The Phillies Need Help. Jesús Luzardo Needs an Exorcism.

I’m sure you know the joke about the two hikers, the bear, and the running shoes. A bear is chasing two men through the woods; one stops to put on his running shoes. “You fool!” his friend says. “Even in those shoes you’ll never outrun the bear!”

“I don’t need to outrun the bear,” says the man. “I just need to outrun you.”

It’s an old joke, and I tell it a lot because I find it to have the probative value of an actual Biblical parable. You don’t need to be great; just be better than the other guy. For the past week, the Phillies have been mired in a losing streak that would’ve gotten national attention had the bear not been devoting its attention to eating the Mets. But on Wednesday, the Mets finally snapped their 12-game skid and the Phillies dropped their eighth game on the bounce. Now the two rivals both sit at 8-16, the worst record in the National League.

Some of those struggles were predictable, and show genuine weaknesses within the team. Zack Wheeler is supposed to return from thoracic outlet syndrome this weekend — if he’s back at full strength just eight months after receiving one of the scarier diagnoses a pitcher can have, at age 35, that’d be nothing short of a miracle.

Nevertheless, Wheeler’s understudy, Taijuan Walker, has allowed 23 earned runs in 22 2/3 innings of work. In Wednesday’s 7-2 loss to the Cubs, Walker allowed eight hits and five runs (four earned) in a four-inning bulk relief stint and his ERA actually went down.

The offense has been predictably top-heavy; Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper have been very good, and we’re seeing the realistic best-case scenario from rookie center fielder Justin Crawford. But the rest of the team’s bats have been ice cold.

Phillies PoBO Dave Dombrowski bemoaned the lack of a no. 4 hitter in an interview with Gregg Murphy of NBC Sports Philadelphia before Tuesday’s game. It was a radio interview, so I don’t know what Dombrowski was wearing at the time.

Because it’s not like nobody saw this coming.

It’s also undeniable that the Phillies have been comically unlucky over the first three weeks of the season. They have the biggest ERA-FIP discrepancy in the league by more than half a run. During this losing streak, they’ve lost closer Jhoan Duran and catcher J.T. Realmuto to injury. (The latter is especially hurtful not just because of his role managing the pitching staff, but because an offense that’s scored 14 runs in its past eight games needs more Garrett Stubbs like it needs a poke in the eye.)

Trea Turner and Bryson Stott — one of the best middle infield combos in the league down the stretch last year — came out of the gate ice cold. Alec Bohm has been even worse, and for good reason: He’s currently suing his parents, alleging that they stole millions of dollars from him while managing his money. It’s such a sad situation that even Phillies fans — for whom Bohm has been a bit of a bête noire in recent years — have cut the embattled third baseman some slack.

On the whole, I think the Phillies deserve the heat they’re getting, from Dombrowski on down. This team’s been close to a title for four years running, but the roster has been historically stable over that time, and its stars are only getting older. Maybe staying the course was the best option available to Dombrowski, and maybe manager Rob Thomson’s attitude of serene positivity serves the team best. But at eight games under .500, it can be hard to tell serenity from complacency.

All that said, this team ought to bounce back. This isn’t a true-talent 100-loss roster, and the bad bounces won’t continue all year, unless God is not only real but also out to get the Phillies in particular. (“Don’t rule that out,” I can hear the Sixers saying from across the parking lot.)

There are two things I’d be worried about here if I were the Phillies. First: Confident as I am that they’ll right the ship eventually, they’ve already dug themselves quite a sizable hole. Our preseason projections had the Phillies, Mets, and Braves within two and a half games of each other in the NL East; as bad as things have been on both ends of the New Jersey Turnpike, Atlanta has gotten out of the blocks quickly and is now 17-8. That’s a gap of eight and a half games; if the NL East is still a realistic goal for the Phillies (or the Mets, for that matter), the Braves are going to have to help their pursuers out.

Let’s look at this from a perspective of sheer wins. Over the four seasons of the 12-team playoff bracket, the last NL Wild Card team has averaged 86 wins. (Actually, 85 3/4 wins.) Before the season, the Phillies were projected for 87.5 wins, which is enough to claim a Wild Card spot with room to spare. But after this start, an 87.5-win pace from here on out would only get the Phillies to 82.5 wins. In order to get to 86 wins by season’s end, they’d have to play at a 92-win pace for the rest of the season. Entirely doable! But it’d require not just getting back to preseason expectations, but surpassing them over the season’s final five months and change.

The second big concern: Is something about Jesús Luzardo broken?

Luzardo was Philadelphia’s big success story in 2025. The team bought low on the talented lefty, but still gave up top shortstop prospect Starlyn Caba to pry him loose from Miami. It turned out to be a steal; Luzardo set new career highs in innings, WAR, and strikeouts, and picked up a couple odd down-ballot Cy Young votes. If not for a couple brutal outings that wrecked his season-long ERA, Luzardo could’ve fared better in the voting.

