👋 Good morning! Happy June 1st!

June has some things going for it. The end of school, the start of the summer, sure. But this year in Philadelphia, June is special for another reason: It is now more financially feasible for Howie Roseman to trade A.J. Brown.

At 4:00 p.m. today, the 2026 dead cap hit that results from trading Arthur Juan goes from $43 million to $16 million.

Will there be a deal with New England at some point today? It certainly seems possible. If it does, we will have a lot to write about in tomorrow’s newsletter.

You can reach me at [email protected]

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This is the perfect time to subscribe. Just this week, we have all of this on our radar:

A loaded week. But the truth is that for most of the year, every week is a loaded week. There is always something interesting going on in this city.

Anything that pops up in Philadelphia sports, I am reacting to it. For instance, do we get a Dan Vladar extension or Trevor Zegras contract this week? If we do, I am reacting to it. Whatever it is, I will be on it. And I will give you this level of detail and effort, five days per week.

⚾ Phils lose 2 of 3 in Los Angeles: With these Phillies, I just keep coming back to the idea of process vs. results.

The results under Don Mattingly have been quite good, 11 games over .500 in a month’s time. Losing two of three to the Dodgers at Chavez Ravine is nothing to get riled up about, even if Sunday’s 9-1 loss got away from the Phillies a little bit. Oh well, Zack Wheeler and Andrew Painter struggled against the second-best offense in the league. Looking back at the whole week, I would have gladly taken a 4-2 West Coast swing heading in.

🤝 In that sense, job well done. That is a good bit of schedule management, which is important. Teams need to stack Ws during difficult stretches. 🤝

But neither the sweep of San Diego nor the series loss in Los Angeles altered our opinion of this team in the slightest: They can really pitch, but boy, this lineup is just not very good.

Take this weekend, against some admittedly good Dodgers pitching:

This is not a team that puts a ton of traffic on the basepaths. On the season, the Phillies rank dead-last in MLB in on-base percentage. While the 2025 Eagles season produced a historic amount of three-and-outs, I would bet that the 2026 Phillies are near the top of the league in 1-2-3 innings (unfortunately, I do not know of anywhere online that publicly tracks 1-2-3 innings). Someone please end this cycle of offensive futility!

The Phillies have won a bunch of games under Donnie Baseball, but it’s not because they started to hit. Their numbers since April 28th, with the league-wide rankings in parentheses:

The power numbers are pretty good, but they should be when Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper are in your lineup.

Those numbers have been much worse over the past few weeks. In their past 11 games, the Phillies have not scored over four runs in a game. To go 5-6 during that stretch is a credit to the pitching staff.

The next few months will be about fixing this offense, both with internal improvement and external additions. You will hear Mike Trout’s name, even if that massive contract presented issues before you get to all of the upcoming CBA uncertainty. I liked Tony Bunz’s suggestion on The Ringer’s Philly Special, of potentially bringing former Philadelphia Catholic Leaguer Christian Walker (RIP Kennedy-Kenrick) home.

Walker is a first baseman, which leads us to one of the big subplots of the next few months: Would Bryce Harper go back to right field? A couple of years ago, when the Phils let Rhys Hoskins walk, Dombrowski was adamant that they liked Bryce at first base. That is fine, and I am sure Bryce likes it there. I do not know how much the Tommy John surgery plays a factor in all of this.

But anything should be on the table here, for a few reasons:

(1) Harper is not a good defensive first baseman: While I do not always trust advanced defensive stats in baseball, pretty much every one of them paints Bryce as the single-worst defensive first baseman in baseball this season. So, you are not exactly losing a Gold Glover there.

(2) If you look around baseball, good right-handed hitting outfielders have become rarer and rarer: They do not exist. I have no idea why.

Opening up the position pool to first base would allow Dombrowski, who has straight-up failed to get adequate play in the outfield — I have said this before, but City Council should write an ordinance banning Dombrowski from handing out another one-year, $10 million contract to an outfielder in his 30s — to be more creative with his roster construction.

(3) The Phillies are getting nothing from right field right now: The outfield is still a major worry at the two spots not manned by Brandon Marsh. Here is how the primary two outfielders at those spots fared in May. It is not pretty:

Crawford’s ground ball rate is still a major concern, but I am willing to cut him some slack since he is a rookie. On Sunday, he doubled and made a wild Aaron Rowand style catch in center… fortunately with some padding this time around. Some Wile E. Coyote type of stuff.

