The Phillies’ ‘longer-term bet’ on Cristopher Sanchez looked like a misstep. Then he found his pitch.

Cristopher Sánchez was new to the Phillies in February 2020, when he got assigned No. 61. It wasn’t his choice. In baseball, the offensive lineman digits usually go to minor leaguers with little chance of making the team.

But when Sánchez starts Game 2 of the division series Sunday, guess what number he’ll be wearing.

“I debuted with that number,” he said through a team interpreter earlier this season, “and I want it to remain my number the rest of my career.”

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It’s apropos that Sánchez wants to honor his baseball roots. Because the 27-year-old lefty’s origin story, which took him from a teenager in the Rays’ organization to a project in the Phillies’ farm system and finally to a top-three starter in a playoff rotation, is a doozy.

For the Rays, it typifies the difficult decisions that must be made when an organization churns out pitching talent with factorylike efficiency. For the Phillies, it represents a triumph of multiple departments over two front-office regimes, from scouting to analytics and player-development.

And for Sánchez, it’s a testament to hard work and trust in the Phillies’ plan.

“I’m glad for Cristopher,” Rays senior adviser and former farm director Mitch Lukevics said by phone this week. “He was tall, skinny, lanky. Like a lot of kids, there’s the good, the bad, the up, the down, they don’t throw strikes, they throw strikes. But the body type isn’t nearly developed the way it needs to until later in their career, and the Phillies are reaping the benefit of it.”

But even the most hopeful Phillies officials would be exaggerating if they said they saw Sánchez doing, well, this.

The Phillies hadn’t given up on Sánchez when they called him up for a spot start midway through last season. But he was slow to put on weight and make the changes to his mechanics that the team’s pitching brain trust prescribed. They were desperate for a No. 5 starter. He was the next man up. It was a move made out of necessity.

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So, there weren’t many expectations on June 17, 2023, in Oakland. The A’s got only one hit off Sánchez in four innings, but it literally went off him — as in, his left hand. The Phillies removed Sánchez as a precaution.

But he made his next start. And the one after that. And the one after that. He started only once in the 2023 postseason, but the Phillies saw enough that they reserved a spot for him in this year’s rotation rather than chasing a free agent such as Blake Snell or Jordan Montgomery.

And since June 17 of last season, Sánchez has a 3.32 ERA, eighth-best in baseball. He had the identical mark this season in a career-high 181⅔ innings. As the workload mounted, he got better. In his last eight starts, he posted a 2.50 ERA and held opponents to a .219 average. His 2.21 ERA at home made him the choice to start Game 2 against the Mets — over Aaron Nola.

Yet it barely warranted a headline when the Phillies traded for Sánchez.

Long before it worked out in their favor, the Phillies were pleased with the process that led to the trade.

It was well-known within the industry that the Rays were overcrowded with pitching talent and would be faced with tough choices about which players to add to their 40-man roster. The Phillies, like other teams, anticipated the Rays’ dilemma and dispatched scouts to watch their minor leaguers.

And in observing Sánchez, they achieved unanimity in the reports filed by the boots-on-the-ground scouts and the quants in analytics.

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“Our scouts were pushing us on Sánchez — lefty, with a projectable body, stuff, all the scouty things that scouts like,” former Phillies general manager Matt Klentak said. “Our analytics group was pushing him because of some characteristics they’d identified as attractive. So, that lined up. Both ends of our player acquisition process were supporting it.”

The Rays coveted Sánchez for many of the same reasons. They signed him for $65,000 and kept him in the Dominican Summer League for three seasons before bringing him to the States for rookie ball at age 20. He threw hard, but without much command, so they sent him to Australia in the 2018-19 offseason to get him additional innings.

But there were questions, too. Some evaluators wondered if his stuff was suited for a bullpen role. He also pitched only 270⅓ innings in the minors, all but 1⅓ coming below the double-A level.

And based on minor-league service time, Sánchez needed to be put on the Rays’ 40-man roster or else be exposed to the Rule 5 draft. It’s a considerable commitment, especially for a contending team. The Rays were at the beginning of a run of five consecutive playoff appearances.

“You can project somewhat, and with the body type, he had size and the potential for strength,” Lukevics said. “He had that frame where you could dream. He had an arm action that was repeatable. But the development was slower, the innings weren’t exactly the way you wanted to map it out.”

The Phillies took what Klentak described as a “longer-term bet” on Sánchez, even though they hoped to contend in 2020, too. They swapped infielder Curtis Mead, whom they signed out of Australia in 2018 and had more time before needing to go on the Rays’ 40-man roster.

“You see what the body type is like, you see what the athlete looks like, you see what the smoothness of his actions are,” Klentak said. “Those are the traits that stand out when you watch him, whether it’s four years ago or today. Yeah, strike-throwing needed to come around. There’s certain areas he’s improved, but I think those are the players you want to bet on, the guys that have the chance to fill out and improve, and that’s where we tip our caps to the scouts who were on that one.

“I remember [then-team president] Andy [MacPhail] talking about how this was a proud moment for the franchise. It all lined up as far as acquisition sense and the investments we’re making internationally to bring in a major-league player.”

And for a while, it looked like a misstep.

Mead hit 15 homers with a .911 OPS in 2021 and began to ascend the Rays’ prospect rankings. He followed with 13 homers and a .922 OPS in 2022.

Sánchez seemed to stagnate. It didn’t help that minor leaguers lost a season of development in 2020 because of the pandemic. But in 2021, he posted a 4.68 ERA in 73 innings in triple A. In 2022, he bounced between triple A and the majors, never appearing to be more than organizational depth.

Then, he discovered a dominant changeup.

Making a change

In considering how far Sánchez has come, manager Rob Thomson likes to recall watching him throw bullpen sessions in spring training in 2020.

“The first time I saw him throw — 98, 99 [mph] all over the place,” said Thomson, then the Phillies’ bench coach. “Struggled to throw strikes.”

After the 2022 season, the Phillies challenged the 6-foot-1 Sánchez to gain weight, with a goal of topping 200 pounds. It took longer than they wanted, but he finally broke through that barrier.

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The Phillies also persuaded Sánchez to dial back velocity in an attempt to harness his command. They wanted him to use his legs more through his delivery, which caused him to throw from a slightly lower arm slot. He worked on it for the first few months in triple A last season with pitching coach César Ramos, now the bullpen coach.

If someone watched Sánchez in 2021 and not again until last season, would he have thought he was a different pitcher?

“Oof, 100 percent,” Sánchez said.

But the biggest difference was a changeup that developed more run and vertical drop, according to Phillies pitching coach Caleb Cotham, when Sánchez started throwing from the lower slot.

“It’s kind of his superpower,” Cotham said. “He can pull it and the ball still comes back to the strike zone. The velo on it relative to how he’s throwing his fastball, it’s a tough one to solve. It’s really tough to sit on that pitch. And it’s really tough if you’re not sitting on it to wait on it.”

How tough? Opponents hit .177 and slugged .200 against the changeup this season.

Sánchez added back some fastball velocity this season but lost neither his command nor effectiveness of the changeup. He threw his changeup 35.7% of the time at an average velocity of 85.1 mph, a nearly 10-mph spread from his fastball (94.5).

Midway through this season, as Sánchez doubled down on his success from 2023, the Phillies rewarded him with a four-year, $22.5 million contract extension, cherry on top of their best trade in years.

“Sometimes in these young, skinny, understrength kids, the journey’s just a little bit longer,” Lukevics said. “And every once in a while, you get a Cristopher Sánchez.”