The Phillies’ $240 million question: Can you slug your way to a World Series?

With the additions of Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos, the Phillies expect the gains made offensively to hit over their defensive mistakes.

by Scott Lauber

Published April 7, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

CLEARWATER, Fla. — The phone calls and text messages trickled in early in the offseason. They stopped for a while after Major League Baseball locked out the players and froze rosters, but picked up again, in frequency and intensity, last month once the collective bargaining agreement was finalized and the doors to spring training swung open.

“Come on, SB,” Bryce Harper would say two, three, sometimes four times a day. “You know this guy’s personality is perfect for Philadelphia. You know it is. Come on! We’ve got to get this done.”

Scott Boras indulged his star client’s lobbying. He agreed that free-agent outfielder Nick Castellanos seemed like a fit for the Phillies. He even had the analytics to prove it and planned to share them with president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski. But as the agent told Harper, the time had to be right. The market still needed to ripen.

Boras knew this, too: Phillies owner John Middleton, a collegiate wrestler once upon a time, is hyper-competitive. It gnaws at him that the team hasn’t made the playoffs since 2011, the longest active absence in the National League. And few executives are better at doing their owner’s bidding — or more aggressive in hunting for stars — than Dombrowski.

The Phillies’ focus wasn’t necessarily on Castellanos, especially once they made a four-year, $79 million agreement with their top target, power-hitting free agent Kyle Schwarber, on March 16. But it’s impossible to fix the majors’ worst defense in one offseason, an interrupted one at that. And it takes years to build adequate pitching depth.

Who has that kind of time? Certainly not an organization that lives under the cloud of a decade-long postseason drought. It’s far more expeditious to keep adding offense. And the Phillies do play half their games in a homer-friendly bandbox. Boras knew that, too.

“When they got Schwarber done, I immediately knew that it was a two-step move,” Boras said by phone last week. “If you were really serious about doing something that would put you in a category of one of the top three offenses in the game, it was there. It was staring at them.”

Dombrowski couldn’t look away. So, on March 17, the morning after the Phillies landed Schwarber, he poked his head into Middleton’s office and asked, “Do you have a minute?”

With general manager Sam Fuld and assistant GM Ned Rice at his side, Dombrowski pitched Middleton on surpassing the luxury-tax threshold for the first time in franchise history to sign Castellanos. Middleton agreed and got his partners, Jim and Pete Buck, to go along. The Phillies and Boras hammered out a five-year, $100 million deal, and Boras could finally deliver what Harper so badly wanted.

“It’s incredible,” Harper said after Castellanos broke the news by posting a picture of his sneaker on the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum to Instagram. “I would never have thought that would have happened.”

In doubling down on offense, the Phillies morphed into Sluggers, Inc. They added Schwarber and Castellanos to Harper, Rhys Hoskins, and J.T. Realmuto, and supercharged a lineup that may challenge the single-season club record of 224 homers set by Ryan Howard, Jayson Werth, Raúl Ibañez, Chase Utley, and the rest of the 2009 Phillies. It’s a lineup that could get Charlie Manuel to wax on about “hittin’ season” again and inspire all sorts of creative nicknames.

The Broad Street Bashers.

Macho Row 2.0.

The Swatters of the Schuylkill.

They’ve played together for a few weeks now in spring training. But the potential of what they could accomplish together really crystalized a few days ago, when the five sluggers — who will combine to make $78 million this year — donned red pinstripes and gathered for an early-morning photo shoot in front of the batting cage.

“What an awesome experience we’re about to have this year with the lineup we’re about to have,” Harper said. “It’s a special thing to be able to have guys at the top of our lineup and in the middle of our lineup. Pretty well-rounded. Just the length of our lineup is pretty impressive.”

The baseball world is about to find out if it’s a winning strategy.

Outhitting the errors

There were other paths the Phillies could have taken after signing Schwarber.

For one thing, they discussed trading for three-time Gold Glove third baseman Matt Chapman, according to a source, but were unable to match up on a deal with the everything-must-go Oakland Athletics. Trade talks with the Tampa Bay Rays for oft-injured center fielder Kevin Kiermaier, who also owns three Gold Gloves, didn’t materialize either.

And so, as Dombrowski sat in his corner office overlooking left field at BayCare Ballpark in Clearwater, Fla., last week, he made a concession.

“I know we’re not going to be the best defensive club,” he said. “But I think if we catch the ball and make the plays we can, we can be adequate. That’s all you ask for a club like ours. I think we can do that.”

The Phillies took that approach last year, too. They had a below-average defender at every position except catcher (Realmuto) and second base (Jean Segura) and unsurprisingly ranked last in the majors with a minus-54 rating in defensive runs saved, according to Sports Info Solutions.

There are few reasons to believe the defense will be appreciably better this season. The Phillies re-hired well-regarded infield coach Bobby Dickerson, but didn’t change the personnel. There are limits to Dickerson’s magic, especially with veterans such as shortstop Didi Gregorius. In the outfield, Schwarber and Castellanos grade out as below-average in defensive runs saved.