Mattingly is not playing Crawford against lefties, who he has struggled against this season. Join the club.

At minimum, it is probably time for Garcia to have a strong-side platoon partner. I love his defense — Garcia made a sick catch on Saturday — and I love his arm. The bar for Garcia to clear at the plate to be an everyday player is realistically not all that high. But he is not clearing it, and it is part of a three-year downward trend. In particular, Garcia is swinging through mistake pitch after mistake pitch. I do not know what you can do about that.

The Inquirer’s David Murphy suggested Gabriel Rincones Jr. as a platoon partner for Garcia the other day, and that is a good thought. That move might have happened already, if Rincones started the season healthy and hitting well. The Phillies still have three catchers on the active roster, if you are looking for a spot to take.

Rincones would represent a short-term fix. If you could land someone like Walker, that would represent a meaningful step forward. The Phillies would have to find a player of that caliber first — Bryce might have moved back to right to make room for Pete Alonso, his Boras Buddy — but Harper switching positions is something I have in the back of my head. Desperate times should call for desperate measures.

And if Bryce did ever move back to right field, he should be allowed to do a press conference where he makes unsubtle jabs at Dombrowski’s crappy roster construction. Fair is fair.

The news and notes of the day…

Saquon studying Gurley: In his first press availability, Sean Mannion said that the Eagles offense would be “a blend” of his new ideas and what the team has done in past years.

That is probably true in the strict definition of the word. But it does not seem like the Eagles hired Mannion for a 50-50 blend with the old Eagles offense. Reports out of OTAs are that this thing is gonna look pretty different. My friend Bo rattled off his offensive observations from OTAs here.

Another signal that we are heading toward a whole lot of Shanahan-McVay Tree: Saquon Barkley, who intensely studies both past and present running backs, is focused on Todd Gurley of all people.

In Sean McVay’s early years as a head coach, Todd Gurley ran a whole bunch of outside zone for the Rams. Back in 2017 and 2018, Gurley ran for a combined 2,556 yards in 29 games. I remember the game when Carson Wentz tore his ACL in The Coliseum, Gurley was an absolute nightmare to defend.

Saquon Under Center, coming to a stadium near you in 2026.

Mundito’s pimp job: Look at Edmundo Sosa admire his work here.

That ball landed in the first or second row! Edmundo was almost channeling his inner Swaggy P. But wall scraper aside, Sosa’s eighth-inning homer off Tanner Scott salvaged the LA series for the Phillies.

It also saved Don Mattingly, who pinch-hit Sosa for Brandon Marsh with the bases loaded in the sixth inning. Over their careers, that would be the right move. This season though, Marsh had hit lefties better and Sosa had struggled overall. The decision initially backfired for Donnie Baseball. In the pinch-hit AB, Sosa had a brutal, chase-filled strikeout against Alex Vesia. But the next time up, Mundito took Scott deep and gave the Phillies a much-needed win.

(Marsh gave Sosa a big hug in the dugout. He seems like a great teammate.)

Process? Questionable. Results? Good.

J.T. Realmuto’s wrist: Yoshinobu Yamamoto is officially on my 💩 list. Striking out ten Phillies is not enough, you also gotta drill the catcher on the wrist?

Fortunately, Mattingly told reporters that Realmuto’s x-rays came back negative and that he will be OK. Phew. That dude has taken a beating so far this season, and it’s just June 1st.

Steward Berroa: Rough go for Otto Kemp this season. He has not hit in the majors, and if he cannot hit, there is not much else. Mattingly got to the point of playing Sosa in left field ahead of Kemp. Once that happens, it is a wasted roster spot.

The Phillies agreed, sending Kemp back down to Triple-A for the second time this year. In his place comes Steward Berroa, a switch-hitting outfielder the Phils acquired in April from Milwaukee. Supposedly, Berroa offers more speed and defense. He knocked in a run in his debut on Friday. Once upon a time, so did Felix Reyes.

Aidan Miller’s back: After “light baseball activities,” we are back to “no baseball activities.”

