Small sample size? Nah. Difference between Phillies and Braves is about mentality

In my primary career as a hockey beat writer, I’m very much an advanced stat guy.

It doesn’t make up all of my coverage — regardless of what detractors might say — but I most certainly lean on the numbers in my evaluations of players and teams. If used correctly, they cut through perceptions, biases, and narratives, right to the the heart of true talent. They’re an invaluable tool to understanding any sport.

That said, numbers clearly aren’t everything. Namely, only by proxy can they measure qualities like focus, approach, and especially the ability to overcome adversity, to prevent petty frustrations from holding a player or team back from playing up to their true talent level at key moments.

Which brings us to the Atlanta Braves and Philadelphia Phillies.

The Braves, at least on paper, were the better team entering this NLDS matchup. Sure, they had some injuries in the starting rotation, and youngster Bryce Elder absolutely wasn’t the same pitcher in the second half as he was in the first. But this was a team built first and foremost around its offense. They scored 151 more runs that the Phillies — no slouches hitting-wise themselves — over the course of a 162-game season. They had the most wins in baseball, the best run differential in baseball. By all objective pre-series measures, they should have been the ones celebrating a berth in the NLCS on Thursday night.

But they weren’t. For the second straight year, they slunk back to their buses in defeat, at the hands of this crazy bunch of Phillies.

Why? Sure, there’s an element of randomness in any short playoff series, regardless of sport. (I’m still an advanced stat believer at heart, remember.) And the Phillies are, in many ways, built both for the playoffs and to be a nightmare matchup for this Braves team. They had the clear edge in starting pitching, especially with Aaron Nola rediscovering peak form and Ranger Suárez back in Playoff Ranger mode. Their bullpen was also able to exploit one of Atlanta’s few hitting weaknesses — they experience a clear statistical dropoff against high-speed fastball pitchers, of which the Phillies have in spades.

But it goes beyond those tangible explanations. To understand, it helps to go back to the teams’ respective reactions to Games 2 and 3.

Remember Game 2? Less faithful Phillies faithful would have been forgiven for thinking their club had lost it all right there, giving away both a stranglehold on the series and every bit of their momentum. Ace Zack Wheeler dealt for six innings, the team jumped out to a 4-0 edge, and the Phillies appeared poised to a 2-0 series lead heading back home to Philadelphia.

Instead, they collapsed. Trea Turner committed two errors. Manager Rob Thomson — perhaps with memories of his ill-fated early pull of Wheeler in the World Series clincher last season — left Wheeler in just a few batters too long. Jeff Hoffman hung a slider over just a bit too much of the plate in the eighth, and Michael Harris II made the defensive play of the series (to that point) in the ninth, sealing an improbable Braves comeback win.

But did the Phillies sulk? Did they complain about balls and strikes? Did they question Thomson’s pitching usage?

Of course not. They tipped their caps to the Braves, and promised that in about 48 hours, they’d shake it off as they had so many times during the regular season after especially crushing defeats.

And in Game 3, that’s exactly what they did.

I joked during the 10-2 win that the Phillies’ superpower is their ability to avoid retaining any bad memories of unfortunate events, allowing them to quickly shake off any tough loss with ease. But that wasn’t quite accurate. Bryce Harper made it abundantly clear with his two staredowns of Orlando Arcia after home runs that he had forgotten nothing.

Arcia, of course, had crowed repeatedly in the Braves clubhouse after the Game 2 victory — within earshot of a boatload of reporters — “Attaboy, Harper!” in an attempt to mock the superstar for his aggressive baserunning on Nick Castellanos’ bomb to Harris II, which led to the game-clinching Atlanta double play. In the wake of Game 3, Harper openly acknowledged that he used used Arcia’s exuberance as fuel, and the staredowns were proof.

That said, even had Arcia been a choirboy in the clubhouse after Game 2, the Phillies most likely win that game. Nola was dealing, and Castellanos — intent on giving Harris no chance to steal any more gamechanging hits from him — hit two bombs of his own. Remove Harper’s revenge-fueled barrage from the equation, and the Phillies almost certainly still roll to a 2-1 series lead in front of a typically bonkers Citizens Bank Park crowd.

You wouldn’t have gotten that impression from the Braves’ postgame response, however.

The post-Game 1 complaining about how the week-long break between the end of the regular season and the start of the Division Series for the top two seeds was almost exclusively from fans, although the fact that The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal immediately wrote a column echoing it does hint that there might have been Braves execs griping to him about it off the record. After Game 3, however, all whining was very much on-the-record.

Both Arcia and Travis d’Arnaud spent their postgame media sessions… well, complaining about the media to the media. The reporter who had included the tidbit in his story had violated the “sanctuary” of the clubhouse, they laughably contended. Unlike the Phillies after their crushing Game 2 defeat, the Braves were seemingly fixated on the past in the wake of theirs.

It’s almost irrelevant that FOXSPORTS.com analyst Jake Mintz did nothing wrong. When reporters are in the clubhouse (or locker room), they have every right to report on what they see and hear, so long as a player or coach doesn’t specifically ask for it to be held off the record. It’s called adding color to a story, and it’s why writers in all North American sports fought so hard for direct room access to be reinstated as pandemic restrictions were eased.

Sure, as a beat writer covering the Flyers every day for years (and hopefully many more), I wouldn’t necessarily recount everything I see and hear in the locker room in a tweet or printed story — including a juicy anecdote might not be worth it if it might ruin a relationship with a player that I’ve worked to build over years.

But that would be my decision to make, my weighing of risk and reward, just as it was Mintz’s, who doesn’t cover the Braves on a daily basis and therefore understandably had no such qualms. The Braves shouldn’t have blamed Mintz for simply doing his job and writing the most entertaining, informative story he could possibly write on Game 2.

But more importantly, they shouldn’t have wasted any mental energy or emotional bandwidth complaining about it.

That’s the mental difference between these two clubs. Call it focus, call it endearing foolishness, call it the manifestation of what some fans lovingly call their himbo mentality, but the Phillies simply don’t let anything get to them.

Compare that to the Braves and Arcia, who — in the middle of an elimination game — felt the need to turn to the Citizens Bank Park faithful and taunt them after an early Austin Riley home run (their only run of the game, it turned out). The last thing an opposing player should be doing in Philadelphia is tacitly admitting to the raucous fans that they are getting to him — except maybe taunting Bryce Harper. It played as an admission that the Braves’ focus wasn’t entirely on the task at hand.

That’s the kind of thing that statistics aren’t going to be able to measure. It’s not “just a small sample size.” It’s a fundamental, inherent difference between the two clubs.

And I’d be willing to wager that it’s a not-insignificant part of the reason why the Phillies are moving on to the NLCS, and this particular Braves team, for the second straight year, has been exposed as a regular season wonder, unable to come through when it mattered most.