What Went Wrong With the Phillies, and How Can It Be Fixed?

Well that’s not how it was supposed to go. The Phillies came into this season as one of the World Series favorites, having won the pennant in 2022, then reached the NLCS in 2023. They were the best team in the National League for most of the year, and — having won the club’s first NL East title since 2011 — were expected to at least repeat the deep playoff runs of the past two seasons. Ideally, they’d improve on it and go all the way.

Instead, they’re out on the first hurdle, having lost 3-1 in the NLDS to — and this might be the most galling part — a hated division rival who sneaked into the playoffs on the final day, then needed a lightning strike of a rally off Devin Williams to eke out a three-game win in the Wild Card series. But over four games, the Mets were comprehensively the better team. If Nick Castellanos hadn’t had his eyes glaze over white and milky as he accessed a higher plane of consciousness in the last four innings of Game 2, this could well have been a sweep.

A team this talented and well-resourced would be within its rights to shrug and run it back in 2025. Indeed, that’s what the Phillies did a year ago, when they were nine outs from going up 3-0 in the NLCS, then lost consecutive would-be clinchers at home. Now, having spit the bit twice in as many playoff series, the Phillies are going to have to at least consider changing more than their postgame playlist.

It’s rare to see such a fractious local media scene so entirely in agreement, but the consensus is clear: There needs to be “real conversations” or a shakeup or some soul-searching. That consensus falls apart when you start to ask about specifics.

So let’s look at what can actually be done.

And let’s start with what can’t be done, or shouldn’t be done.

As disappointing as the end of this season was, I don’t think anyone can accuse president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski of putting together an uncompetitive team, especially considering how poorly his predecessors fared for a decade. Manager Rob Thomson remains popular and authoritative in the clubhouse, and insofar as I disagreed with certain of his in-game tactics — leaving Aaron Nola in a batter or two too long in Game 3, which allowed the Mets to break the game open, to name one — I’m inclined to cut him some slack after watching the relievers he’s relied on for two straight Octobers go full Mitch Williams with no warning.

I’d expect the roster to remain more or less the same in 2025 as well. For starters, you don’t just blow up a 95-win team because of one bad trip to Queens. But the Phillies are kind of in the same boat as the Braves: They’ve locked in their core until kingdom come, which means they should be good for the foreseeable future, but it’s hard to shuffle the roster to make necessary upgrades.

The Phillies have $259 million already committed to their 2025 payroll, according to RosterResource, which is the highest number in baseball. Their only major league free agents are all relief pitchers: Jeff Hoffman, Spencer Turnbull (who hasn’t pitched since June), and Carlos Estévez (who only just got here at the trade deadline). Only three more major contributors will be on expiring contracts next season: Kyle Schwarber, J.T. Realmuto, and Ranger Suárez. Everyone else is under team control through at least 2026.

So whatever ails the Phillies is not going to be solved by free agent attrition. They’re going to have to be proactive. Even so, most of this team would only leave Philadelphia if abducted by aliens.

Bryce Harper got caught trying to do too much in a few key moments, but that only underscored how much the Phillies rely on him. He was 4-for-12 with three extra-base hits and five walks in four games; Harper either scored or drove in five of the Phillies’ 12 runs. If anyone tells you he was the problem, you should re-evaluate with whom you’re spending your time. Schwarber went quiet after his mammoth series-opening home run: 1-for-15 to end the series, including the final out. But you’re going to hear a lot about how the Phillies were too aggressive at the plate, and cutting bait on the team’s most selective hitter is not the way to do that. Especially when said hitter has also contributed 143 home runs between the regular season and playoffs over the past three seasons.

And believe it or not, Trea Turner wasn’t the problem either. Not that you could move on from him if you wanted to, just two seasons into an 11-year contract. But after a pretty brutal oh-fer in Game 1, Turner put in a solid series from that point on, reaching base five times across Games 2 and 3. You still want more than singles and walks from a player of his profile, but he’s not on my list of players I’d accuse of looking lost.

Turner is a polarizing figure in Philadelphia because of the aforementioned contract, as well as the fact that he started his Phillies tenure in a half-season-long slump. But in 2024, he was almost exactly as advertised. Let’s compare his 2024 numbers to two pivotal seasons in his career: 2019, when he was the third-best position player on a championship team, and 2022, his last season with the Dodgers before the Phillies signed him.

