Pete Mackanin and Maikel Franco have to prove their value to the Phillies during the rest of the 2017 season. (Frank Klose/STP)
By Tim Kelly, Sports Talk Philly editor 
After a 6-22 month of May, the Philadelphia Phillies hope that a flip of the calendar will allow them to break out of a prolonged run of bad baseball. Heck, the month of June can't possibly be worse than the month of May, right?
But May still happened, and based off of their current winning percentage of .333, the Phillies are on-pace to lose 108 games in 2017. That prompted an unnamed "rival" to blast the Phillies when discussing the team with Jon Heyman of FanRag Sports:
“The Phillies look and sound dead,” one rival says. The team was 6-22 in May.
It's hard to argue with that take. Phillies general manager Matt Klentak suggested this week that the Phillies aren't planning to send Maikel Franco to Triple-A, but the 24-year-old hit just .218 in May, which was actually up from the .213 batting average he posted in April. Last year's lone All-Star representative, Odubel Herrera, batted .183 in May, with 30 strikeouts. Vince Velasquez, who flashed front-of-the-line starter potential at times in 2016, has a 5.58 ERA after the second month of the season and is going to open June on the disabled list. Even Jeremy Hellickson, who had a strong April and is thought of as one of the more reliable pitchers in the National League, posted a 7.04 ERA in 30.2 innings in May.
Manager Pete Mackanin did agree to a one-year extension with a club option for 2019 on May 11, one that Klentak stood by earlier this week. That said, whether a month like May had to do with Mackanin losing the clubhouse, across-the-board underperformances and lack of talent, or all of the above, Mackanin will not have a job after 2017 if the Phillies look (or sound) lifeless for the rest of the season.
SportsTalkPhilly.com spoke exclusively about the team's struggles with former Phillies Brett Myers and Billy Wagner (you can read that here), with both suggesting that how the Phillies respond to a horrible month of May will tell a lot about the team's character:
Myers: "Losing takes a lot out of you and if you accept it then you're never going to win," Myers said. "They need to play the game the right way and don't let losing bring them down, because just like hitting it [losing] can be contagious."
Wagner: "You never know what you will get with youth, so this is a character test for a few guys," Wagner said of the scuffle. "These games will show you who the baseball players are. Jimmy (Rollins), Chase (Utley) and Pat (Burrell) went through this and they figured it out and learned how to win the World Series."
The Phillies will get their first chance to leave the month of May behind them Friday evening, when they welcome Buster Posey and the struggling San Francisco Giants to Citizens Bank Park for a three-game set.
