The fan comments are just brutal, but not all that unexpected I guess, considering how hard prior Phillies announcers and administrations indoctrinated them in the evil of highly paid players being 'too willing to accept a walk' with RISP. They called them out as cowardly sissies. You don't get a walk unless the pitcher throws you 4 balls, which generally means he's not going to giving you a good pitch to hit. So, the hitter either 'accepts' the walk handed to him or he swings at pitches for which his BA and SLG are going to be awful, because he isn't good at hitting those pitches. The fans are all over Santana and the low BA, but in the past they and the announcers were all over Abreu, when he had a great BA and a .400 OBP and hit quite a few HRs. The problem comes when you have several weak bats in the lineup, whom the pitcher would rather face with an extra guy on base than pitch to the better hitter. If the team is going to insist that the good hitters swing at crap to avoid walking, they're going to get more Ks and easy outs from the good hitters. It is on management not to have multiple Kevin Sefciks in the lineup. This season we often had multiple Kevin Sefciks.
On the downside, MacPhail definitely indicated that money is an object, despite what Middleton has said. In reference to the Phillies being among top 5 spenders in golden age, he pointed to the larger attendance back then and at least strongly implied that until attendance rises, we shouldn't expect to see the salary budget pushed that high. He also really downplayed getting one of the top FA, actually looking ahead to the 2019-2020 offseason. He didn't have much more to say about why a young Braves club played well to the end, while a young Phillies club didn't, other than to suggest it was something like an anomaly/normal growing pains for a young team.
Nobody asked him exactly how he expects to ever catch a better Braves team, which also has a stronger farm, if we don't use our $ to expand the budget with FAs. He was to preserve his budget cushion for flexibility.
He's right that we won 14 more games and that this would look a lot better if the bad ending came earlier in the season, but really didn't offer any plan for how the team will improve or cause for significant hope. He did imply that Middleton isn't happy. That's probably the best news out of his presser. It certainly seemed during the past off-season that, without pressure from Middleton to actually spend some FA money, we would not have acquired Arrietta or Santana.
The fans who participated with comments on this presser post seemed to really hate MacPhail, Klentak, Kapler, analytics, low BA (I don't like low BA with below average power either), and walks with RISP.