Leading up to the trade deadline, all I wanted for the Phillies was a starting pitcher. Please get a starter, please get a starter, please get a starter, my brain muttered, despite the fact that they insist upon not consulting me at all before they do things, which is a real insult to my several years of paying attention to the team.

My hierarchy of needs (Phillies edition), where a starting pitcher is water, a left-handed middle reliever is love and belonging, and a great right fielder is self-actualization, was based on a couple of things. The big two were the Malaise of Aaron Nola, a sad story now a couple of seasons old, and the Protracted Elevation of Andrew Painter, a drama in which fans are still trying to work out whether we are waiting for Cristopher Sánchez Part 2 (people do not always remember he took a while to become fully nasty as a pitcher) or, you know. Godot.

The deadline came and went, and they did not get a starter. They got a couple of bullpen arms, which is fine. Mostly, though, they acquired Luis Arráez from the San Francisco Giants. The upside of this is that Arráez is a terrific hitter with a high average and a couple of batting titles. The downside of it is that (on top of being a lefty when my understanding was that they more wanted a righty) he plays second base. Only second base, really. And a good new 2B was not even on my hierarchy of needs. It was up there with, I don’t know, access to Skee-Ball. Sounds fun, but I am fine to go without.

After all, we already have Bryson Stott, who’s a decent hitter and who’s been a very good 2B this year. Stott started off as a shortstop, but he plays at second, and has for several years, because Trea Turner is the Phillies’ shortstop.

Side note: I love Trea. Trea makes errors and had a particularly bad run in July. But he is a beautiful hitter, he’s great on the bases, and he is usually a passable fielder. Passable! Anyway.

In order to put Arráez at second base, Stott had to go somewhere else, but he could not go to short, because again: Trea. Stott can play third! But of course, Alec Bohm plays third, and he has worked quite hard to become a good defensive 3B. On the other hand, Bohm can also play first! In fact, he has often been the one who does it on the days when Bryce Harper is taking a full day off or on the days when (stay with me) Kyle Schwarber is taking a day off, so Bryce Harper becomes the DH, so somebody else needs to play first. So! If you put Arráez at second, you move Stott to third, and you put Bohm at first, the odd man out turns out to be … Bryce Harper. They’re not going to sit Bryce Harper, though, and they’re not going to make him the DH, because that would require Kyle Schwarber to play in the outfield, which nobody wants to happen on a daily basis, because he tends to do things like fall down.

But here’s the wrinkle, which is really two wrinkles: First, Bryce Harper used to play in the outfield, but he hasn’t done it in about four years. He’s four years older, he’s presumably four years slower, he’s four years out of practice, and as he himself has said, he hasn’t had to have an outfielder’s throwing arm in four years.

Second, and this is where there is a weird logic to this entire thing, the Phillies have had trouble finding a right fielder who can hit while also being decent on defense. This is the position, after all, where Nick Castellanos used to play, until he started getting unhappy and doing things like bringing a beer into the dugout during a game, which as you may know, is frowned upon.

They got rid of Nick and got Adolis García, but then García pretty much ripped his own arm off throwing to the plate just as he was starting to generate some offense, so that was the end of that. Since then, they’ve been cycling guys through, guys they brought up from Triple-A who just could not quite deliver offensively with the consistency they wanted. So they do, in fact, need a bat in right field. It is not the craziest idea in the world that said bat could be Bryce Harper.

In fact, they could have reverse engineered this. To be clear, they would not have approached it like this, but let’s just say as a thought experiment: How would you move Harper back to the outfield to be the desired right field bat you otherwise cannot find? Well, you’d need somebody to play first. Who do we have who can play first? How about Bohm? Bohm can play first. Then you’d need somebody to play third. How about Stott? Stott can play third. Well, then you’d need a 2B, and ideally what the Phillies need at the moment is a guy who gets on base a lot, so does anybody have a 2B available who gets on base a lot?

Oh, hey, how about Luis Arráez?

