That's a poor excuse, especially this far into the season. ST was screwed up for every team. A lot of those other screwed-up-ST teams are doing a lot better than the Phillies. Eventually the time must come to stop pointing to unfortunate exogenous factors and admit that the Phillies are screwed up because, over a period of a decade their baseball professionals did a poor job of scouting and developing young talent, did a poor job deciding which FAs to sign or players to trade for, decided too late to rebuild, took an extremely lackadaisical approach to strengthening their baseball-side professional employees, and deciding what The Phillies Way actually was and what they wanted their team and players to look like. The Phillies are bad, because the Phillies have made way more than their share of bad decisions. We are well past the point where we can point to refusal to spend as the cause of our woes. We are a big underperformer in resutls/$.
"It's still early, we're not even in June". The problem with this is that we aren't a dominant team, in either record or on paper with the players we have. We began the season with a decent shot to snare a wildcard. With a quarter of the season gone and 4 games below .500, we have to win at a pace of about 8 games above .500 for the rest of the season to have the decent shot at a wildcard, which we had at the start. 85-86 wins may not be enough to snag the 3rd wildcard. We are third in our division, which is the weakest of the NL divisions. Might have to win the division to make the playoffs.