How Nick Castellanos’ time in Cincinnati — and a meeting with a Reds icon — helped set him up for Year 2 with the Phillies

Castellanos went from miserable in 2020 with the Reds to comfortable in 2021. There’s a path for him to reach that point again now with the Phillies.

Nick Castellanos is settling in with the Phillies in Year 2, and that's progress for him on and off the field.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

by Scott Lauber

Published April 14, 2023, 2:05 p.m. ET

CINCINNATI — To better understand the unease that gripped Nick Castellanos through his first season with the Phillies, consider the example he often uses to put the entire experience into context.

“I compare last year,” he said, “a lot to my first year in Cincinnati.”

Castellanos’ first year in Cincinnati was 2020, when MLB’s pandemic protocols prohibited players from straying far from a hotel or the fan-free ballparks where they submitted to rigorous and frequent COVID-19 testing. Nobody felt comfortable in that dystopia. Yet Castellanos found it equally disorienting to get thrown into the fishbowl of a sports-obsessed, championship-starved region two weeks before the start of a season with an eight-months’ pregnant wife and the expectations of a $100 million contract. Not ready, not set, go, go, go.

It’s better now. It has to be. Even after the Phillies kept the flame lit until the sixth game of the World Series on Nov. 5, Castellanos had a three-month offseason to finally stop his world from spinning off its axis and root his feet in the ground. He’s closer to feeling what one longtime coach describes as “that inner calmness and peace.”

But if Castellanos has, in fact, reached the other side, he can credit his time in Cincinnati for providing the road map. Because the second half of his two-year tenure with the Reds represented nothing short of the best season of his career.

Castellanos became part of the community here in 2021. His family loved it. Fans reciprocated. He went from slashing .225/.298/.486 in 242 plate appearances — league average in 2020, according to OPS adjusted for league and park — to .309/.362/.576, 38% better than average based on adjusted OPS, with career highs in home runs (34) and slugging percentage (.576).

“I was able to get a little more grasp on where I’m at, who I’m playing for, the city I’m at, just my whole bearings on everything that I’ve got going on,” said Castellanos, seated at his locker before a game this week in Cincinnati. “I started feeling like everything was really settling in for me. So, the last thing I really felt was free and happy and relaxed and being able to be that kid that goes and plays baseball.”

There are signs that Castellanos may be emerging similarly from last year’s misery. Through Thursday, he hadn’t hit a home run, the longest into a season that he’s gone without going deep since 2019 with Detroit (20 games/90 plate appearances). But he was leading the majors with eight doubles. He also was batting .292/.382/.458 and anchoring the middle of a Phillies batting order that is being recalibrated without Bryce Harper and Rhys Hoskins.

It wasn’t perfect. It probably never will be. But it was progress. And after last season, just like after 2020, that’s what he was seeking.

“What we do, you’re at your best when you’re comfortable and you’re close to your teammates,” Reds manager David Bell said. “Unfortunately, we can’t rush that sometimes. And Nick, he’s such a real person, he’s not going to be able to fake it. It’s good to see that he’s more settled in now. Even toward probably the second half of last season, you could see he was getting there.”

For that, Castellanos gives credit to a former Reds star.

‘Eric the Red’ to the rescue

Castellanos met Eric Davis in 2020. It was spring training, a few weeks before the pandemic changed everything.

The Reds had just signed Castellanos to a four-year, $64 million deal that included opt-outs after each of the first two seasons. Big contracts come with responsibility, and Davis knows the terrain. He was a two-time All-Star in Cincinnati. He stole 80 bases in 1986 and 50 in ‘87, hit 37 homers in 1987 and 34 in ‘89, won a World Series in 1990, and got traded a year later.

Davis and Castellanos hit it off right away.

“Us as high-paid athletes, where all of our net worths and everything are out in the media, the last thing anybody wants to hear is us kind of complaining about anything, you know?” Castellanos said. “But he’s somebody that’s done it. He’s had a major league career, had the ups, had the downs, had to change a lot of organizations, had to deal with his fair share of stuff.

“I can’t really explain it, man. He just understands the weight that athletes can bear on themselves behind the scenes, especially those who give a [crap]. Because not everybody gives a [crap]. He’s just one of those guys that, when he speaks, I hear him.”

Castellanos was attentive as ever, then, after a chance encounter with Davis over breakfast during the Phillies’ visit to Cincinnati last August. Castellanos was leaving a restaurant with his family; Davis was sitting down. They talked for almost an hour and a half.

“My conversation with him was simple,” Davis said by phone. “It was like, ‘You know who you are? Why are you being somebody else?’ We had a real conversation. And that’s how me and Nick are. It was like, ‘Dude, did you forget you’re that dude?’”

Said Castellanos: “He just said some things that, he put things in perspective. It gave me a little bit of comfort on where I was at.”

It made a difference. Castellanos went a month without a homer and was getting booed at Citizens Bank Park. But beginning the weekend before the Phillies came to Cincinnati and continuing through the weekend after they left, he went 23-for-64 with five doubles and two homers. It was his best two-week stretch.