Yes, the designated hitter is coming to the NL. But teams are allowed only one.

“It’s not the worst defensive team I’ve seen,” one NL scout said before a recent spring training game, “but it ain’t going to be good.”

Here, though, is where Dombrowski believes there will be a difference: The offense last season ranked sixth in the NL in homers (198) and seventh in runs (734) and on-base plus slugging (.726). With Schwarber and Castellanos, the Phillies expect to make significant gains in those areas and hit over their defensive mistakes.

“We can’t drink our Kool-Aid,” hitting coach Kevin Long said. “We’ve got work to do. We’ve got to grind. We can’t give away at-bats. We’ve got to go out and perform. And we will. We will.”

Maybe so. But it isn’t a conventional way to win. Since 2003, only seven teams made the playoffs despite ranking worse than the 2021 Phillies in defensive runs saved: the 2005 New York Yankees (minus-120), 2004 Yankees (minus-79), 2013 Detroit Tigers (minus-72), 2014 Tigers (minus-68), 2013 Athletics (minus-63), 2009 Boston Red Sox (minus-56), and 2011 Phillies (minus-56). All but the 2011 Phillies finished among the top three in their league in runs.

Dombrowski assembled the 2013-14 Tigers teams that put up big run totals with the likes of Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder, Victor Martinez, and Jhonny Peralta. He said he sees similarities to these Phillies, but noted that Citizens Bank Park is more conducive to homers than Comerica Park in Detroit. Jim Leyland, the manager of those teams, also rejected the suggestion that they were defensively challenged.

“I never really looked at us as a bad defensive club,” Leyland said before a recent spring training game in Lakeland, Fla. “I thought we were OK. And with our pitching, that made us better.”

Indeed, Max Scherzer won his first Cy Young Award for the 2013 Tigers and finished fifth in the voting in 2014. He was paired with Justin Verlander atop a rotation that also included Doug Fister, Aníbal Sánchez, Rick Porcello, and Drew Smyly. David Price spent the final two months of the 2014 season with the Tigers.

The Phillies believe their starting rotation will be a strength, especially once Zack Wheeler and Ranger Suárez build arm strength after a truncated spring training. But unlike, say, Scherzer and Verlander, most of the Phillies’ starters are ground ball pitchers who may be adversely affected if the infield is porous.

“We had some strikeout pitchers,” Leyland said. “Sometimes if you get eight, 10, 11 strikeouts a game, that’s a lot of outs out of 27 that the ball wasn’t put in play. It makes a difference. You can overcome some stuff. And with our offense, we compensated for some shortcomings.

“But I think you normally have a tough time just totally slugging your way to the championship. I think you do have to be respectable defensively. I think [the Phillies] will be. Dave will get it done.”

Easy money

To hear Dombrowski tell it, the Phillies intended to stop at one heavy hitter. They tried hard to sign Schwarber before the lockout, then reconnected with his agents almost as soon as the work stoppage ended.

But Boras believes they never stopped thinking about Castellanos.

“Dave and Bryce during the lockout, I knew what they were watching and it was clearly ‘Nick At Night,’” Boras said, delivering one of his signature puns. “And that continued all through spring training, believe me.”

The only question was whether ownership would authorize surpassing the luxury-tax threshold. The Phillies had never before done so, even stopping about $600,000 short of the tax bar in each of the last two seasons.

But money is their greatest asset. They lack an elite upper-level prospect around whom they could build a blockbuster trade, but have a small core of stars and a narrow window to contend.

Middleton has always said he would incur the tax for the right player. With the addition of the DH, Dombrowski, who drafted Castellanos in Detroit in 2010, made a case that the 30-year-old fit that description, both for his ability as a hitter and his fiery style of play.

But even if Castellanos turns out not to be the right player, it was easy to argue that it was the right time in the organization’s life cycle to suspend its treatment of the luxury tax like a salary cap.

It helped, too, that the initial luxury-tax threshold rose to $230 million in the new collective bargaining agreement, a $20 million hike that represented the largest year-over-year increase ever, with the tax rates going mostly unchanged.

“For me, yes, there’s certain times that you’re [more] willing to pay the price of a penalty, but it’s not only from my perspective,” Dombrowski said. “You have to be on the same page with your ownership.”

Add in Harper’s influence and Boras’ feel for market dynamics, and you could see the formation of the Broad Street Bashers coming from a 400-foot homer away.

But will it work?

That’s the $240 million question.

“It was kind of like when you have the jigsaw puzzle and you’re sitting there and you’re putting it together, and all of a sudden, there’s a couple of pieces left and you see it and you know where they go and you’re just waiting for it to happen,” Boras said. “I’m really excited for baseball about this team. Because this is really the dynamic of a group of players that I think will fit so well together. They really will.”

Boras won’t need to check back in October to see how it went. His text messages from Harper will probably tell him all he needs to know.