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Murphy: Phils improved, but .500 seems optimistic

THERE WAS a time in this city's not-so-distant past when a manager would have been risking his reputation and perhaps even his job in speaking the words that Pete Mackanin spoke at Citizens Bank Park on Wednesday afternoon.

THERE WAS a time in this city's not-so-distant past when a manager would have been risking his reputation and perhaps even his job in speaking the words that Pete Mackanin spoke at Citizens Bank Park on Wednesday afternoon.

By identifying .500 as the benchmark for his team for the upcoming season – "I don't want to set the goal too high," he continued, "because I don't want anybody to get carried away with this" – the Phillies' second-year skipper flouted one of the cardinal rules of life in the public eye in Philadelphia: Don't say anything to the media that Rocky wouldn't have said to Apollo Creed as he was getting his face reduced to a velvety pate.

Yet the words did not induce any winces from the crowd. If anything, they sounded a bit rich in the giddy-up department. An 81-81 record would be a 10-win improvement over last season, when the Phillies won nine more games than their run differential suggested they should have.

No doubt, the roster looks better than it did at this time last year. Charlie Morton has been replaced by Clay Buchholz, Peter Bourjos by Michael Saunders, Cody Asche by Howie Kendrick. Bourjos batted .251 with a .292 on-base percentage and .389 slugging percentage, Asche .213/.284/.350. Even if Saunders is more the player he was from 2012-15 (.736 OPS, 18 HRs per 600 PAs) than 2016 (.815 OPS, 24 HRs, 558 PAs), that's still decent improvement. The reverse is true for Kendrick: from 2010-15, he hit .289/.332/.418 while averaging 11 home runs and 11 steals. Last year, at 32 years old, he hit .255/.326/.366 with eight home runs and 10 steals. Put it this way: They won't be worse at the corners, and they've got a wide range of potential outcomes in which they're significantly better.

The variability cuts both ways, of course. Tommy Joseph hit 21 home runs with an .813 OPS in 347 plate appearances last year, but that's not a whole lot different from the lines we saw out of guys like Domonic Brown (.818 OPS, 27 HRs, 540 PAs) and John Mayberry Jr. (.854 OPS, 15 HRs, 296 PAs) in what were supposed to have been their breakout seasons. On the flip side, he got better as the season rolled on, posting a 1.065 OPS in July and a .929 OPS in September/October. Last year, he had to share time with Ryan Howard, going just 5-for-33 as a sub or pinch-hitter (Joseph posted an .850 OPS in games he started).

The same line of rationale goes for Cesar Hernandez, who is coming off a season in which he hit 11 triples and reached base at a .371 clip.

At this time last year, you would have penciled Aaron Nola in for better than 111 innings and a 4.78 ERA. Nola, who was one of two players who joined Mackanin at the ballpark on Wednesday for the drive up to a promotional appearance in Allentown, says he feels 100 percent and that last year's elbow scare will go down as one of those rare instances when a trip to Dr. James Andrews did not precipitate a year on the disabled list. A healthy season from Nola is a prerequisite for the Phillies to even flirt with Mackanin's number. The potential of him picking up where he left off at the end of his first season in the big leagues is one of the intoxicating glimmers that prompted the manager to execute a subtle shift of his goal as he continued to talk: He said if the Phillies were achieving his goal heading into the final month of the season, then they could start thinking about stacking up the kinds of wins that sometimes result in a playoff berth.

Is such a scenario unlikely? Of course. But unlike in recent seasons, at least such a scenario exists. Joseph, Saunders and Maikel Franco all have 25-plus home-run potential. If all three have big seasons, and Hernandez and Odubel Herrera do what they did last year, and if Buchholz somehow rediscovers himself, and Vince Velasquez takes another step forward . . .

That's a lot of ifs, and Mackanin is well aware of the unflinching nature of probability. That's why his brain told his mouth to say what he said when someone asked him his expectations for his team. But there were also moments when you could hear his heart speaking the language of spring.

"In general, we might not go from A to Z, getting to the World Series, but I think we're going to go from A to F or A to G," Mackanin said. "We're going to start making our move toward more wins."

And, in this process-oriented era in Philly sports, that counts for something.

dmurphy@phillynews.com

@ByDavidMurphy

Blog:philly.com/Philliesblog