Everybody keeps talking about the Dodgers because, well, they’re the Dodgers and they have a lot of everything and seem to look even better coming into this season than they did coming out of last season. You know people have been talking up the Mets ever since they signed Juan Soto for that contract, adding Soto to a team that played the Dodgers even tougher in the National League Championship Series than the Yankees played them in the World Series.
It’s why you wonder sometimes, with all that East-West and coast-to-coast conversation if people are talking nearly enough in the National League about the Phillies, who are still loaded and who might be ready to kick in the door they’ve been knocking on since they last made the World Series three years ago. And they want to show the baseball world that no doors are being closed on what has been one of the best and most entertaining teams in the sport since then.
“If they’re not talking about us, that’s fine with me,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said on Monday morning as his team was getting ready to break camp in Clearwater, Fla. “This group doesn’t go looking for the spotlight. These guys know who they are.”
We talked about the way the past two seasons ended for Thomson’s team. They were ahead of the Diamondbacks three games to two in the 2023 NL Championship Series and going home to play Games 6 and 7. Then everybody stopped hitting at once, and the Diamondbacks were the ones going to the World Series.
“We were trying to do too much and stopped controlling the strike zone,” Thomson said. “They’d made an adjustment and kept expanding the zone and expanding it, and we just couldn’t find a way to reel it back in.”
Then last year, even after winning the NL East, they went up against a Mets team that had been getting back up all season and was doing it again after being a couple of outs away from losing in the Wild Card Series to the Brewers. The Mets got hot again, just like that, and Francisco Lindor hit a grand slam in the sixth inning of Game 4 against the Phillies, and a few innings later, it was next season again for Thomson’s team.
“We ran into a buzz saw,” Thomson said on Monday, “and didn’t play every well ourselves.”
I asked him then if that kind of October heartbreak -- two years running -- could somehow make the collective heart of a team actually get stronger.
“Without question, I think it will make us stronger,” he said. “This is a highly motivated team coming into this season. There’s a hunger here I haven’t seen before. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been hunger before. But it’s even more apparent now, like next level.”
Then Thomson added this:
“There’s no doubt in my mind that heartbreak can really motivate a group when they act as a group, and this group does, it’s as together as any team we’ve had here. They celebrate together, they mourn together. To me, that’s a very big deal.”
Thomson then spoke of the belief that he and Dave Dombrowski, head of baseball operations for the Phillies, have in the core of a team still led by Bryce Harper (“I never worry about him,” Thomson said).
“Going into the offseason,” Thomson said, “the goal was to improve us around the edges.”
“If we stay healthy,” Dombrowski said, “we have no glaring weaknesses.”
Dombrowski added starter Jesús Luzardo and reliever Jordan Romano. And he added a professional hitter like Max Kepler, long part of the core with the Twins and coming off an injury-shortened season when he played just 105 games.
“[Kepler] is healthy now,” Thomson said, “and has had a really good spring (a .375 batting average with three home runs coming out of the last weekend of Spring Training). He’s a guy who does control the zone and hardly ever chases.”
Kepler goes into a Phillies batting order that could rake even before he got to town, Harper, Trea Turner, the amazing Kyle Schwarber, J.T. Realmuto, Nick Castellanos, Alec Bohm and all the way down the line. When Ranger Suárez, an All-Star last season, has recovered from some back issues (“I only expect him to miss a couple of starts,” Thomson said), the Phillies might have the best starting rotation in the NL East -- Suarez in there behind ace Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola at the top.
Again: For years, the Phillies have been one of the best shows around. They went six games with a terrific Astros team before losing the World Series in 2022. In ’23, it seemed everything had lined up for them, and that they would play their way back to the Series in front of the loudest home crowd in baseball until the bats went quiet. Maybe they could have found a way last October to play their NL Division Series against the Mets back to Philly, but then Lindor made one of those October swings.
Now the Phillies are all ready to take their swings again. Don’t tell their manager that their window is closing. They might take a bat to it.