In the postseason, with Wheeler out and Aaron Nola outside the circle of trust, Luzardo was excellent as the Phillies’ no. 2 starter, hanging with Blake Snell in Game 2 and providing five crucial outs in relief in Game 4.

The Phillies could not have been a better fit for Luzardo. They love velocity, sinkers, and sweepers, and they’re great at keeping pitchers healthy. Luzardo, already one of the harder-throwing lefties in the game, gradually phased out his slider for a harder sweeper throughout 2025, and it immediately became his best pitch.

So rather than wait for Luzardo to hit the open market, the Phillies gave him a five-year, $135 million contract extension this spring. Based partly on a long-ish track record of success with the A’s and Marlins, but mostly on one good season, the Phillies made Luzardo their second-highest paid pitcher, after Wheeler, in terms of AAV. When the extension kicks in next year, he’ll have a higher AAV on his deal than Harper or Nola, and will trail Turner by only a quarter million dollars a year, give or take. This calculated risk is now an invaluable part of Philadelphia’s core.

This year, even with the godawful results, Luzardo’s stuff looks better than ever. He’s throwing slightly harder, the sinker is moving more in both axes, his sweeper is getting a preposterous 50% whiff rate. Truly, I’d put these raw materials up against just about any pitcher’s.

So how in the heck is Luzardo running a 6.91 ERA? That’s an important question, because if the Phillies — who made the metaphysically dangerous decision to piss off the ghost of Harry Kalas because they’re hard-up for cash — end up whiffing on this contract, they’re going to be in serious trouble.

It’s puzzling. Luzardo’s underlying numbers — strikeout rate, walk rate, groundball rate, whiff rate, HardHit% — are all, at worst, the same as they were last year. Some of them are markedly better.

He’s allowing fewer balls in the air to the pull side than in any season since 2020. His FIP, 3.25, is only marginally worse than it was last season. On the aggregate, he’s been incredible.

But Luzardo is getting about as little bang for his buck as any pitcher I’ve ever seen. All of the damage he’s given up has come at the worst possible time.

That, no doubt, contributes to Luzardo’s 54.1% strand rate, which is the worst mark among any qualified starter in the league. And that’s after a not-good-but-OK start in Chicago on Tuesday in which he scattered nine baserunners in 4 2/3 innings but only got charged with one run. (More on that in a second.) Before that start, Luzardo’s strand rate was 41.7%.

I used that phrasing — “got charged with” — because, technically, Orion Kerkering walked in that run, not Luzardo. Live, I thought Kerkering’s 3-2 fastball to Moisés Ballesteros might’ve just clipped the outside edge of the zone, but it was indeed a ball. But that got me thinking: Luzardo also walked four in a fairly brief outing. Was he ending up just on the wrong side of these decisions too?

Well, he’s not doing great on borderline pitches at any rate. As of Wednesday morning, 156 pitchers had thrown 250 or more pitches this season; Luzardo’s opponent wOBA in the shadow zone — pitches on just either side of the edge of the strike zone — was the 22nd highest of those pitchers.

And if you want to go down the rabbit hole even further, you can find some truly bizarre batted ball luck, as well. Luzardo has allowed three home runs this year; not only did all three come with at least one runner on base, but they were all wall-scrapers. Two of them were hit plenty hard — xSLG of 2.500 or better — but none of the three would’ve been a home run in all 30 ballparks.

Luzardo’s FIP might be close to what it was in 2025, but his xERA is 4.04. That’s still almost three runs below his actual ERA, but if his ERA were actually 4.04, nobody would be giving him a nine-figure extension.

But xERA — all of Baseball Savant’s expected stats, really — don’t always answer the question you think they’re answering. They tell you how often batted balls with such-and-such exit velo and such-and-such launch angle turn into hits, and if so, what kind of hits they’re likely to turn into. On an individual pitch-by-pitch basis, they don’t actually measure high-quality contact.

Let’s take the 10 batted balls Luzardo has allowed this year with the highest xBA. Nine of them have turned into hits — which is right on the money, as those 10 batted balls have individual xBAs between .869 and .974. You want to know how many of those 10 batted balls were hard hit, by Baseball Savant’s definition? Two.

By xBA, this is the highest-value batted ball Luzardo has allowed all year.

Luzardo has not been faultless: He could stand to pitch better with men on base, regardless of luck, and he’s gotten rocked the third time through the order. But I wouldn’t worry about his extension being a boondoggle on Day 1; he deserves much better results than he’s gotten so far this year.

Not that that’s particularly comforting, all the way down at the bottom of the hole the Phillies have dug for themselves.