The Phillies chased their way out of the NLCS. They’ll need to adjust

In the first two games of the NLCS, the Phillies looked invincible.

After dismantling the Braves in four games of the NLDS, they kept their offensive momentum at a prolific cruising altitude, plating 15 runs on the back of six solo home runs against Arizona. Kyle Schwarber was responsible for three of them, setting the tone with a lead-off shot in Game 1, while Trea Turner punished a first-inning offering in Game 2 to give the Phillies another early lead they wouldn’t relinquish. In addition, through their first eight postseason games, the Phillies, behind a stellar Zack Wheeler, combined for a 1.39 ERA. It was a killer combination. 

Then they flew to Arizona. 

“I’m not really sure what happened,” president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski said. 

And yet, as he sat alone at the Phillies dais last week for his end-of-year press conference, he came to a few conclusions: The bats chilled, the bullpen faltered, the confidence evaporated. The team’s hitters became shells of themselves. They looked lost against rookie Brandon Pfaadt and had little answers for Diamondbacks relievers, which combined for a successful bullpen game the next night. After escaping the desert with a 3-2 series lead, none of the team’s top hitters made adjustments or rose to the occasion, and back home inside the frenzied environment where they had thrived, the Phillies looked tight, stressed, unprepared. On the other hand, Arizona looked unfazed in a Game 7, partied where the Phillies should have, and advanced to the World Series. 

“When you lose Game 6 at home, the pressure is on the home team in Game 7, and some guys looked like they might have been feeling the pressure,” Dombrowski said. “We didn’t have good at bats, and I’m not sure why their bullpen shut us down all the time.” 

Outside of the Phillies bullpen giving up a 5-2 lead in Game 4, the primary issue stemmed from the team’s aggressive approach at the plate. According to The Athletic, after the first two games of the series, the Phillies chase percentage rocketed from 21 percent to 36 percent, exacerbated by Arizona pitchers taking different approaches to the team’s streaky swingers and keeping the ball out of the strike zone against Schwarber and Bryce Harper. By the end of the series, most hitters looked out of sorts, trying to be the hero by swinging out of their shoes and standing too many runners on base. 

The issue was a microcosm for the entire season. The Phillies lineup streaked its way through various points of the summer, but it was also hamstrung by that same streakiness at the beginning and end of the year. As a team, the Phillies had the fourth-worst chase rate in the league (31.4 percent), a number buoyed by Nick Castellanos and Turner, whose chase rates spiked last year and continued to climb in 2023. Even with Castellanos’s more productive season, and even after Turner’s August resurgence, both players finished the year with the highest percentage of swings outside the zone in their careers. 

“When you’re playing a team in a series like that — and I tip my cap to the Diamondbacks because they did a really fine job — they make adjustments, and when they made adjustments, our guys still kept chasing,” Dombrowski said. “I don’t know if they were such quality pitches that they were fooled, the timing was off, they were stressing too much, feeling pressure… I don’t really know that answer.”

The Phillies will spend the offseason trying to find out, though the team’s lineup doesn’t figure to change much. So far, the team has relieved two coaches of their duties, including assistant hitting coach Jason Camilli, an attempt to address the free-swinging problem that the D-Backs exploited.

“How we approach the new position and the new role will be designed to somewhat assist us with some of these things,” Dombrowski said, before hedging. “Some hitters, you can talk to them a lot and they’re still going to chase.”

It’s not as though the offense can’t continue to function as it did throughout the season—the Phillies’ aggressive approach got them to within a game of the World Series, and their power surges helped chase elite starting pitchers out of games. The goal, however, will be to “close the gap,” as manager Rob Thomson said at his own end-of-year press conference, and limit the periods when the lineup goes collectively cold. 

The Phillies skipper also acknowledged his own mistakes throughout the series, both with bullpen usage and lineup construction, where he could have been more adaptable. 

“Every decision I make, there’s always a reason,” he said. “Was the reason correct? That’s what I reflect on.”

Read between the lines and he might have been referring to keeping Alec Bohm in the cleanup spot, even after his playoff struggles allowed Arizona to pitch around Harper. Or maybe he meant more consideration around dropping Schwarber out of the leadoff spot and into the middle of the lineup, where his power could have been better used. “That could happen, it’s not out of the question,” Thomson said of implementing that strategy in 2024. “When we put him back in the leadoff spot, we started to score runs and win games. That doesn’t mean when we start the season next year the lineup does not stay the same way.

“I reflect on almost everything on a nightly basis,” he added. “And some things, even things that went well, you look and say, ‘Was that really the right move?’”

The regrets are understandable. The Phillies could easily still be playing against the Rangers right now, rather than watching the team that took them down slink off the field in defeat on Wednesday evening. Everything seemed like it was aligning for that reality. In a silent clubhouse following the Game 7 loss, Thomson told his players they had nothing to be ashamed of, that they played hard and did everything the coaching staff had asked them.

“At some point we’re gonna have to turn the page and get going on next year, but so far, it’s disappointing,” he said. 

When the organization eventually gets through the “haze” of disappointment, as Dombrowski called it, there is reason for optimism. The team’s star players are still in their prime, and its younger starters—Bohm, Bryson Stott, Brandon Marsh, and Johan Rojas—should continue to get better. And the bullpen, as much as it fumbled a couple of games in Arizona, has no shortage of arms that can step into high leverage situations and keep developing into dominant options. “We can play,” Dombrowski said. “We’re good.”

That comes with some caveats, like starting April and May on a strong foot, unlike the last two seasons. (Five more wins in both April and May would have made this team a 100-game winner.) It also requires a shift in mentality that the Phillies didn’t seem prepared to handle after they embraced their underdog status against the Braves for a second straight year.

After all, now that they’ve made the NLCS for two consecutive years, they can’t call themselves “hunters” any more. They are the “hunted.” Embracing that mindset, and using it as motivation, will be necessary to achieve their ultimate goal. 

“Nobody is going to lay down for us. People are going to come after us constantly,” Thomson said. “So you’re going to have to be aware of that, be on guard for that, play well, get ahead, and then put people away, because they’re not going to quit.”