Ex-Oriole Austin Hays knows how a bye can break bad but says there is a key difference with the Phillies

As the Phillies spend this week preparing for an unknown National League Division Series opponent, there’s one player who knows firsthand what not to do during the five-day layoff.

Austin Hays, who was acquired from Baltimore at the trade deadline, has experienced the dark side of the first-round bye. A 101-win season and the best record in the American League ended in a nightmare for the Orioles in 2023 when they were swept by the eventual World Series champion Texas Rangers in the American League Division Series.

It marked the first time the Orioles had been swept all season.

The workouts the Phillies went through on Monday — involving batting practice, defense, and sprints — had some similarities to what the Orioles did last season, Hays said. But there is one key difference to their plans this week: the intrasquad game the Phillies set up for Wednesday.

In Baltimore, they took live at-bats during the bye, and faced real pitching. But they lacked the urgency of a real game.

“Guys that weren’t hitting would just kind of filter into a position and try to make plays on balls,” Hays said. “But we’re going to actually play a game. So that is a little bit different, how we’re going about that.”

President of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski said the team even considered allowing fans into the park for the game like Atlanta did in 2023, but ultimately decided against it. The Phillies are finding other ways to simulate a real game environment by hiring umpires and playing walk-up songs.

They’re trying to make the stakes real, too. Bryce Harper and Trea Turner are co-captains of one team. Kyle Schwarber and J.T. Realmuto will co-captain the other. They held a draft on Monday — Hays said he’s on Harper’s team — although they haven’t announced what the wager will be.

“We got some competitive stuff going on in the clubhouse between a couple teams, so I think that’s going to be really good, just for the fire side of it,” Hays said. “And it’s not just going through the motions out there. We’ll actually be playing for something.”

One other difference he sees compared to Baltimore is the Phillies’ wealth of postseason experience. The Orioles hadn’t made the playoffs since 2016, so the entire notion of playing in October — bye or not — was foreign to most of that clubhouse.

» READ MORE: How Kyle Schwarber went from failed leadoff experiment to a unique, record-setting No. 1 hitter

“It’s a confidence thing,” Hays said. “When you’ve gone through it before, and you’ve done it before, and you know exactly what to expect and what’s coming, you’re going to be a little bit more confident.”

For Hays, the time off has a personal benefit, as an opportunity to reset after a stop-and-start second half of the season marred with injuries. First, he dealt with a hamstring strain, and then he was sidelined again with a kidney infection.

He returned to the lineup on Sept. 24 after a brief rehab stint, but was held out from the Phillies’ final regular season game as a precaution with a sore back.

Hays said Tuesday that his back feels good.

“I just had some fatigue, my body just feeling a little tired, like I was pushing it hard,” Hays said. “But we knew that was going to be there. We put that into our plan, that we’re going to have to work really hard, because we have a very short window to try to get back to being in game shape.”

Dombrowski said the Phillies feel “extremely optimistic” that Hays will be ready to go for the NLDS. He also believes Hays’ right-handed bat — and his .354 average against lefties this year — could be a crucial piece for the Phillies this postseason.

“We really believe that he can hit left-handed pitching. So dependent upon who we play and who we face, that could be an extremely important part of our ball club,” Dombrowski said. “I think he has a chance to really be valuable for us at this time of the year.”

Spencer Turnbull is set to pitch two to three innings in the Phillies’ intrasquad game on Wednesday.

Turnbull has not pitched in a major league game since June 26 due to a right shoulder strain. He made a two-inning rehab appearance in the IronPigs’ season finale on Sept. 22, and threw 52 pitches at the Phillies’ triple-A facilities in Allentown on Friday.