Phillies NLCS was a choke, yes -- but even more an exposé of all of their flaws

Let’s get it out of the way now: yes, the Philadelphia Phillies choked.

There’s a laundry list of evidence for such a tag. They were facing an 84-win Arizona Diamondbacks team. They had the clear-cut on-paper advantage both in hitting and starting pitching. They had home-field advantage. They raced out to a 2-0 series lead. They led in both Games 3 and 4 — a three-run edge in the latter. And then, worst of all, they returned home — where they were previously unbeaten throughout the playoffs — up 3-2 in the series and somehow managed just three runs in 18 innings en route to a seven-game series loss.

There will be no return trip to the Fall Classic. Only despair.

It was ugly. It was embarrassing. It could have been prevented on numerous occasions, by so many people.

But while it was undoubtedly a choke, it was also, in retrospect, predictable. Because the manner in which they threw away the series was totally consistent with the team’s well-known and thoroughly dissected flaws entering the October tournament.

The collapse was stunning. But it didn’t come out of nowhere.

Let’s start with the bullpen. It was abundantly clear throughout September that the relievers — who had helped to carry the team through the first half of the season — were beginning to falter, with one particular reliever at the top of the Concern List: Craig Kimbrel.

His surface level stats over the final two months actually weren’t that bad — a 3.52 ERA and 29 strikeouts in 23 innings. But anyone who was watching the Phillies on a nightly basis as the season neared its end could tell that this wasn’t the same Kimbrel from before the all-star break. Every appearance was an adventure; no lead was safe. The 35-year old very much appeared to be running out of gas, and given that entering the playoffs, the other high-leverage options were Jose Alvarado (fine), Jeff Hoffman (who had a great season but was only recently introduced to a high-pressure, end-of-game role) Seranthony Dominguez (had struggled all year), Gregory Soto (5.40 ERA in August and September) and Orion Kerkering (a green rookie drafted a little over a year ago), it was a cinch that Kimbrel was going to be asked to be the stopper at key moments in the playoffs, and very much appeared to be a ticking time-bomb.

In Games 3 & 4, it exploded — as did the Phillies’ chances to gain a stranglehold on the series.

Then, we come to Aaron Nola.

It’s not quite fair to pin the series loss on him. After all, he was stellar in Game 2, and looked every bit the part of an ace during his first three postseason starts. The Phillies don’t get to the point where they are in position to blow a seemingly-insurmountable edge without Nola.

But those first three starts (and the two strong ones to close out the regular season) let everyone push out of their minds the fact that all year long, Nola was one of the team’s biggest issues. He allowed 31 HRs, fourth-most in the National League, and proved infuriatingly prone to the big inning, the out-of-nowhere meltdown, when his command and composure would totally abandon him.

As it turns out, Nola would find one last way to pull off his classic “Lucy with the football” technique, executing a perfect long con on a fanbase that so desperately wanted to believe in him. After a dominant first inning in Game 6, Bad Nola reemerged in full force, playing all the hits — back-to-back home runs allowed, missed spots, crushing hits relinquished to bottom-of-the-lineup players.

The meltdown shouldn’t have come as a surprise at all. It was the previous five starts that were the anomaly, lulling fans into a false sense of security belied by six months of a far larger sample size of struggles.

And finally, there was the team-wide approach to hitting.

It’s not that the Phillies were terrible with runners in scoring position during the regular season — in fact, they were about average, posting a 101 in wRC+ (100: league average) with men on second and/or third, ranking 16th in MLB. But when things would go bad, far too many Phillies would revert back to swinging for the fences as a way to bail the team out of their problems. Sometimes it worked, leading to epic home runs and dramatic comebacks. Other times, it led to awful at-bats and swings at pitches way out of the zone.

Cue up the highlight reels from Games 6 & 7.

Organizationally, the Phillies identified this as a problem, and have worked to address it. Alec Bohm and Bryson Stott helped during the season, but they were internally-developed prospects; it was the outside adds of Nick Castellanos and Trea Turner that showcased the front office’s emphasis upon improving the lineup’s balance. Turner is a former batting champion who had finished two seasons with over a 0.300 average; Castellanos is a doubles machine who can hit homers, yes, but is fully capable of knocking in a ton of runs even if the ball stays in the park. These were the guys who were being paid primarily to produce runs if the home runs dried up elsewhere in the lineup.

The one problem? Holy mother of god, were they both streaky in 2023. And that issue reared its ugly head in the NLCS at the worst possible time.

At least the daycare showed up in Games 6 & 7, with Bohm, Stott and Brandon Marsh combining for eight hits and three RBIs despite the fact that the first two had struggled mightily at the plate throughout the rest of the postseason. Turner and Castellanos, on the other hand?

Nope.

