The Phillies Already Need Another Special Run

Fresh off the team's first playoff bid in over a decade, Philadelphia is in trouble again.

Things are never easy for the Philadelphia Phillies, it seems. Build around one of the best groups of starting pitchers ever assembled? Lose a Division Series heartbreaker. Keep your fan-favorite core together? Watch it crash and burn. Follow the Astros’ and Cubs’ total-teardown blueprint? Become MLB’s first failed tank job. Hire proven winners at manager and GM? One of them eventually has to leave in shame.

Against all odds, last year’s Phillies were saved by a huge turnaround after switching managers, going from 7 games below .500 under Joe Girardi to 19 games over .500 with Rob Thomson. Add in MLB’s new extra wild card — plus a postseason for the ages by Bryce Harper — and Philadelphia finally found itself in the World Series again, 11 years after its last postseason appearance of any sort.

But the celebration was short-lived: Not only did Philly lose to the Astros last fall, but they’ve started the 2023 season with an identical 20-23 record to the one they sported at this time last year. Again, this team always feels like it’s playing baseball on hard mode — and it already finds itself needing yet another stunning turnaround to overcome early-season troubles.

According to an average of the playoff odds at FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference, Philadelphia had just a 31% chance of returning to the postseason, and virtually no chance of winning the NL East, as of Thursday morning. They were a half-game behind the New York Mets (who are having problems of their own) for third place in the division, 7 games back of the five-time defending East champ Atlanta Braves. After losing to the San Francisco Giants on Wednesday, the Phillies have dropped four straight games and 10 of their past 15.

After this phase of the 2022 season, the Phillies went 67-52 to finish with 87 wins, which was just good enough to sneak into the playoffs and give them a chance to make postseason magic. The way the NL is shaping up this season, Philadelphia might have even more wiggle room in 2023. As of Thursday, here’s a playoff-seed ranking based on the average of win forecasts from FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference:

Based on the statistical forecasts, as few as 83 wins might be enough to get into the playoffs this year — meaning Philly would need only to go 63-56 from here on out to play itself into a postseason-caliber record. But is that feasible? Here are a few reasons why… and why not:

• Harper has only been in the lineup for 13 games so far. Since joining the team for the 2019 season, Harper (15.2 WAR) is one of only two Phillies batters — joining catcher J.T. Realmuto (18.3) — with double-digits in Wins Above Replacement. He’s also been the team’s OPS leader by far, with a mark (.938) more than 100 points better than the next-best qualified hitter. All of which is to say, of course Philadelphia’s offense is running below league average early on; its best hitter has missed nearly 70% of its games.

• Yes, but: Philly is only 5-8 in his games since returning. As important as Harper is, the Phillies haven’t exactly capitalized on his comeback from Tommy John surgery. While he’s hitting for a very good .876 OPS (41% better than average), his team is actually scoring fewer runs (4.1 per game) since he made his season debut than it was before (4.3 RPG).

• The other slumping stars have been healthy, and should eventually turn things around. Of the eight Phillies players who came into 2023 with an established level of at least 2.0 WAR, two — Harper and pitcher Ranger Suárez — missed time at the start of the season, and therefore have a substantially lower Playing Time % than we’d expect:

  

  That bodes well for Philly’s core of stars to eventually start playing more to their true potential, particularly since none of them are especially past their primes (the oldest is Zack Wheeler at age 33).

• Yes, but: That still might not be enough. If you think about it, the various different preseason projection systems already had those established performances baked into their forecasts back in Spring Training. Yet those systems were sort of lukewarm on the Phillies’ chances to repeat their World Series run.
  
  The statistical systems used to power FiveThirtyEight’s forecast model had Philadelphia at 88.3 wins on average, ranging from 85.7 at FanGraphs to 90.0 at Baseball Prospectus; the simulations from Out Of The Park 24 had Philly even lower, at 80.8 wins. Taking the average of all those figures comes out to a winning percentage of .536 — and remember, to go 63-56 over the rest of the season, they’d need a .529 winning percentage. So even a complete regression back to previous expectations would leave the Phillies cutting it kind of close to make the final wild card by season’s end.

In the end, it all might come down to pitching anyway. Last year’s Phillies ranked sixth in WAR from pitchers across the entire staff, and third in WAR specifically from the starting rotation. Nola and Wheeler each ranked among the best starters in the NL, and Suárez was better than average as well. This season’s staff has been nowhere near as sharp, ranking 20th overall in WAR and 16th among starting rotations. While Wheeler continues to shine, and former Red Sox reliever Matt Strahm has seen solid results in a hybrid role (when not getting ejected for weird pregame shenanigans), Nola hasn’t been as good as usual and important newcomers Taijuan Walker and Craig Kimbrel have gotten lit up.

If the pitchers improve, it would go a long way towards helping Philadelphia save their season again. But as things stand now, the Phillies have dug themselves the same hole as they were in at the beginning of last season. It took a fairly miraculous reversal of fortune to climb out and eventually make a deep postseason run, but that’s a pretty unrealistic thing to expect for a second consecutive year.

Filed under: Baseball