The Phillies Were the Hunters. Now They’re the Hunted.
In the past two Octobers, the Phillies were upstart wild-card winners who made surprisingly deep postseason runs. Now they’re division champs and experienced playoff favorites with a bye week to worry about. Will the baseball gods still smile upon them?
Internally, the Philadelphia Phillies called the break between the end of the regular season on Sunday and the start of the division series on Saturday their “Stay Hot Camp.”
The team earned the opportunity to use that time however it chose by finishing this season 95-67—the second-best record in baseball and, for the first time since 2011, the best in the National League East. A decade passed after that division title before the Phillies made it back to the postseason in 2022 as an 87-win, third-place wild-card team that came within two games of a championship after burning through better-on-paper teams all October. That Phillies squad—which had an air of rambunctious, upstart energy despite a top-five payroll—had struggled out of the gate, falling eight games under .500 by the end of May, before igniting at exactly the right time.
The 2024 Phillies have been more lukewarm lately. They took over the top spot in the division on May 3 and never relinquished it, but they played to a perfectly average .500 clip after the All-Star break. Before the break, their starting staff had the highest cumulative wins above replacement and the lowest collective earned run average among all teams’ rotations, while the lineup posted a combined 110 wRC+. In the second half, their starters’ WAR fell to 15th overall and their ERA all the way to 24th. The offense fared slightly better: a 105 combined wRC+ down the stretch. All of which was fine in a season without superteams, especially since they started the season scorching. This is just to say that perhaps a more apt moniker would have been “Get Hot Camp.”
Except then the Phillies would have to reckon with an uncomfortable truth: No one in baseball actually knows how to get hot. That’s what makes MLB’s postseason so maddening.
Entering October with their backs already up against the wall—and crash-the-party personas—suited the 2022 and 2023 Phillies (the latter of whom came within a win of the pennant). They (twice!) toppled the 100-plus-win Atlanta Braves (among others). And it wasn’t just the Phillies who seemingly benefited from being thrown right into the pressure cooker of playoff baseball. Both World Series teams in 2023 got there via the wild card, and the eventual champion Texas Rangers had to navigate an especially grueling, extra-long, cross-country road trip just to bring playoff baseball to their home park.
The 2022 Phillies and last year’s Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks had inexperience on their side. Each of them had gone at least five seasons without a postseason berth before winning the pennant. Meanwhile, the failures of division winners in the expanded postseason era (with the exception of the Astros—until this year) have fueled a new October tradition: existential hand-wringing about the wisdom of a playoff structure that could be so callous to regular-season success.
But the 2024 Phillies—similarly star-studded compared to the last two seasons, but now also October-proven—aren’t sneaking up on anyone. Instead of a crapshoot, best-of-three, wild-card series, these Phillies have to contend with a much more amorphous pair of foes: downtime and expectations.
“I don’t know whether it’s an advantage or disadvantage,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson told The Ringer. “I think that we’re the hunted now, we’re not the hunter. And you have to cherish that, too. You have to own it.”
Sometimes when we talk about teams as singular, continuous characters, it’s a form of fiction. Nowadays, even the laundry changes from year to year. A team’s identity has a lot more to do with the particulars of the roster than the history of the franchise. But the Phillies clubhouse has been remarkably consistent during this recent run.
In 2022, Phillies batters were roughly league average in age; this year, only a few lineups were older. The team has yet to announce exactly who will make the NLDS roster—but every single one of the starting position players from the lineup of the final game of the 2023 NLCS is sure to be on it, along with every pitcher who started in that series. The team that thrived as a wild card is, quite literally, the same team tasked with navigating the bye week better than the majority of division winners have. Since the playoff field expanded to 12 teams under the latest collective bargaining agreement—thereby necessitating a whole wild-card round that puts the top teams on ice—five of the eight teams who received the bye have lost in the division series.
Navigating the bye week is a deeply imperfect exercise. Teams implement whatever training method they feel will strike just the right balance between taking a break after six long months to ease the inevitable aches and staying sharp for a sport that is generally played every single day. And then the hypothesized perfect approach to prep is stress-tested in a totally uncontrolled environment. Maybe the Dodgers need to tweak how they handle the layoff—or maybe if they just had a fully healthy pitching staff every October, they’d be working on a dynasty.
