The Phillies’ three best (and worst) decisions of the 2022 World Series season

You know it’s been a good season when it’s hard to choose only three great decisions, because there are so many, and it’s hard to find three truly awful decisions, because there are so few. But when a team reaches Game 6 of the World Series, that’s usually the case, even when it’s the Phillies.

Replacing Zack Wheeler with José Alvarado in the sixth inning on Game 6 isn’t going to make the cut as a poor decision, because that sort of decision got the Phillies to where they went. Alvarado didn’t do his job. Period.

Neither is the incredible job Rob Thomson and Dave Dombrowski did managing a half-dozen pitchers through two pseudo-starts every fourth and fifth game when the Phillies were dealing with injuries to Wheeler, Ranger Suárez, and Zach Eflin.

Nor is the deadline dealing by Dombrowski that brought Noah Syndergaard and Brandon Marsh. Neither was a savior, and each cost plenty, so we’ll judge those moves as the pieces they cost progress.

We’ll judge these moves now.

Credit Dombrowski, the team president, for waking up June 3, going for his thrice-weekly, one-hour run, and deciding, at its end, to tell owner John Middleton he wanted to fire the manager. Why? Because Joe Girardi had made playing baseball about as much fun as a proctology checkup.

Credit Dombrowski and Middleton for promoting career coach Rob Thomson, who understood that this group of characters needed to express themselves and police themselves.

But, first, credit me.

By June 3, I had fired Girardi twice this season, and suggested hiring Thomson once.

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I’ll admit I had no idea Thomson would take a team that was seven games under .500 and go 21 games above .500 in his four-month run, then take it all the way to the World Series.

But Larry Bowa did. Credit him for that.

I always hated the idea of Kyle Schwarber batting leadoff, and, sure enough, he struggled when placed there to start the season, then, intermittently, for the first six weeks or so. Putting him back in the leadoff spot for good May 28 when he was hitting .190 with a .724 OPS seemed idiotic. The Phils had little choice.

The other 12 hitters they’d tried stunk at it. Rhys Hoskins had a .663 OPS in 14 games. Jean Segura had a .426 OPS in 12 games. Odúbel Herrera was never an answer for anything. So, they went with Schwarbs.

Schwarbs hit 38 of his league-high 46 home runs from the leadoff spot, including seven homers to lead off games. Schwarber hit six more homers in the postseason, including a 488-foot bomb in Game 1 of the NLCS; a leadoff homer to start Game 5 of the World Series; and the only run in Game 6, when the Phillies were eliminated.

Incredibly, Schwarber hit .218 in both the regular season and the postseason. A leadoff hitter hitting .218? Well, his regular-season OPS was .827, commensurate with his career .836 OPS entering 2022, and his .937 playoff OPS was fifth among players with at least 30 at-bats.

He is what he is, and he was not the problem.

Zack Wheeler, the No. 1 starter, was supposed to miss two late-August starts with right forearm tendinitis. He missed five. The Phillies went 15-12 in his absence and lost six of seven in the middle of his recovery, but they didn’t panic. Dombrowski gambled that a healthier, stronger Wheeler down the stretch would be imperative. For that matter, if Wheeler wasn’t strong in the playoffs, there was no reason to make it to the playoffs.

Smart.

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The Phillies babied Wheeler’s return. They gave him extra rest every chance they could. They never got 100% of what Wheeler was from May through early August, when he went 10-2 with a 2.08 ERA in 17 starts. He never fully built back up, either; he averaged about 80 pitches in his six playoff starts.

But he was dominant in four of those starts and he was competent in another. In his first career playoff run, he did what an ace is supposed to do: He gave his team a chance to win almost every time he took the mound.

Nearly everyone rejoiced that Phillies owner Middleton exceeded the salary cap by adding a last-minute, All-Star DH/outfielder, but signing Nick Castellanos for five years and $100 million has, so far, been a disaster. His OPS fell 245 points, from .939 in 2021 to .694 in 2022. It was .478 in the postseason. He was, by every measure, the most disappointing player on the Phillies’ roster this year. Factoring in his defense, he was probably the worst player on the roster.

There were extenuating circumstances.

The pressure of playing to a huge contract in a city that holds players accountable every at-bat — Philly ain’t Detroit or Cincy — can be oppressive. No front office is going to hit on every player. Nobody in baseball saw the Castellanos crash coming. Still, the numbers are what they are.

Castellanos did make three scintillating plays in the postseason, but they were scintillating only on the Castellanos scale. Most other right fielders make those plays much more easily.

He also admitted that “On defense I struggle focusing for 162 games,” and that his “mind wanders.” He makes $123,456.79 per game (a number which, weirdly, is almost entirely sequential, and therefore perfect for Casty).

Making more than 100 grand a game should buy complete focus.

Dombrowski spent $10 million on closer Corey Knebel, who was demoted by Thomson in mid-June after having blown four of 15 save opportunities. He landed on the injured list two months later.

The Phillies president spent $6 million on Jeurys Familia, whom Dombrowski released at the deadline. Familia had a 6.09 ERA in 38 appearances.

Dombrowski dealt 23-year-old double-A prospect Ben Brown to the Cubs for 37-year-old reliever David Robertson in order to bolster the back of the bullpen down the stretch and into the playoffs.

Robertson went 1-2 and blew three of nine save chances in the middle of the Phillies’ September swoon. Brown went 6-5 with a 3.38 ERA and struck out 149 batters in 104 minor-league innings this year.

If the Phillies hadn’t hit five home runs off Lance McCullers Jr. in Game 3, Thomson surely would have tinkered with the lineup. They did, and he didn’t, and so the Phillies were no-hit in Game 4. They then scored just three runs over the last 18 innings of the World Series, two of them solo Schwar-bombs.

There was no obvious solution, but there were obvious problems, and sometimes change for change’s sake works. At any rate, it didn’t make much sense to platoon shortstop Bryson Stott, a left-handed hitter who hit .263 against lefties in 110 plate appearances, which was 37 points better than he hit righties.

My complete solution: