Alex Bregman? Kyle Tucker? Nope. A line-driving Trea Turner is the superstar the Phillies need this offseason.

Turner needs to get back to the player he was when the Phillies signed him to his monster deal. The team thinks he can.

Phillies' Trea Turner hit .295 with 21 home runs and 62 RBI in 2024.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

Published Dec. 11, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

Gramps and granny will tell you that $300 million doesn’t go as far as it used to. But it still goes plenty far. Far enough to set a certain level of expectation.

Last year, the 14 highest-paid hitters in Major League Baseball hit an average of 28 home runs with an OPS of .876 and an OPS+ that was roughly 50% higher than a league-average hitter.

Trea Turner was one of those 14 hitters. Here were his ranks within the group of 14 in each of the aforementioned statistical categories:

OPS: 10th of 14 (.807, or .69 below the average of the group)

HR: 10th of 14 (21, or seven below average)

OPS+: 11th of 14 (124, or 20 below average)

Those numbers make it pretty clear what the Phillies really need to get back to the World Series. They don’t need Houston’s Alex Bregman or Kyle Tucker or New York’s Juan Soto. At least, they better hope they don’t. If they do, it is only because they are not getting enough return on the investment they made in Turner with the thought he would be one of those guys.

It’s easy to forget that Turner is being paid to be a superstar. When the Phillies signed him to an 11-year, $300 million contract in the wake of their World Series runs, they did it with the thought that he was one of the rare ones, a top-of-the-lineup force that would confront opposing pitchers with a murderers’ row they could not escape. Soto-Judge, Betts-Ohtani, Acuña-Olson, Turner-Harper. It sounds silly now. But it wasn’t supposed to.

In the four seasons before he signed with the Phillies, Turner ranked third in the majors with a .311 batting average, 29th with a .361 on-base percentage, and 21st with an .870 OPS. His 133 OPS+ was nearly identical to Mookie Betts (135) and Tucker (133) and was higher than Ronald Acuña Jr. (130).

“He’s another guy where, he gets on base, he creates a lot of chaos,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said earlier this offseason.

When he gets on base, that is.

He needs to get there in order for him to be the player the Phillies need him to be. That’s the message they are preaching this offseason. Even in his peak, MVP-candidate seasons, Turner never really ranked among the most feared hitters in the game. He wasn’t Aaron Judge or Soto or Shohei Ohtani or Bryce Harper. From 2018-21, a stretch that included a top-10 MVP finish, Turner averaged a healthily modest 29 home runs per 162 games. What set him apart were all the balls that landed in play. He reached base at a .370 clip in those seasons, thanks in large part to a .317 batting average that was a product of his ability to hit the ball on a line and in the middle part of the field.

While Turner’s line-drive rate was never elite, it improved in each of the four seasons before he arrived in Philly and it ranked in the top 37% of hitters in 2021-22. His hit dispersion showed little bias: 41.6% to the pull side, 58.3% up the middle and to the opposite field.

Both of those tendencies took dramatic turns in 2024. His line-drive rate (16.2%) was nearly five points lower than 2023 and the lowest since 2017, his first full season in the majors. According to FanGraphs, he hit 46.1% of his balls in play to the pull side, up from 39.6% in 2023 and 41.0% for his career.

What changed? Part of it is the pitching, no doubt. It gets better across the game every season. But the Phillies also think part of it is mechanics, a diagnosis that jibes with the looping, uppercut swing-and-misses we saw throughout the postseason. If Turner is the biggest variable this offseason, the second is hitting coach Kevin Long.

“I think it’s a little bit of both,” Thomson said. “I think they are approaching him a little bit different, but I think there’s some tweaks in his mechanics that Kevin will go to work on this winter to get him to use the field, to get him to hit line drives.”

Is Turner responsible for all of the Phillies’ shortcomings? Of course not. Thomson’s lineup is begging for a hitter to slot between Kyle Schwarber and Harper, freeing Turner for the leadoff spot. But the Phillies don’t need to spend seven years and $190 million or trade Aidan Miller and Andrew Painter in order to find such a hitter, as long as Turner ups his production.

Don’t get me wrong. The Phillies would be wise to do everything in their fiscal power to figure out a way to make Bregman their new third baseman. As good as Alec Bohm has been, as much potential as he may still have to unlock, Bregman is much more of a classic power-hitting glove at the hot corner, with a playoff track record to go with it. His 2024 season with the Astros was bit misleading if you look only at the overall numbers. He shook off an early-season slump and was back to his usual self for the bulk of the season, hitting .288 with an .862 OPS and 22 home runs in 414 plate appearances after May 27.

That said, the payroll is what it is. The Phillies were pushing the luxury tax even before the offseason began. Bregman will be 31 years old. Trading for Tucker is a pipe dream. The only deal that would make sense for the Astros is a deal that wouldn’t make sense for the Phillies. Dave Dombrowski has little choice but to trust the moves he has already made.

“I don’t think we need to have more star players,” Dombrowski said earlier this offseason. “We have as many stars as about anybody in baseball.”

Like gramps always says, responsibility is commensurate with salary. Don’t let inflation deflate expectation. As good as Turner has been relative to an average big-league hitter, or to the average Phillies regular, he hasn’t been good enough relative to his economic class. The Phillies need him to use this offseason to get there.