On the advice of hitting coach Kevin Long, who helped steer the 2019 Nationals through a full week off between an NLCS sweep and the World Series, the Phillies prioritized intensity. They opted for an extreme velocity drill in the cage and hosted a highly anticipated intrasquad game.
The game was scheduled for Wednesday, after a day off on Monday and a workout Tuesday. The Phillies pumped in crowd noise at Citizens Bank Park, brought in a crew of umpires, played hitters’ walk-up songs, and had the jumbotron operating normally. They decided against inviting actual fans, as the Braves and Dodgers did last year (which didn’t help them avoid defeat), but the plan was to practice like they play, to prepare for the atmosphere of a real postseason game.
The day before, two pairs of captains—Bryce Harper and Trea Turner on one side and Kyle Schwarber and J.T. Realmuto on the other—selected teams of position players. (Pitcher work is a little more precise and thus couldn’t be subject to Phillie-on-Phillie rivalries.) Trash talk was promised, and the idea of a wager pervaded Tuesday’s workout.
“Can’t just be a show-up-and-play game,” Schwarber said, although at the time, the stakes beyond bragging rights had not been set. “Could be a punishment, could be someone is buying someone something.”
The potential for mythology-building shenanigans seemed high.
Wednesday afternoon, Thomson reported that the game had gone well. Nick Castellanos and Harper had homered back-to-back.
The final score was 5-5. In conspicuous discordance with the way meaningful baseball games are decided, they had tied. The wager was moot. It may have sounded—artificially—like a real game, but actual competitive stakes are harder to fake.
Unintentionally, and likely without even noticing, Aaron Nola lent some credence to the concern that the bye could backfire. The affable starter has spent his now decade-long career in Philadelphia but had never played in October until the past two years. The experience was so exciting and intoxicating that he could hardly bear to go a day without it.
“When we had an off day, I’m like, ‘I kinda want to play today. I kinda want to go to the field and play,’” he said as the regular season wound down.
Before getting traded to the Phillies midseason, Austin Hays was on the 101-win Baltimore Orioles team that got swept out of the division series by the wild-card-winning Rangers last year. He said it felt like the Rangers seized momentum faster.
“And they just didn’t let it go,” Hays said. “They came out so aggressive, so early, and just put their foot on the gas. We just couldn’t catch them.”
Or maybe they already had momentum coming into that series. Maybe that’s what players mean when they cite momentum—an unrelenting urge to keep going, to outrun the reality of a failure-based sport, to not stop to rest, even if, objectively speaking, the break should be beneficial.
That’s what struck Orion Kerkering when, after all of three big league innings, he was part of the Phillies’ postseason bullpen last year.
What stood out to him most, he said this week, was “pitchers wanting to go throw as many times as they could. It’s just like, guys want to get in the game. Not that they don’t care about their health, but [it’s like], ‘I don’t care if I have to throw three, four straight days in a row. I just want to be in there and help my team win.’”
Neither pitcher intended to argue in favor of forgoing a bye to be forced into a best-of-three series that could cut short a promising season after essentially little more than a coin flip. That’s the counter to all the “rest vs. rust” discourse. Of course it’s better to be one round deeper into October when your postseason efforts—which don’t guarantee anything, even in the most lopsided of circumstances—begin.
“People who say you would rather play in the wild card than win the division, I disagree,” Nola said in the days between clinching a postseason berth and claiming the division title. Although not yet a mathematical certainty, the latter was essentially already assured. The Phillies had fought hard and come so close two years in a row with the odds stacked against them. Now they would cruise to the second round of the playoffs with the chance to reset their rotation and let the new upstarts come to them, forced into the famed “four hours of hell” that is Citizens Bank Park for opposing teams. Surely, it would be an advantage.
“But then again, I’ve never won a division before, so I’ve never had a bye,” Nola continued. “So I really don’t know.”
Kerkering has a casino-themed sleeve tattoo—a hand tossing a pair of dice and a roulette wheel featuring all the numbers he’s worn throughout his baseball career, dating back to Little League—to remind him to always bet on himself. It’s good advice, as far as gambling-themed aphorisms go. So is riding the hot hand, you could argue.
Then again, there are reasons to feel confident about the more rested, seasoned Phillies as they take on the Mets in the division rivals’ first postseason matchup. Despite the second-half downturn, this edition of the Phillies is probably better—especially at or near full strength—than the previous two iterations. The president of baseball operations, Dave Dombrowski, assessed the team as “stronger, deeper overall.”
