Does Phillies’ Nick Castellanos have another 162-game season in him? It’s not a goal this time around.
The right fielder played every game in 2024. This season, Rob Thomson is focused on keeping his stars from becoming fatigued in the postseason.
CLEARWATER, Fla. — After batting practice on opening day last year, Phillies manager Rob Thomson had a message for his veteran right fielder.
Thomson told Nick Castellanos: “One hundred sixty-two.”
Castellanos pointed back at his manager and nodded. That short statement would become the theme of Castellanos’ 2024 season, in which he played in all 162 regular-season games for the first time in his career.
Thomson later said that Castellanos wasn’t the only player he gave that message to. But he was the only one to latch onto it, and Thomson kept him in the lineup even through his slow start as he hit .183 with a .501 OPS in April. Castellanos, who will turn 33 next month, was one of only four MLB players to hit the 162 mark last year, joining Matt Olson, Marcell Ozuna, and Pete Alonso.
» READ MORE: Kyle Schwarber, Bryce Harper OK with changes to batting order: ‘Wherever my name gets written, I’ll play’
Will he try to repeat the feat?
“I don’t want to say that it is a goal for me to start 162 games,” Castellanos said Sunday in the BayCare Ballpark clubhouse. “It is, however, a goal of mine to be consistent in my work and always put myself in a position to be healthy and help the team.”
After the Phillies’ early playoff exit last season, Thomson wondered if fatigue played a role in their collapse against the Mets, and suggested that giving players more days off earlier in the season might have helped extend their run. Thomson said that health will be the theme of his address to the team on Monday before the first full-squad workout of the spring.
Given this focus, would Thomson even allow Castellanos the opportunity to play 162 games in 2025, now that he has reached the milestone once?
“I think so,” Thomson said. “I think most guys want to play 162 every year. It’s just a matter of their body, and are they healthy? Do they need a mental break? Those things come into play, too, and Nick’s going about it pretty well, almost a year, and he was healthy. So we’ll see.”
For his part, Castellanos didn’t feel any different this winter following his iron-man season.
“I felt pretty good after the end of the year. I rolled right into my workouts pretty early,” he said.
But with that 162-game feather already in his cap, Castellanos isn’t dreading the moment when he finally has to take a day off. His bigger focus is on parlaying the success he had at the end of last season — he hit .412 in the playoffs — to a stronger start this year.
“It’ll become a thing, sure. I mean, it could get more challenging, I guess, to take a day,” Castellanos said. “I really doubt I’m competing with Cal Ripken for the most all-time, so I’m not going to be too stressed out about it, whenever that day is.”
Aoyagi throws
Koyo Aoyagi threw his first bullpen session of spring training Sunday, showing off his sidearm delivery in front of a crowd including Thomson and Dave Dombrowski. The Japanese right-hander set foot on American soil for the first time when he arrived in Florida on Thursday.
After he spent nine seasons in Nippon Professional Baseball, there are some things that Aoyagi, 31, has to adjust to stateside, including MLB balls. NPB uses a smaller ball that is “pre-tacked,” giving it a better grip. He had some issues commanding the new baseball on Sunday.
“He said it was kind of slipping out of his hand a little bit,” Thomson said. “So it’ll take some time, but he’ll get there. ... He said that the first day was a little bit overwhelming, because he’s meeting all these new people, and I get it, but he said he feels pretty comfortable now.”