You can go up and down the Phillies’ lineup and find a litany of issues:
- Too much swinging and missing.
- Not enough swinging at strikes.
- Not enough power across the board.
- Why is Kyle Schwarber hitting more singles than homers?
- Why is Nick Castellanos not hitting at all?
- When will Bryson Stott break out in a big way?
It’s fair to say we saw this going differently, although historically, it’s just more of the same. The Phillies are a free-swinging team, unburdened by the clatter of over-analysis or an abundance of caution in the box. It doesn’t always look good when they wave at a breaking pitch outside the zone, but there is always a period of adjustment as an offense fights its way through a slump to regain some kind of balance.
Castellanos seems to be trying to overcorrect his penchant for those balls four inches off the plate, and pitchers have learned how to sneak a strike call on him by taking advantage of his newfound restraint. No one is going to complain that Schwarber is hitting the ball hard in early April, but the groundswell of singles is definitely new. Trea Turner has developed a nasty habit of passing up 91 mph meatballs tossed directly into his hot zone. J.T. Realmuto has not looked as lost, but now he’s doing everything with a bruised neck.
The Phillies have managed to score enough runs to win, but their pitching has undoubtedly been the bigger strength thus far. However, one of the few lineup spots filled by a player with no complaints is Brandon Marsh, around whom the main question isn’t when he’s going to start hitting; it’s why he doesn’t get more chances to do so.
It’s early, so we can say things like, “Brandon Marsh is in a nine-way tie for third in home runs in all of Major League Baseball!” But Marsh’s four bombs are tops on the Phillies, for now, after he bashed a two-run shot last night to put the Phillies up 3-0 in the seventh. His early success is pretty much holding the Phillies offense together.
Of the 12 games he’s played in this year, Marsh has gone hitless in only three of them. In two of those games, he was a late defensive substitute so he didn’t get as many at-bats, and in the one in which he played the full game, he drew a walk and drove in a run despite the 0-for.
It started on Opening Day when, in a scoreless slap fight with the Braves, Marsh was the first to break through. He barreled up on a 96 mph four-seamer from Spencer Strider of all people and dropped it over the wall in right center. The Opening Day vibes, for a moment, were flawless, and Marsh almost outpaced Bryson Stott, who’d been on second, as he raced to meet his teammates at home plate.
The rest of that game is irrelevant to our topic.
On April 2 against the Reds, the story was, of course, Bryce Harper’s three home runs (one being a grand slam). You can’t outhit that heat, narratively. But Marsh added a late homer of his own anyway as part of a three-hit night out of the seven-hole. The Phillies had a significant lead at the time thanks to Harper, but we weren’t far enough from the Braves series to feel like any amount of runs was “too many runs.”
At the time, Rob Thomson was still of the mind that Marsh was a platoon player and avoided starting him against lefties, but that strategy seems to be fading as Marsh keeps teeing off to the opposite field. He’s now played in 12 of the Phillies’ 13 games, ten of which as a starter. It’d be silly to come up with a reason not to get him in the batting order, as with the rest of the lineup in the doghouse, the guy who barks is the only one hitting regularly.
With two outs and a full count on April 8 in St. Louis, Marsh went yard to give the Phillies a 3-1 lead in the ninth. The bullpen has shown itself to be reachable at times this season, so the insurance run was appreciated… especially when the Cardinals’ Masyn Winn tied the game at 3-3 in the bottom half of the inning. Without Marsh’s blast, the Phillies would be under .500 today. Instead, they went into extras on the road—always a disadvantage—and managed to hold onto a new lead they secured in the tenth.
You can see Marsh’s bat working even when the rest of the Phillies aren’t. Hitting in front of the scuffling Johan Rojas doesn’t do Marsh a lot of favors, as the Phillies’ young center fielder reconfigured his approach to be more effective against big league pitching. But even in their 3-0 loss—the waste of another great Zack Wheeler start—in game two against the Cardinals, Marsh was trying to stir up trouble. He singled his way on with one out in the third but wound up stranded at second after Rojas’ successful sac bunt, and he got on again behind Castellanos during a brief rally in the fifth that was eventually killed by Rojas hitting into a double play. Thomson has since bumped Marsh up to the sixth spot in the order, giving him some new surroundings.
And then there was Thursday night, when the Phillies really needed to start their ten-game homestand against exclusively terrible opponents—the Pirates, Rockies, and White Sox—off on the right foot. That meant bringing the power that’s been missing from their batting order, and they got it from Alec Bohm, Bryson Stott, and of course, Marsh, who has six hits and two homers in his last four games. He’s hitting the ball hard at a higher rate than the last two seasons, about 10-15 points higher than usual, and while every early season statistic comes with a caveat, well. Somebody’s gotta be hitting the ball hard. Despite the slog, the Phillies have won seven of thirteen games.
Maybe it’s all this wetness. The 26-year-old is most comfortable in a moist state, and the Phillies have been playing in almost nothing but that so far. According to MLB.com writer Todd Zolecki, “The Phillies have played in mostly terrible weather since the beginning of the year. No team has played more games in the rain.”
There’s always something to learn by breaking down a guy’s swing or taking a harder look at his struggles. But this Phillies team has proven before that they are their best when they aren’t thinking that hard. You don’t always have to ask “why’ a hitter is finding grass. Sometimes he’s just doing it. But in Marsh’s case, the adjustments made to his swing by Kevin Long and the Phillies coaching staff since arriving via trade from the Angels have turned him into the kind of player the Phillies are missing in their lineup: A consistent one.
And we are all wet-nesses.
