Patient Phillies insist the hits will come

The Phillies had the second-best average (.259) in the National League entering last night’s game against the San Francisco Giants.

The hits have fallen. Problem is, few have been of the extra-base variety. Only 21 of the Phillies hits have been greater than singles in the team’s first 11 games.

“We realize that we haven’t had many extra base hits yet,” Shane Victorino said. “But those are going to come. It’s still early.”

Hunter Pence, who leads the team with four extra-base hits, is confident the Phillies will break out of their power outage.

“I think it’s pretty simple,” Pence said. “We just have to keep plugging away. This is not the offensive start that we wanted. We’re dealing with some adversity [with the loss of Ryan Howard and Chase Utley] but we just have to keep pushing. We’re not taking what’s going on lightly. It’s frustrating. But we’re just going to keep at it.”

Pence also leads the team with two homers. The Phillies have just six long balls.

“We can’t worry about that stuff,” Jimmy Rollins said. “The home runs and the extra base hits will come at some point. Right now, we just have to score runs any way we can. The pitching has been tremendous so far. We just have to give our pitchers enough runs to work with. It’s still very early. We’ll get there offensively.”