When the Phillies acquired Harrison Bader in a trade deadline day deal with the Minnesota Twins, it was widely assumed that he would be taking the spot of Max Kepler in the lineup. But soon after the trade became official, the Phillies and manager Rob Thomson announced that they would be platooning Bader with Kepler for at least a week. Before Tuesday night’s game, Thomson reaffirmed that plan when he said that he promised the players that he would hold true to that plan.

We are not privy to the inner workings of the Phillies clubhouse. We can make assumptions based on what has been said publicly and from whispers through the media, that Rob Thomson is widely respected throughout the clubhouse, dust up with Nick Castellanos aside. It’s totally understandable that Thomson would want to stick to his word and not change course after a few days. A manager has to have his player’s trust.

The only problem? Max Kepler hasn’t done anything on the field to warrant that level of trust or opportunity. There’s nothing that six extra days, despite a two-run homer Tuesday, can tell you about his season that the previous 4+ months didn’t.

Kepler was brought to Philadelphia on a one year, $10M contract with the expectation that he would be the Phillies every day left fielder. He got off to a decent start, hitting .258 with a .753 OPS through 27 games by the end of April. But the idea of Kepler starting everyday soon became scrapped, as he took a nose dive beginning in May where he hit .188 with a .650 OPS. He would start to find himself in a platoon with right handed options such as Weston Wilson and Otto Kemp and even Edmundo Sosa on a tryout in left field.

That led to Kepler publicly complaining about his playing time in late June, despite hitting .162 with a .590 OPS in 86 plate appearances in the month of June. He expressed that he signed with the expectation to be a starter, something the team at the time of the signing shared. But it was becoming obvious that he simply wasn’t performing enough to be given every day at-bats and the Phillies were adjusting.

That was over a month ago. Since the start of July, Kepler is hitting .180 with a .536 OPS across 71 plate appearances. His ISO over that span is a minuscule .098. July made three straight months that Kepler was hitting under the Mendoza line with an OPS well under .700. His wOBA of .284 for the season is in the bottom ten percent of all Major League hitters.

The Phillies gave up on the every day experiment by June. They then tried a platoon for two months with even worse results. By the trade deadline, they were looking high and low for an outfield upgrade and they ended up with Bader.

Now, there’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the Bader trade. He is vastly out-hitting his metrics and has a strikeout rate that is the highest it’s been since 2020. But, there are even more reasons to see the writing on the wall with Kepler. Even if regression does come hard for Bader, he will still provide a huge defensive upgrade over Kepler, as the former’s 5 OAA compared to the latter’s -1 suggests.

It’s time for the Phillies to admit their mistake. They haven’t shied away from doing so in the recent past. It’s possible however that the Phillies aren’t quite ready to completely move on from Kepler, as ironically it would leave them in a spot with possibly too many right handed outfielders. In conjunction, maybe the Phillies are not quite ready to call up Justin Crawford without a guaranteed path to playing full time. In that case, it makes some sense to hang onto Kepler even if it’s ill advised. But it’s clear that Bader should be starting every day regardless of the platoon advantage. Six more games isn’t going to outweigh the last four months worth of evidence.