Sure, their end-of-season hitting stats painted the picture of players who could bring exactly what the Phillies needed in the NLCS. But their paths to producing those totals were as inconsistent as possible. Turner’s season was basically four awful months and two incredible ones. Castellanos swung wildly between stretches where he hit everything in sight, and then weeks at a time where he looked like wouldn’t even have been able to make solid contact in a tee-ball league.

So was it bad luck that both went ice cold at the same time? To a point. But the extreme streakiness shouldn’t have come as a shock — it was what they had both been all season long. It didn’t come out of nowhere, it was a known and recorded tendency.

The “choke” moments were more when out-of-character and unexpected mistakes were made. Kerkering’s inability to find the strike zone in Game 4 and instead throw breaking ball after breaking ball to the exact same spot four inches out of the strike zone. Manager Rob Thomson’s obstinate refusal to shake up a stagnant batting order until it was too late to do so without exuding panic to his players. Hoffman and Alvarado’s mistake pitches in relief of Ranger Suárez in Game 7. Bryce Harper’s miss of a down-the-middle strike in Game 7 with two men on that was tailor-made for another Bedlam at the Bank moment.

A team doesn’t blow a 2-0 series lead, a 5-2 lead in Game 4, and a 3-2 series edge heading back home without it being a choke. There were so many moments for the Phillies to overcome their inherent flaws with one big pitch, one clutch hit, one huge inning.

But that doesn’t mean the fatal flaws weren’t there.

People can say that the outcomes in baseball’s postseason are driven by randomness, and to an extent they absolutely are. One glaring missed call by an umpire can swing an entire game. The lack of feel for one pitch from a key reliever because he slept wrong on his arm the night before can be the difference between a win and a loss. Lightly hit batted balls can find holes for one team and not for another over nine innings. In a small sample size, one-off events that even out over the course of 162 games simply don’t. There’s just not enough time. That’s both the fun and the terror of playoff baseball.

But by the same token, playoff losses aren’t merely bad luck, the result of a weighted-number generator spitting out weird results. They’re revelatory, exposing inherent flaws by upping the level of competition and ramping up the pressure and leverage of each at-bat. The playoffs are stress test more than anything else, and either a team overcomes its own weaknesses or is dragged down by them.

The Phillies may have been the better team on paper in this series. But they were far from a perfect team. And they ultimately lost because those imperfections — which were glaringly obvious to anyone who had followed the club all season — did them in.

Now, does that mean their flaws will prevent the Phillies from ever winning it all? Of course not. The window remains wide open for this club, despite what doomsayers might think. The team chemistry is undeniable. They’re stacked with talent, and have both young players with plausible upside and veterans years away from steep decline. They have an owner fully engaged with the team and willing to spend money like crazy. This Phillies club isn’t going anywhere; they’re poised to be a playoff staple for years to come.

But just as the post-series response of “they’re chokers, they’ll never win it all” is foolish and wrongheaded, so is “the breaks just didn’t go their way, we’ll get ’em next time.” It’s not that simple.

The bullpen needs one or two additional trustworthy, high-leverage arms — preferably ones that aren’t 35 years of age or older. They desperately need to solve the No. 2 starting pitcher question — it’s totally justifiable to let Nola walk in free agency, but if they do, they need to get a quality replacement. To get it done in the playoffs, they’re going to need an unflappable impact starter to follow Zack Wheeler and can steal a game even if the offense hits another poorly-timed cold stretch.

And then, there’s the offensive approach. Perhaps the answer here is simply further development; if the Phillies get better versions of Stott, Bohm and Johan Rojas against Arizona, they’re preparing for the World Series right now, and all three could presumably take a further step in the coming years. They’re exactly the kind of situational slap-hitters that the Phillies need to complement their big bombers in the lineup. Progress was made this season in that area; more must come.

But most likely, they’re going to remain a streaky hitting team. There isn’t much room for significant lineup adjustments without fundamentally altering the team chemistry that is so integral to their identity in the first place. It’s not like players like Turner, Schwarber and Castellanos are going to magically become consistent hitters in their 30s. It’s just who they are.

And it’s just who the Phillies are. All season long, they were the epitome of a high-variance team. They could win games in the most thrilling ways possible, with no opponent’s lead safe. And then they could lose games in the most heartbreaking, inexplicable fashions — again, with no lead being truly safe. Sometimes, they even pulled off the impossible trick of doing both in the same day.

That’s just this era’s Philadelphia Phillies.

It’s how they could go up against the powerhouse Braves, take their best punch in Game 2, and then forget it in 10 minutes and sweep the series’ remaining games. It’s also how a guy who bombed five home runs in three games could suddenly forget how to hit anything less than a week later, and a dude with a 1.163 OPS through 11 postseason games could go 0-for-12 in the next three and look as pathetic as possible in the process.

So did the Phillies choke? Or was the loss a logical endpoint for the season given all of their season-long weaknesses and tendencies?

Yes.