Once you account for the hamstring injury that cost Turner a quarter of the season this year, there was no appreciable drop-off. If he’d played 160 games in 2024 and produced at the same rate, he would’ve been a 5.2 WAR player. Maybe he’s coming to the end of his time as a shortstop, or maybe he should cut back on the pregame Red Bull during the playoffs, but since mid-2023, he’s lived up to his billing.

The other area where change is neither advisable nor possible is the rotation, which had three All-Stars this season — Suárez, Cristopher Sánchez, and Zack Wheeler — plus Nola. Those four all pitched well enough to win in this past series; Phillies starters were 0-1 against the Mets, with a 2.53 ERA and 30 strikeouts in 21 1/3 innings. And it’s a good thing all these guys are doing a good job, because the Phillies signed Nola, Sánchez, and Wheeler to multi-year contract extensions in the past 12 months; that trio will make some $68.6 million total next season, which is more than the A’s spent on their entire big league roster this year. Taijuan Walker, who didn’t throw a pitch in the 2023 postseason and was left off the 2024 playoff roster altogether, has two years and $36 million left on his deal. He was a high-volume, league-average starter in 2023, but it feels unnecessarily cruel to recount his 2024 season. I’ll give you some numbers: a 5.5 K-BB%, 7.10 ERA, 6.94 FIP, -1.1 WAR.

Anything the Phillies get from Walker going forward is gravy. If he reinvents himself, adds a pitch, changes his windup or his conditioning and unlocks the old Walker, great. The odds of moving off of that $36 million are so remote it might behoove the Phillies to wait and see how he looks next spring; this, for anyone who’s curious, is why they didn’t just cut him during the season. Either way, as much as Walker was a lightning rod during the Phillies’ 33-33 second half, what happened after was not his fault.

If you’re going to blame a unit, there’s an obvious place to start.

It’s nothing short of shocking that the Phillies bullpen cratered against the Mets. This is, on paper, one of the deepest bullpens in the league. Hoffman, Matt Strahm, and Orion Kerkering had been unhittable for most of the season. José Alvarado, the team’s knockout leverage guy in the previous two postseasons, was something like no. 5 or no. 6 in the pecking order. When the Phillies made Estévez their big deadline pickup, I thought it was a misallocation of resources because the incumbent relievers were so strong.

During this postseason, the Phillies bullpen allowed 17 runs, 16 of them earned, in just 12 2/3 innings of work. Plus two runners inherited from Nola in Game 3. That’s an ERA of 11.37, which is the fourth-worst mark in playoff history for a bullpen with at least 10 innings pitched. In just four games, the Phillies blew three saves and posted the third-worst collective WPA by any bullpen in playoff history. (One of the two teams that beat them was the 1986 Red Sox, the travails of whose relievers have been written into legend.)

Hoffman took two of the losses, but it’s not fair to blame him. This was an all-hands effort.

It bears repeating that these guys were really good during the regular season. Strahm, Hoffman, Kerkering, Estévez, and Banks all had ERAs under 3.00 with the Phillies this year. Strahm and Hoffman were All-Stars, and Kerkering had a 2.25 FIP to go with some of the best stuff in any bullpen anywhere. This was a meticulously curated group, and Dombrowski has committed to his relievers as much as his starters. Alvarado and Strahm are both on multi-year contracts. Estévez was brought over at the deadline at the cost of two legit pitching prospects. This isn’t some bunch of jamokes off the street.

But by the end of the series, Estévez looked like the only one who could get the ball from his glove to Realmuto’s in the strike zone without it getting kabonged into outer space. Until, of course, Estévez gave up the series-losing grand slam to Francisco Lindor. The plague comes for everyone sooner or later.

All of that might’ve been survivable had the offense shown up. The Phillies hit .186/.295/.302 in four games. Some of that was due to the Mets pitching very well, but it was also self-inflicted. Alarming as the bullpen meltdown was, three or four elite relievers all going off the boil at the same time is not really something for which you can plan. The offense, on the other hand, exhibited a lot of the same frustrating problems that sank this team against the Diamondbacks in 2023. And that does have a fix other than hoping for different bounces next October.

The narrative is that the Phillies are a bunch of twitchy, free-swinging knuckle-draggers who never met a curveball in the dirt they didn’t like. That’s simplifying things a little. As a team, the Phillies swung at 57 out of 342 pitches outside the strike zone, which is only the fifth-highest rate out of the 12 teams in this year’s postseason. They actually chased less than the Mets did.

