Five Phillies questions for opening day (and pitching depth is one of them)

As the days clicked by this month in Clearwater, Fla., and the hits mostly stayed away, Trea Turner encouraged his Phillies teammates by repeating a hopeful reminder.

“We’re a third-deck team,” he said.

It’s the type of thing that veteran players tell themselves in the dog days of spring training, when the meaninglessness of the results begins to dull the dedication to the process. The Phillies didn’t knock the cover off the ball in the Grapefruit League. Nobody cared. Rinse, repeat, stay healthy.

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The Phillies are rerunning a 90-win team that got to Game 7 of the NL Championship Series. They will go further this season mostly by making marginal improvements. So, J.T. Realmuto focused on closing a hole in his swing; Kyle Schwarber tried hitting more balls to center field and left; Zack Wheeler developed a splitter.

Spring training was the time for all that. It was tedious, but necessary.

Now, though, it’s about to get real. The Phillies will begin their 142nd season at about 3:05 p.m. Friday after rain postponed Thursday’s opener, in Citizens Bank Park against the archrival Atlanta Braves. The third deck will be full. The results will count.

Here, then, is a handful of questions to mark the new season:

Walker didn’t care for the results last Wednesday night (three homers in 2⅔ innings against the Orioles), but he felt healthy. In spring training, health supersedes everything. So, he was in good spirits, joking about the size of the popcorn at a recent showing of Dune: Part Two.

Three days later, everything changed.

After feeling stiffness in his right shoulder before a bullpen session on Saturday, Walker was diagnosed with an impingement, a pinching pain in his joint. It isn’t considered serious, but it will prevent the No. 4 starter from starting the season on time.

For the second consecutive season, the Phillies will open with a starter on the injured list. Last year, Ranger Suárez missed the first six weeks with a strained forearm. Walker could be looking at a similar timeline.

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Once he begins playing catch, likely on Wednesday, he will have to go through a repeat of the usual spring-training buildup, from two bullpen sessions to live batting practice and game action, according to manager Rob Thomson. The Phillies will want him to pitch roughly 20 innings before rejoining the rotation.

By then, it’ll likely be May.

Maybe Walker’s shoulder issue explains why his fastball appeared so flat in spring training. He also dealt with knee soreness early in camp, but by all accounts, it hasn’t resurfaced.

“He just didn’t throw a lot coming into camp,” president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski told reporters this week. “He was in good physical shape, but he didn’t throw a lot. All of a sudden, he’s just really not ready.”

Three days before they opened camp, the Phillies made their biggest move for pitching depth by signing 31-year-old right-hander Spencer Turnbull for $2 million.

Guess who will start the sixth game of the season.

Turnbull missed most of the last three seasons due to an assortment of injuries, including Tommy John elbow surgery in 2021. The Tigers didn’t tender him a contract after last season, enabling him to become a free agent. He described his first spring training with the Phillies as “wonderful.”

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“I can’t say enough good things about it,” said Turnbull, who worked with pitching coach Caleb Cotham on adding a sweeper, a slider variant that has become trendy in baseball. “Completely different vibes in a lot of different ways. I’ve loved it so far, and hopefully, it’s just going to continue to get better. I’ve enjoyed every second of it.”

Turnbull had a 2.88 ERA in nine starts, including a no-hitter, for the Tigers in 2021 before injuring his elbow. The Phillies believe in his upside. When Turnbull was drafted in the second round in 2014, Dombrowski ran Detroit’s baseball operations and special assignment scout David Chadd oversaw amateur scouting.

But they didn’t expect to have to rely on Turnbull so quickly.

Another injury to a starter would stretch the Phillies’ depth even further. The top choices in triple A: lefty Kolby Allard, Max Castillo, and Tyler Phillips, a South Jersey native who left a positive impression in spring training. Prized prospect Mick Abel could be an option by midseason.

At least a few months’ worth.

Rojas is the Phillies’ best defensive center fielder since Garry Maddox. And although he can’t be a total zero at the plate, the Phillies do get above-average offense from nearly every other position, including catcher.

If Rojas is able to bat, say, .230 with a .296 on-base percentage and a .661 OPS — the major league average for No. 9 hitters last season — his defense would make him an asset.

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And now that they have named him the opening-day center fielder, the Phillies are intent on giving Rojas ample opportunity to prove he isn’t overwhelmed by major-league pitching.

“I don’t know what the week number is, or the month number is, but if you’re going to make a commitment to him, I think it’s got to be for a while,” Thomson said before spring training. “You’ve got to just shut your eyes and let him play.”

When the Phillies began their march to the World Series in 2008, Jayson Werth split time in right field with veteran Geoff Jenkins. A year later, he hit 36 homers as an everyday player.

Could Brandon Marsh’s career follow a similar trajectory?

Marsh is a .272/.347/.438 hitter in 897 career plate appearances against right-handed pitchers. In 296 plate appearances against lefties, he’s a .223/.278/.312 hitter. Over the last few years, then, he has played primarily against righties.

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But Marsh is 26 and healthy after having arthroscopic left knee surgery on Feb. 9. He’s set to move to left field, with Rojas taking over in center. And as one team official noted this spring, it could be the year that Marsh muscles his way into an everyday role.

“It is a big year for me personally,” he said. “Just because I feel like I’ve got another year of experience. I’m still really young. For sure, it’s always motivation to try to do better against those lefties to try to get some more games throughout the season.”

It was a talking point in the clubhouse all spring.

The Phillies started 25-32 last season after going 22-29 to open 2022. And although they proved it matters less how a team starts than how it finishes, the road to October is far easier when it runs downhill.

”I’d rather be hot at the end than the beginning, but we’re putting ourselves into such a big hole that we can’t come back in the division,” Realmuto said. “We need to just play better in the first couple months. But I still feel that this is a second-half team and this team is built for the postseason. We just need to do a better job of not digging ourselves a hole.”

It begins Friday.

The third deck will be full.