The Phillies have won nine games in a row and that should be a good thing. It should be celebrated as the solid accomplishment that it is; winning is hard. Winning a few in a row is hard, but winning these many games in a row is very hard to do.
Yet there has been some ink spilled lately about who the Phillies are winning against. They’ve beaten up on team that are collectively not very good. Taking three from the Pirates, four from the Rockies and now two from the A’s has made people say things like, “we’ll see what happens when they play good teams.” Right now, the Phillies are 12-13 against teams over .500, which has given “evidence” to people that want to follow that line of thinking.
Which brings us to our question of the day: does it really matter who the opposition is when baseball teams are winning? I’m not really even talking about just the Phillies here. Everyone plays the same schedule now, so there is no more arguing about how some teams get to beat up on bad ones more often than others. You have to win the games in front of you and that’s what the Phillies have done.