FanGraphs playoff odds give only the Yankees a better chance of winning the World Series. FanGraphs writers give them an equal shot. Historical evidence suggests that relatively long layoffs in October haven’t hurt, on the whole, and research has failed to confirm players’ deep-seated belief that momentum matters. One study says younger teams have slightly overperformed in the playoffs; others say age is just a number. And the Phillies themselves have found ways to turn their recent experience into a reason why this is their year.
“I think there’s more about ‘want’ than there is a pressure aspect,” Schwarber said, referring to how increased expectations could affect the outcome. “Just because we’ve come so close the previous couple years.”
“Even in 2022 I had expectations,” said Thomson, whose ascension to skipper marked a turnaround for that team. “And it’s always to win, to win a world championship. So nothing has really changed for me.” Except that he’s learned: how to better delegate daily tasks, to appreciate how resilient the team is, and how fast it all feels once the whirlwind of October takes over.
Confidence, though, creates something of a mental paradox.
“I believe in baseball gods,” Thomson said to explain his wariness of committing to a bye week plan before the division title was locked up.
And if there’s one thing the baseball gods don’t like, it’s hubris.
“I believe in respecting the game,” Hays said. “I think if you get your highs too high, and you’re overly confident, and you think nothing can go wrong for you, that’s the moment you get humbled. I do believe in that.”
“Yes,” Kerkering said about the existence of the baseball gods. “100 percent.”
But this is where it gets tricky. The baseball gods demand humility—deference to the unpredictability that somehow doesn’t drive the players totally mad—but also appreciation.
A wild-card team contending for a trophy two years in a row? Surely, the baseball gods have been good to the Phillies the past few years.
“I don’t know that you could say …” Schwarber started before trailing off. “I wish that we would have held up a trophy the last two years, right? Now I’m not saying they’ve been bad.”
Maybe there is some mental strain to entering the gauntlet with a target on your back, after all.
“Don’t overthink,” Kerkering said about how to navigate the landmine of jinxes before the Phillies. “They’re trying to beat us, because we’re the team to beat. Not that we’re the better team, but like, they’re the one trying to get past us to get their goals. But also we’re trying to get past them to our goal. So, trying not to overthink that kind of thing.”
When he watches his team play, Dombrowski always keeps score. He’s worked in front offices since the 1970s. He’s been to five World Series with four different teams and won two titles. And whether it’s a spring training contest or Game 7 of the Fall Classic—and, of course, every regular-season game in between—he meticulously keeps score by hand. The by-product would be literally thousands of scorecards spanning decades, which could constitute an almost unrivaled personal library of single-game snapshots from MLB’s modern era. Except that he doesn’t keep them. At the end of the year, Dombrowski—who is a compelling case study into the correlation between being supremely unbothered and having a beautiful head of hair into your late 60s—simply throws away each year’s scorebook to start anew the next season.
He has just one scorecard from his career. After his first championship with the then–Florida Marlins (a wild-card team!) in 1997, his wife conspired with his coworkers to save the Game 7 scorecard and included it in a collage of mementos from that run. That’s it. Not even 21 years later, when the 108-win Red Sox stormed to a championship under Dombrowski, did a scorecard from that World Series survive the annual purge.
So Dombrowski laughed when asked a few weeks ago whether he would consider keeping the scorecard from the day the 2024 Phillies clinched the division. No, it would be the World Series—maybe—or nothing.
And isn’t that sort of funny? In Dombrowski’s role, he never has less control over the outcome than in the postseason. Often, heads of baseball operations say they can hardly handle watching playoff baseball, waiting to see if decisions made months or years earlier will be undone by a bad bounce. Dombrowski is steelier in that respect, but even he has to admit, “It makes my stomach twist a little bit.”
Players, certainly, have a more direct hand in how it all unfolds. And yet even they know that good process isn’t always rewarded with good results. Great teams go home ringless all the time. The thing they want the most—the only thing worth celebrating, commemorating, and memorializing, in some estimations—is so fluky. It all comes down to who gets hot.
“I think, if anything, from a fan perspective, that’s the fun of the postseason atmosphere,” Dombrowski said. “It’s unsettling.”
Hannah Keyser is a baseball writer and occasional television analyst living in Brooklyn.