larger.

Their hirings came out of left field. And with little broadcast experience, they've struggled to find their grooves.

Moyer has improved as the season has progressed. Stairs is still flailing. The harder he tries, it seems, the less natural he sounds. It's as if, to borrow one of his favorite descriptions for a struggling hitter, he's "swinging under water."

Neither has a classic or particularly soothing TV voice. Neither is funny. Neither has been overly critical in a season that cries out for it. Neither knows exactly when to talk or be quiet.

Consequently, Tom McCarthy, his play-by-play equilibrium disturbed by a change in sidekicks, has often had to rely on painfully obvious questions to his partners, hoping to elicit telling and time-consuming responses.

They'll get better. So will the ratings. The $2.5 billion question is, can both happen quickly enough for Comcast?

"All these billion-dollar contracts," said Curt Smith, a baseball-broadcast historian, "[these guys] better be able to perform and meet whatever expectations are out there."

On the field, the Phillies face the same challenge. And one day, though the horizon of hope has moved further away this dreadful season, they too will improve.

Until then, they and their broadcasters have to find a way to hold the fort.

Until then, those summer days of sodas and pretzels and beer won't be nearly as much fun.

@philafitz