After the Phillies started this season 9-19, they fired their manager, Rob Thomson. I always liked Topper, thought he was a good manager, but something was clearly not working. The vibes were putrid, even if they were nobody’s fault. And sometimes, in sports, managers get booted even in situations where no one thinks the problems of the team are actually manager problems. You just have to shake up something; you have to change the energy.

My personal theory about how this works is placebo-adjacent—that that when a team believes they’re getting a fresh start or a new angle, it can be self-fulfilling. And in this case, it worked quite well through May and June, and the Phillies moved within two games of the Braves for first place in the division at one point. They had legitimately turned it around. Unfortunately, sometimes when you turn things around, you don’t manage to stop, but you instead keep turning and turning until you are facing the same direction you were facing before. The All-Star break came, and the Phillies came out of the All-Star break flat. Hitters weren’t hitting like they can, pitchers weren’t pitching like they can, the defense was sloppy, and they slumped through most of July.

And when I saw this somewhat byzantine trade deadline maneuver, I thought: It is possible that a disruption of this size, sending several guys to new positions to accommodate one trade deadline pickup, could theoretically work in the same way as firing a perfectly good manager. It could give a team a reset, like the exchange from Sports Night:

“This is a third-place show on a fourth-rate network.”
“Yeah, but that’s all gonna change once I grow a goatee.”

Maybe this is the goatee.

I’m not sure you’d get that from a simple one-for-one, like if they’d acquired a 3B and traded Bohm or something like that.

For this to happen, it has to be something that sounds like a terrible idea. It has to be an idea nobody thinks will work. It has to be an idea that makes my extremely knowledgeable pal Joe Posnanski say to me, “I have no idea who’s playing where.” If Joe doesn’t understand why they would do this, it might be the kind of idea I’m talking about. It might be the goatee.

Now, many Phillies fans are convinced that they have a better idea. Most popular seems to be the notion that Trea Turner, who has not played outfield much and has not done it in ten years, should have gone to the outfield instead of Harper, or that Turner should be dumped entirely and replaced at shortstop by Stott. As near as I can tell, this second approach would require putting eight players on the field accompanied by a scarecrow in a housecoat, because I have no idea who would play right field and produce more offense than Turner does. After all, the inability to find that person is one of the ways we got into this whole shuffle.

I am going to say this, and I mean it from the bottom of my heart: I do not have a better idea. I have no clue whether this idea will work. It seems utterly wacky to me, in a way that’s almost charming. It has a certain whimsical, Air Bud, “there’s nothing in the rule book that says you can’t reposition three of your four everyday infielders simultaneously at the beginning of August” quality to it.

Bryce Harper is re-learning what it’s like to be out in right field getting whatever reaction he gets from fans (and he hasn’t done it at a road game yet). Alec Bohm will find out whether he can put his 6’4” frame (down from 6’5” last year, thanks a lot, ABS measurements!) to as much good use grabbing line drives to the right as he did line drives to the left. Eventually, we’ll see if Turner and Arráez can turn a double play.

I don’t know!

But it was kind of funny that on Tuesday, the very first night they used this alignment, it looked beautiful. Arráez got two RBIs, which is exactly the plan. Harper fielded a bunch of balls successfully in right field. Turner continued his path back to not fumbling every ground ball that comes to him (as we all should certainly have known he would). There were no errors. Jesús Luzardo, who’s been a skitch up and down this year, went eight innings and is mostly back to a version of himself that’s very capable of shutting down a really good offense like the Nats have (despite the great James Wood being out with an oblique situation; get well soon, ya tall drink of water). Caleb Kilian, one of those two relievers the Phillies picked up this week, pitched the ninth and did well.

And the team looked … happy. They looked pumped. One of the things Crash Davis says in Bull Durham is that if you believe that you’re playing well because you’re wearing women’s underwear, then you are. And I believe that if you think your team has a chance to turn things around because you got a new manager, or because you got a new hitter, or because you scrambled your whole infield and everybody thinks you’re nuts but you’re going to show them? Then maybe you do.