No offense to Preston Mattingly, since this is not his fault. But he is starting to sound like Bryan Colangelo describing Markelle Fultz in 2018. Maybe not all the way there yet, I do not see any virtual reality headsets. But this whole business with Miller’s back has been such a bummer.

Mike Gansey, it is: The Philadelphia 76ers do not mind a late-Friday news dump in May after settling on a new, relatively unknown president of basketball operations. They did so with Sam Hinkie 13 years ago, and history repeated itself with Mike Gansey a few days ago.

(Yes, I know I am sick.)

My reaction to the hire?

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Most articles about Gansey start touching on him lighting up college hoops while wearing a tall tee underneath his jersey, an era that is two decades old and pretty irrelevant to his current job, by the 300th word. There is good reason for that. We just do not have a lot of concrete information in the public sphere about Mike Gansey, basketball executive.

Here is the main thing we do know: Gansey has grinded for a pretty long time at this, and he has done so working his way up within one organization. The bullet points of his tenure with his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers:

🏀 2011: Fresh off a short professional career, hired as a front-office intern for the Cavs

🏀 2015: Promoted to general manager of the Canton Charge (G-League)

🏀 2017: Promoted to assistant general manager of the Cavs

🏀 2022: Promoted to general manager of the Cavs

Everyone likes a grinder. And 15 years is a long time to work your way up through one organization. During that time, Gansey saw a whole lot of stuff: The rebuild post-Decision, LeBron’s return and four years of Finals trips, the rebuild post-LeBron bolting to Los Angeles, and most recently, the Donovan Mitchell-Evan Mobley era. Some good in there, some bad.

But Gansey was never the lead decision maker. That was David Griffin first and Koby Altman second. So, while Gansey was the general manager and worked his way up to an influential position in the organization, pinning this February’s Darius Garland-James Harden trade on him is probably too reductive. We just do not know how involved he was with any individual decision.

I do like that Gansey has never worked with Bob Myers. That is a plus, because it suggests that a real search took place here. A similar analysis to the Eagles going outside the family and hiring Sean Mannion. This does not look like a sham “The best candidate is clearly the guy who is running the search’s son!” type of thing. We saw a terrible hiring process a decade ago from this very organization, and the results that Bryan Colangelo delivered were disastrous.

Shams reported that Phoenix Mercury Nick U’Ren was the runner-up, and he would have brought those questions. U’Ren worked with Myers for a long period of time in Golden State. Ending up with Gansey suggests a good process, at least when it comes to filling this position. Of course, a good process does not guarantee anything.

So, to recap: We still do not know how much autonomy Gansey will ultimately have, with Myers potentially parachuting in from his almighty “president of sports” position. Hopefully, Gansey is the one running the show. And we do not know if Gansey will be good at the job, because frankly there is so little to go on.

But unless Myers went into this search looking for a Midwestern lookalike ten years his junior (and if so, he succeeded), I cannot really argue with the hire. They had a real search, and they picked a highly-regarded first-timer that paid his dues. I will be interested to hear more from Gansey in the coming weeks.

Over at PhillyVoice, Adam Aaronson reported that “a decision has not been made” about Jameer Nelson’s future role. The general manager position, which some reported Nelson could land in a promotion, currently belongs to Elton Brand. I wonder if this next six weeks (draft, free agency) will be an “all hands on deck” type of thing under Gansey, and then the Sixers will officially make the necessary front-office changes and restructures.

Father’s Day is coming up. Instead of gifting your dad that David McCullough or Erik Larson book (which honestly sounds quite nice), give him something that he can read all year.

But you do not have to wait until then! You can now bring The Broad Street Bulletin to the Philly sports fan in your life as a one-time, non-recurring gift for either a monthly or yearly period. And you can so right here.

I will have some thoughts on the Stanley Cup Finals tomorrow and the NBA Finals on Wednesday.

Great Game 7 win for San Antone over OKC, though. Even if Sixers fans have to stop watching Jared McCain, they get to keep watching Julian Champagnie. In Game 7, Champagnie shot 6-10 from beyond the arc. A refresher:

The Sixers waived Champagnie for Mac McClung. Anyway, Go Spurs Go.

The Phils are off today after flying back from the West Coast. But hey, we might get a football trade.

Let’s make it a good one.