As sports fans we all know numbers don’t always tell the whole story. Your Daily Philadelphian learned that lesson again this week. The other day, we wrote that Domonic Brown was playing his way back to the Phillies. While that may still be the case, the need to temper that enthusiasm became more apparent.

Reader G Baker warned us to be careful about evaluating Brown on numbers alone. Seems the young man still has the same issues that were a major part of his demotion last year.

Please take him up. He is not helping the Iron Pigs win games. I am a regular attender to the Iron Pigs games. Those of you who sit in Philly and watch numbers see hits which have improved. You don’t see judgement or lack there of like last night’s bone head play that ended the game.. Obviously Sandberg was not happy with Brown’s game ending poor base running. Brown has a lot of talent but what will it take to teach this young man the game?

A bit more digging and we found out exactly what Baker was referring to. While the Phillies were busy staging four epic come-from-behind wins in Philly, Brown was stopping an IronPigs comeback in Lehigh Valley in a 3-2 loss. He tried to move from first to third and was thrown out to end the game.

“I don’t know. You have to know better than that,” a disappointed Brown said. “Things happen and you have to learn from it. That’s it.”

Domonic Brown may be hitting better, but other aspects of his game need to improve if he wants to be a serious contender to contribute at the Big League level.

Manager Ryan Sandberg had this to say about the incident according to LehighValleyLive.com:

“He figured he was going to make it because it was his read,” manager Ryne Sandberg said. “It’s one of those things … as it turned out it was not a good read.”

He continued with this statement:

“It was a pitchers’ battle, both lefties did a nice job,” Sandberg said. “It was a tight game all the way through. Cochran pitched well, but lost his feel in that last inning and they were able to put up two runs which was huge at the time.

“We battled back, but came up short with the last out at third base.”

Ouch! Clearly Brown’s decision-making is going to continue to hinder his chances to make it back to The Show, even if his hitting has gotten better despite last night’s 1-for-4 performance.

While Brown wasn’t setting the world on fire at the plate, his fielding was a bigger issue. Turns out, that hasn’t improved if you go by fielding numbers. Brown has seven errors in 54 games this year, including five in leftfield. Compare that to his eight errors total in 2012 in which he appeared in 95 games between the Phillies and Lehigh Valley.

Of course, as we have learned again, numbers don’t tell the entire story. If you have been to Lehigh Valley, feel free to provide your observations in the comments section below or send us an email to DailyPhiladelphian@gmail.com or hit us up on Twitter @TDPhiladelphian.