2025 ZiPS Projections: Philadelphia Phillies

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Philadelphia Phillies.

Batters

The quick exit in the postseason at the hands of the New York Mets was a disappointing finale for the 2024 Phillies, but the season as a whole still has to be considered a successful one. Cristopher Sánchez convincingly evaporated any questions about whether his late-2023 performance was a fluke, Bryce Harper stayed healthy and proved to be a more-than-competent defender at first, and the bullpen stayed strong despite a few veteran losses from the year before. But that’s not to say there wasn’t some good fortune involved. I don’t mean that to diminish the Phillies; most great teams have more things go their way than not. The preseason NL East favorite, the Atlanta Braves, saw some of their best players lose most or all of the season with serious injuries, and along those lines, the Phillies didn’t have their depth tested to the same degree.

Unless the Phillies are willing to make a splash and go after Juan Soto or something and make Nick Castellanos a well-paid role player, the lineup you see now is the lineup it’ll be. There’s good and bad in that. Philadelphia had a top 10 offense last year, so this is a valuable crew that is returning. But there is some real risk here, too. Five of the lineup spots and a large proportion of the Phillies’ team WAR in 2024 involved players on the wrong side of 30. Of course, 32 isn’t 38, but these are the years where downside risk accelerates, and we may have already seen some signs of aging from J.T. Realmuto. This is an even greater problem because the Phillies don’t have much depth to cover for any sudden injuries or declines at the major league level, and they can’t turn to the next generation of Phillies hitters because they don’t have much in the pipeline, either. ZiPS does have some fondness for Justin Crawford, but it’s bearish on Aidan Miller in the short term, and the computer just doesn’t see a lot of Plan Bs for this team. If hit by a similar spate of injuries as the Braves, the Phillies are rather unlikely to win 89 games and sneak into the playoffs, as Atlanta did.

Still, as long as the players stay healthy, this is a potent offense. With Harper at first base, Kyle Schwarber doesn’t have to play the field, which boosts his value considerably. The only lingering question involves the team’s other player who is better suited as a DH, Castellanos. Despite his 23 home runs and 105 wRC+, he was barely above replacement level this season because his defense was dreadful. Are the Phillies really satisfied with Castellanos as their starting right fielder? He probably should only be a part-time player at this point, but I’m not sure this organization wants to rock the boat too much; after all, this is a veteran, successful team. At the very least, Castellanos on the bench would mean fewer opportunities for his homers to cause tragedy.

Pitchers

There’s a great deal of similarity between the rotation and the lineup, in that the top four starters are extremely potent, but the question of “what if” is a thorny one. ZiPS projects the Phillies to have baseball’s best rotation in 2025 – though take pre-Thanksgiving 2025 team projections with a grain of salt – but it looks incredibly ugly once you get past that quartet. The best hope is for Andrew Painter to destroy batters in spring training and force his way into the fifth spot, and there are a lot of reasons to think that’s a possibility given just how good he was as a prospect. However, it’s not something you want to bet the house on, given that he’s made five starts in the high minors and he’s basically had two lost seasons due to elbow problems. There were a lot of reasons to like Ricky Tiedemann too, but ask the Blue Jays how guaranteed they feel about his potential now.

After Painter, you have the equivalent of Ben Stein calling “Bueller” in a monotone to no reply. Taijuan Walker was a disaster, with few mitigating factors to think he’s a good option. Mick Abel had a disaster of a year and can no longer even be written into the rotation in pencil, and the quality drops off quickly from there. Most organizations have a couple of low-upside guys who can probably be passable fourth/fifth starters for a few years, the pitching trope the A’s have excelled at finding over the last decade or so, but ZiPS just isn’t seeing any of those types here. Given Philadelphia’s front-end talent and the dwindling time remaining to have them, middling swingy arms like Ross Stripling or Matthew Boyd are probably more valuable to the Phillies than to nearly any other team in baseball.

The bottom of the bullpen looks very thin, similar to Atlanta, but a large part of that is because it’s so early in the offseason. It’s unlikely that the Phillies would stand pat with this group of relievers. But in any case, as it stands now, Philadelphia has four bullpen arms that ZiPS really likes — Orion Kerkering, Matt Strahm, José Alvarado, Tanner Banks — and a bunch of other arms that ZiPS sees as near replacement level. We’ll see what the team does over the next three months.

It’s likely that going into 2025, the Phillies will again project as an underdog to the Braves, but by a diminished number of games. That said, there’s a real argument to make that the Phillies have a bit more stability and certainty than the Mets do at this point, and they should have a leg up on New York. Philadelphia is in a good position to claim the division for the second straight season if Atlanta disappoints again.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2025 due to injury, and players who were released in 2024. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Ukulele Dixieland Jazz band that only covers songs by The Smiths, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.11.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. ZiPS is not designed as a playing time predictor, but as a predictor of what a player would likely do at the major league level. It works well enough on playing time for established major leaguers, but it doesn’t know the specific contours of a team’s situation to the effect that it can make judgments on who a team will be playing. When the team standings are run, I do have a model for playing time that uses my input, but here, ZiPS has zero input from Dan other than occasionally changing a position.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on Bluesky.