The Phillies Were the Hunters. Now They’re the Hunted.

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 95-67the 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 squadwhich had an air of rambunctious, upstart energy despite a top-five payrollhad 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.

Thats what makes MLBs postseason so maddening.

Entering October with their backs already up against the walland crash-the-party personassuited 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 wasnt 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.

Related The 2022 Phillies and last years 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 Astrosuntil 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 Philliessimilarly star-studded compared to the last two seasons, but now also October-provenarent 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 dont know whether its an advantage or disadvantage, Phillies manager Rob Thomson told The Ringer.

I think that were the hunted now, were 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 , its a form of fiction.

Nowadays, even the laundry changes from year to year.

A teams 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 rosterbut 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 agreementthereby necessitating a whole wild-card round that puts the top teams on icefive 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, theyd 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 didnt 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 captainsBryce Harper and Trea Turner on one side and Kyle Schwarber and J.T.

Realmuto on the otherselected teams of position players.

(Pitcher work is a little more precise and thus couldnt be subject to Phillie-on-Phillie rivalries.) Trash talk was promised, and the idea of a wager pervaded Tuesdays workout.

Cant 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 soundedartificiallylike 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, Im 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 didnt let it go, Hays said.

They came out so aggressive, so early, and just put their foot on the gas.

We just couldnt catch them.

Or maybe they already had momentum coming into that series.

Maybe thats what players mean when they cite momentuman 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.

Thats 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.

Its just like, guys want to get in the game.

Not that they dont care about their health, but [its like], I dont 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.

Thats the counter to all the rest vs.

rust discourse.

Of course its better to be one round deeper into October when your postseason effortswhich dont guarantee anything, even in the most lopsided of circumstancesbegin.

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, Ive never won a division before, so Ive never had a bye, Nola continued.

So I really dont know.

Kerkering has a casino-themed sleeve tattooa hand tossing a pair of dice and a roulette wheel featuring all the numbers hes worn throughout his baseball career, dating back to Little Leagueto remind him to always bet on himself.

Its 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 betterespecially 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 havent 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 theres more about want than there is a pressure aspect, Schwarber said, referring to how increased expectations could affect the outcome.

Just because weve 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 its always to win, to win a world championship.

So nothing has really changed for me.

Except that hes 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 theres one thing the baseball gods dont like, its hubris.

I believe in respecting the game, Hays said.

I think if you get your highs too high, and youre overly confident, and you think nothing can go wrong for you, thats 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 humilitydeference to the unpredictability that somehow doesnt drive the players totally madbut 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 dont 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 Im not saying theyve been bad.

Maybe there is some mental strain to entering the gauntlet with a target on your back, after all.

Dont overthink, Kerkering said about how to navigate the landmine of jinxes before the Phillies.

Theyre trying to beat us, because were the team to beat.

Not that were the better team, but like, theyre the one trying to get past us to get their goals.

But also were 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.

Hes worked in front offices since the 1970s.

Hes been to five World Series with four different teams and won two titles.

And whether its a spring training contest or Game 7 of the Fall Classicand, of course, every regular-season game in betweenhe 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 MLBs modern era.

Except that he doesnt keep them.

At the end of the year, Dombrowskiwho is a compelling case study into the correlation between being supremely unbothered and having a beautiful head of hair into your late 60ssimply throws away each years scorebook to start anew the next season.

He has just one scorecard from his career.

After his first championship with the thenFlorida 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.

Thats 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 isnt that sort of funny? In Dombrowskis 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 isnt always rewarded with good results.

Great teams go home ringless all the time .

The thing they want the mostthe only thing worth celebrating, commemorating, and memorializing, in some estimationsis so fluky.

It all comes down to who gets hot.

I think, if anything, from a fan perspective, thats the fun of the postseason atmosphere, Dombrowski said.

Its unsettling.

Hannah Keyser is a baseball writer and occasional television analyst living in Brooklyn.

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This article has been shared from the original article on theringer, here is the link to the original article:

https://www.theringer.com/2024/10/4/24261675/philadelphia-phillies-mlb-playoffs-2024-experience-rest-bye-week-nlds