But they saw the lowest percentage of pitches in the heart of the strike zone and the highest percentage of pitches out of the strike zone. The only playoff team with a higher whiff rate was the Orioles, who in their two-game playoff cameo were the only team that looked even more offensively inept than the Phillies did. It’s not as simple as Thomson yelling at the guys to stop swinging at breaking balls in the dirt. (Though if he hasn’t tried that yet, maybe it’s worth a shot.) There’s a whole ontological knot to untangle first.

The Phillies offense is built on selective aggression. Very few players, if any, are better than Harper at identifying their pitch to hit and coming out of their shoes swinging at it. Year after year, Harper puts up ludicrous walk rates despite ranking near the top of the league in swing rate and in the bottom half of the league in contact rate. That’s because he’s not afraid to get his money’s worth when he pulls the trigger, but has a good enough eye to lay off a borderline pitch in a three-ball count.

Very few players share that gift. Schwarber is arguably one of them. Among the other Phillies, Brandon Marsh is a platoon player at this point with a lot of swing-and-miss, and the Phillies — between Whit Merrifield and Austin Hays — put a lot of effort into finding him a platoon partner with no success. Realmuto is slowing down; as recently as two years ago, he was a down-ballot MVP guy, but he was an average hitter this season and a no-show in the playoffs. Which is not much of an exaggeration; Realmuto went 0-for-11, and in the pivotal Game 4, he took the bat off his shoulder just three times out of 19 pitches. Bryson Stott can be a tough out when he’s locked in but passive when he’s not, and Johan Rojas is just straight-up not a good hitter.

No, the frustrating hacker reputation really comes down to three players: Turner, Castellanos, and Alec Bohm. All three are righties with long swings who keep their bats in the zone for a long time and hit for some power. All three of them spray line drives to all fields when they’re hot — and look completely hapless when they’re cold. Castellanos was one of two Phillies hitters, along with Harper, who you could say had a great series. Turner had his ups and downs.

Bohm was so bad I saw someone on Twitter compare him to Ben Simmons.

Let’s not go that far. But in four games, Bohm managed one walk, one single, and one contentious benching. He saw just 39 pitches in 14 plate appearances, and swung at eight out of 21 pitches outside the zone. We think of chasing as a bad thing because you’ll swing and miss, but Bohm made a lot of contact on pitches outside the zone, which might be worse — those chases resulted in four weak outs, three of them within the first two pitches of the at-bat.

The Phillies have a lot of hitters who like to force the action early. When the intensity of scouting and quality of pitching goes up in October, that can lead to a lot of quick outs and soft groundballs. Harper can’t be the only one grinding.

What I’m about to say is probably going to sound ridiculous. The Phillies lineup was assembled at great cost; it features five free agent signees making $20 million a year or more, plus two first-round picks.

But they need another hitter.

Specifically, they need someone who’s going to grind walks and see a ton of pitches, who can slow the game down instead of speeding it up.

In fact, this is a lineup that cries out for Juan Soto. Please subscribe to FanGraphs, the internet’s leading provider of such original and incisive baseball analysis.

Unfortunately for Dombrowski and his merry men, Soto would cure what ails a lot of lineups around the league, so competition will be stiff, and the ultimate cost of such a player will be preposterously high. If owner John Middleton wants his effing trophy back badly enough, maybe he’ll find a spare half billion dollars to put in Soto’s bank account. But that can’t be the only plan.

The Phillies have reinforcements coming on the pitching side — Andrew Painter, and maybe Mick Abel and Seth Johnson—from their own prospect pool. Their best position player prospects are still a couple years away, thanks to a recent high school-happy run at the top of the draft. So if you’re waiting for Aidan Miller or Griffin Burkholder to step into the lineup and fix everything in 2025, you’re going to be bitterly disappointed. That probably means that an upgrade, if it comes at all, is going to come from outside the organization.

An outfielder would slot right into the Phillies lineup, but they could create space elsewhere for a second-tier free agent on the infield by moving Bohm to left. (First basemen like Christian Walker and Pete Alonso are probably nonstarters, unless Harper is interested in returning to the outfield.) One option is a challenge trade. Suárez is a free agent after this season, and the Phillies will almost certainly add top pitching prospect Painter to their rotation in 2025. The Marlins were able to trade for Luis Arraez, but only at the cost of Pablo López; perhaps Suárez could be the anchor of a similar deal.

It depends on how creative Dombrowski wants to get. They can’t — and shouldn’t — fire all the bums. But this lineup, as currently constituted, needs help. That much has become clear.