With their 87-75 regular season record and near collapse in September, the Philadelphia Phillies don’t have the look of a team destined for a deep playoff run.
Even if you had no idea what the club’s record was you could argue that they don’t look the part on the most basic level.
With an injury-limited Bryce Harper, Rhys Hoskins, Nick Castellanos and Kyle Schwarber, they are running out four players whose best position right now is designated hitter. According to Baseball-Reference, that’s 887 pounds of slugger that this team is hanging its hopes on.
The Phillies have a puncher's chance of toppling the defending World Series champs and reaching the NLCS — and it’s not an exaggeration to say they’re punting defence. By FanGraphs’ UZR-based defensive value metric, only two teams were worse with the leather than Philadelphia this season.
We tend to associate strong defence with postseason success, and in recent years the correlation between the two has been strong.
Since the expansion to 10 playoff teams in 2012 we have a sample of 40 teams that have reached the ALCS or NLCS. Not a single one of them has been a bottom-three defence by defensive value.
In fact, almost as many of those teams had literally the majors’ best defence (4) as featured one in the bottom third of the league (5).
Here’s how those 40 clubs break down on defensive quality:
We’re dealing with a single metric here, but it’s clear that teams that are butchers in the field have rarely gone far. The most analogous team to the current Phillies we’ve seen recently is the 2012 and 2013 Detroit Tigers, who combined Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder at the corners with full-time DHs (Delmon Young and Victor Martinez) and an aging core.
Even they were better than Philadelphia, though, which makes this Phillies team a statistical curiosity. While it’s possible the Phillies are gone in a matter of days, it’s worth wondering if they present a model for how teams can survive defensive limitations.
Philadelphia mitigates its Achilles heel in a number of ways.
The most obvious is by producing offensively. The Phillies wouldn’t run Schwarber and Castellanos out in the corners if they didn’t expect to be compensated for their trouble offensively. Philadelphia’s offence wasn’t elite offensively this season (106 wRC+), but it was firmly above-average.
If you can’t hit or play defence, you’re just the Washington Nationals.
Philadelphia also helps nullify its defence with excellent pitching. The team’s rotation is headed by Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler, who pitched 13 shutout innings in the wild-card round. Their bullpen lacks big-name stars, but it’s deep.
Put it all together and you have a staff that ranked fourth in the majors in fWAR during the regular season. An inability to convert batted balls into outs meant that the group’s ERA (3.98) overshot its FIP (3.60) by a significant margin, but the pitching was still good enough to keep the team’s run suppression solid.
The way in which Philadelphia’s pitchers were productive is also noteworthy. The most intuitive way to compensate for poor glovework would be a high strikeout rate and the Phillies ranked 10th in the league in K/9 (8.97). They also allowed MLB’s third-lowest exit velocity (87.8 mph), making life easier on a set of fielders who needed all the help they could get.
One last interesting way the Phillies handled their defensive deficiencies is by having arguably the league’s best defender and the most important position on the diamond. JT Realmuto was an absolute rock at catcher this season.
He spent 127.2 more innings behind the plate than any other catcher and posted a league-best 44 per cent caught stealing rate. His masterful control of the run game, as well as his blocking ability helped the Phillies at the margins all season long — even if his teammates were giving outs away.
No one is going to zero in on the 2022 Phillies as the template to build the next great champion off of. This team is an underdog in the NLDS, after all.
Even so, they are bringing a different flavour to the 2022 playoffs and helping demonstrate the shape of your strengths and weaknesses matter less than their magnitude
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