How Phillies hitters’ meetings give their red-hot offense the tools to dominate postseason pitching

Trea Turner: “It’s less information in a good way. We’ve got a lineup of guys that just want to hit.”

Kyle Schwarber celebrates his solo home run in the sixth inning of Game 2 with Trea Turner.Read moreYong Kim / Yong Kim / Staff Photographer

Published Oct. 18, 2023, 5:45 p.m. ET

PHOENIX — A few hours before Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, 13 Phillies hitters met to go over a scouting report on the Diamondbacks pitching, standard operating procedure for most teams when they face a new opponent.

But rather than poring over reams of data and stuffing information in the players’ heads, hitting coach Kevin Long kept it simple.

“Listen,” Long said, recalling his message, “Zac Gallen’s making his 37th start. He’s logged [221] innings. This guy, his arm’s taxed. He’s in a spot that he may be a little bit vulnerable.”

Translation: Be aggressive. It made sense. It also got the Phillies thinking — and talking. Long encourages the hitters’ input in these meetings, and some who faced Gallen most often noted that he likes to establish his fastball early in a game. The Arizona ace also tends to be around the strike zone. A game plan was taking shape.

Sure enough, when the Phillies came to bat in the first inning, Kyle Schwarber swung at Gallen’s first pitch and scorched a 117 mph missile to right field. 1-0. Two batters later, Bryce Harper unloaded on the fifth pitch of the game and hit it 420 feet to the left of the bullpens. 2-0. In the second inning, Nick Castellanos went deep. 3-0. All three pitches were fastballs. None measured up to Gallen’s 94 mph regular-season average.

The scouting report was pitch perfect (pun intended), but so was the manner in which it was communicated to players who, as Long puts it, “love to talk hitting.”

And to hear the players describe it, those hitters’ meetings — and the upbeat batting-cage sessions that often follow — explain how the offense is functioning at peak capacity in another postseason run that has the Phillies two wins away from returning to the World Series.

“I think here is a little different,” Trea Turner said. “It’s a little old-school. It’s less information in a good way. We have all the information. But we’ve got a lineup of guys that just want to hit. Sometimes you can get caught up a lot in the video or the numbers. Throughout the season, we’ve kind of learned what we like and what we don’t like. We’re doing the same thing we’ve kind of done all year.

“We definitely have our meetings. We talk. If there’s something that we want to game plan or a specific thing that we think makes a big difference, we’ll do that. But we’re keeping it pretty simple.”

Take it from Long: It isn’t like this everywhere.

Long, 56, has coached hitting for the Yankees, Mets, and Nationals, helping each mash its way to the World Series. He has worked with stars in their prime and impressionable rookies. At every stop, he sought to turn the batting cage into a hangout where players can develop a positive vibe.

Some embraced it; others did their own thing. In Washington, for instance, Long said the players rejected team-wide hitters meetings. Instead, he checked in with them individually and relayed whatever data they wanted. It proved to be successful.

But Long prefers that hitters work collaboratively, and with the Phillies, he’s gotten a full-scale buy-in.

The Phillies hold longer meetings before a series and shorter ones before each game. Long usually speaks first, then opens the floor for players to chime in. From there, they trickle into the indoor cage. There’s music, trash talk, highlight videos of a different player each day, and good, old-fashioned chatter about hitting.

To wit: None of the Phillies had faced Diamondbacks Game 2 starter Merrill Kelly more than Turner, so he shared his impressions from those matchups with teammates who were less familiar.

“I’ve tried to create a positive, energetic place where they can go and we can have fun, shoot the [bull] a little bit, almost like a bar atmosphere,” Long said. “It’s a safe place for them. There’s guys that’ll just come down there not even to hit, just to hang out. That’s what I want that vibe to be.”

Surely it has contributed to the Phillies scoring 46 runs and hitting 19 homers in eight playoff games. Fifteen of those homers have come since Game 3 of the division series, the most by any team in a four-game span in the postseason.

“K-Long does a good job of breaking down the opposing pitchers and kind of gives us what they’re doing lately and what their recent outings have been like, and guys will kind of talk just around that,” Schwarber said. “And the input, it’s really important. It might not even be in the hitters’ meeting. It can be when you are coming off an at-bat and someone is asking you, what did that cutter look like, or what did the slider look like?”

Whatever the case, there’s no doubt what a fully functioning offense looks like. It’s Castellanos joining Reggie Jackson as the only players ever with five homers in a three-game span of the postseason. It’s Schwarber bashing three homers in the last two games. It’s Turner going 15-for-30 with three homers. It’s Harper reemerging as Mr. October.

Pitching is supposed to rule the playoffs, but the Phillies have scored at least four runs in all but two games despite facing a gantlet of top starters, including Miami’s Jesús Luzardo, Atlanta’s Spencer Strider (twice) and Max Fried, and now, Gallen and Kelly.

“Everybody’s feeling pretty good, especially the big guys,” Long said. “They’ve been hot for a while. They’ve kind of taken on that extra pressure, so to speak, and said, ‘OK, you guys are going to ride us. We rode the young guys for half the season. Now it’s our turn.’ And they’ve basically done that, and they’ve been, really to a man, incredible.”

It’s helps when the hitters are invested in not only receiving the game plan but also putting it together.