“When you sign a multiyear deal, the first year’s always tough,” Davis said. “Because you’re trying to prove to everybody that, ‘Hey, I deserved this.’ When he signed the deal with us, COVID and all the things that transpired, he didn’t really get a chance to prove it, but that was his mindset. The second year, he had been around, saw what it was, and was able to breathe and find himself and have an MVP-caliber year.

“He’s a perfectionist, and sometimes you can get in your own way. When he started to realize that, just having that conversation, I saw a calmness started to resonate in his body structure, in his movements. And that’s when I knew he was going to be OK.”

It helped, too, that the Phillies made the playoffs.

When they clinched the postseason berth that had eluded them for a decade, Castellanos observed much of the clubhouse revelry from a quiet spot on the periphery of the room. But once the playoffs started, the focus wasn’t on any individual player. Nobody seemed to care that Castellanos had fewer homers (13) than any season since he was a rookie in 2014 or ranked 103rd in slugging (.389) among 130 players who qualified for the batting title.

And he had more fun in October than at any time in his career.

“When they did so well in the playoffs and really the whole team kind of had one heartbeat, I think that gave him some peace right there,” said Matt Martin, Castellanos’ longtime hitting and mental skills coach. “Because this guy wants to win, man. And he’s always wanted to win.”

Back to ‘Nick being Nick’

For most baseball players, success is rooted in routine. Castellanos finds it easier to establish a routine in spring training. Because the season is relentless, with 162 games packed into 186 days. Once the merry-go-round starts, you hold on for dear life. Martin likens it to a loose thread on a shirt. Pull too hard, you only make it worse.

“That’s what makes baseball so challenging is that it’s every day,” Castellanos said. “It’s not like the NFL, where you’ve got one game a week. It’s in motion and you just do the best you can. Last year, kind of like ‘20, it’s just kind of survive the best you can.”

So, before Castellanos could reap the rewards of an offseason in the weight room or sessions with Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long, he had to solidify his foundation. He needed to reestablish his routine, his sense of control over everything around him.

In January, Martin visited Castellanos in Florida. They have known each other since Castellanos’ rookie year with the Tigers. Few people in baseball know what makes Castellanos tick more than Martin, who found him to be more at ease with everything.

Castellanos would wake up at 6 a.m., according to Martin, and work out before taking his 9-year-old son, Liam, to school. He helped his wife, Jessica, care for their infant son, 11-month-old Otto. He had a routine again.

“He had to get back in the arena of Nick being Nick first before he could start making other improvements,” said Martin, hired last year by the Phillies as a special assistant to farm director Preston Mattingly. “If the starting point is off, we’re searching, trying to get back to that, and it doesn’t happen. There’s a calmness to having that starting point. He didn’t have it in the COVID year. He definitely didn’t have it last year. When the starting point is right, it just kind of flows, everything lines up the way it needs to be.”

Last Saturday, Castellanos started a winning rally in the ninth inning by working a seven-pitch leadoff walk and stepping three-quarters of the way up the third-base line to distract Reds reliever Alexis Diaz. Two nights later, he got ejected by plate umpire John Libka for drawing a line with his bat to protest a called third strike, even though the Phillies had a 10-run lead in the seventh inning. He plays ping-pong in the clubhouse with Liam before and after home games. He even jokes around with reporters.

At the plate, Castellanos is still a work in progress. He’s walking more (12.7%, nearly double his career walk rate of 6.7%) and chasing fewer pitches out of the strike zone (33.3%, down from 43.6% last year and 37.8% for his career). But there’s a balance between being more selective and remaining aggressive. The Phillies want him to achieve the former without sacrificing the latter.

They’re also paying Castellanos to slug, especially now with Harper and Hoskins missing from the lineup. He has always been more of a line-drive doubles hitter than a Kyle Schwarber-style slugger. If the process is sound, Castellanos and Long believe the homers will start to come more frequently.

From a distance, Davis sees a hitter who is still caught in between.

“As a hitter, you struggle because you miss and you chase,” Davis said. “He’s alleviating the chases, but he’s missing pitches. And the question is, ‘Why am I missing?’ It’s very simple: He’s waiting to see instead of trusting that it’s going to be.”

Castellanos concedes that it’s been “an adjustment.”

“It’s like learning a new language a little bit,” he said. “In the past, I had a lot of success hitting closer to the top of the order and having protection behind me. Hitting in the middle of the lineup here, pitchers and opposing teams are going to take advantage of that sometimes blind aggressiveness. It’s just me learning to adjust to where I’m at and kind of be where the team needs me to be.”

Castellanos eventually got to that place with the Reds. He went from utterly miserable in 2020 to blissfully comfortable in 2021. There’s a path for him to reach that point again now.

“Unfortunately, I’m a perfectionist, so to say that I’m completely secure and really happy with everything where I’m at, I’m not,” Castellanos said. “But I’m much better than I was. I have a much better grip on everything than I did last year. But I also know that the harder I squeeze and the more I want to get good right now, the better chance I have to slip off.

“The one thing I’m really happy with is I’m just enjoying my time, enjoying the way I’m going about my days, my relationship with my guys, just settling in, being here in Philadelphia.”

And that’s progress.