PHILADELPHIA -- There have been many startling elements of the Philadelphia Phillies' run into the deepest recesses of the postseason -- starting with the fact that they've made it to Game 6 of the World Series at all. There's the team's suddenly solid relief pitching. A postseason for the ages by Bryce Harper. And for sheer shock value, the most eye-popping development in Philly's title bid: The sudden transformation of the team's defense.
Yes, transformation. Houston Astros' outfielders Chas McCormick and Trey Mancini might have had the headline-grabbing plays in their Game 5 win Thursday night, but the Phillies have held their own. In fact, the Philly defense, an anchor during the regular season, has been a sail in the postseason. Who could have seen that coming?
The Phillies, that's who.
"Really, since probably the first month and all the work we did in spring training and in the first month of the season, I think it just paid off," said Phillies infield coach Bobby Dickerson, who was hired during the offseason to help maximize whatever there was to get defensively from a group of position players mostly brought on board to punish baseballs with bats.
First, we should make it clear that this narrative about the Phillies' defense helping their cause during this spirited run is a real thing, not just a perception driven by a few headline-grabbing sliding catches. Somehow, one of the regular season's poorest defensive units has been an asset.
"It wasn't supposed to be one of our strengths coming into this season, obviously," says Gold Glove catcher J.T. Realmuto, "but I feel like our defense the way we played this postseason is a huge reason why we're still playing today."
Realmuto is right. The Phillies were never supposed to be a good defensive team. This was a roster built around offensive firepower. The team knew, fans knew and Phillies management knew.
It's not that the Phillies were going to concede everything. While the range across the diamond was sure to be limited, the plan was to make the routine plays and hope that the value of the hitting would offset the generally statuesque nature of the fielders.
And even during the regular season, they mostly did. Philadelphia finished fourth in the majors in fielding percentage and were one of just five clubs to commit fewer than 70 errors on the season.
"We might not have the best range, we may be a little slower than some of the other teams," Dickerson said. "People see that and people want to say that it's going to affect the defense and to an extent it does at times. But that's uncontrollable. So we basically control the things that are controllable. Which is when it comes to you, keep it off the ground, try to be secure with it. And I think we've done a good job of that all year."
But unfortunately for the Phillies' defensive reputation, there are good reasons why we no longer rely on fielding percentage to form value judgments about the quality of a team's fielding -- it only really measures how well teams handle routine plays.
It was when you moved beyond fielding percentage that doomsday forecasts about the Philly defense mostly came to fruition. The first stop on that path is defensive efficiency, or the percentage of balls in play that the fielders turned into outs. By that measure, the Phillies ranked 24th in the majors and last among the 12 teams to earn a spot in the playoffs. In other words, the Phillies generally handled the balls their fielders got to. They just didn't get to very many of them.
Advanced metrics didn't like the Philadelphia defense at all. They ranked 25th in defensive runs saved by the end of the season, according to Baseball Info Solutions, and 29th in outs above average, according to Statcast. Fangraphs' bottom-line defensive metric estimated the Phillies' defense cost the team 20.3 runs compared to the average team, and that's even though the Phillies feature one of the game's best all-around catchers in Realmuto, who does it all behind the plate.
Tying everything together, the Phillies ranked ninth in strikeout percentage, 10th in walk percentage, fifth in homers allowed percentage and, as mentioned, fourth in fielding percentage. And yet they ranked 16th in park-adjusted runs allowed. The defense was very bad.
But here's the thing: It got less bad over the course of the season. According to daily DRS reports from Baseball Info Solutions, the Phillies ranked last on June 1. They rose to as high as 20th before settling in at 25. Not great, or even good. Less bad.
"I feel like all season long, our defense has continued to get better and better," Realmuto said. "The guys have put in a ton of work with the coaching staff. They're out there every single day grinding. The infielders are out there taking ground balls. The outfielders are out there getting reads, throwing to bases."
The Phillies made some personnel changes over the course of the season, which also seemed to help rally the club's flagging defensive metrics. Bryson Stott and Edmundo Sosa supplanted Didi Gregorius at shortstop, while Brandon Marsh became the everyday center fielder after being acquired from the Angels.
Other fielders simply got better, including young third baseman Alec Bohm, who started a key double play late in Game 5. His advanced metrics during his career have been poor, and yet he's been a standout at the hot corner during the playoffs.
"We did get a lot more athletic when we added Marsh and Sosa," Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. "The improvement of Bohm and [first baseman] Rhys Hoskins and our corner outfielders, especially Nick Castellanos, has been immense."
Improvement from those players was a prerequisite for the Phillies to have gotten as far as they have. This was a roster that seemingly featured an infinite number of DH types, like Hoskins, Castellanos, Kyle Schwarber and maybe even Bohm. As it turned out, none of them could be hidden in that role because of Harper's elbow injury that has prevented him from playing in the field.
In terms of personnel, the Phillies' defense had all the traits of a thing meant to be endured, not appreciated.
Then the playoffs began.
Sure, let's acknowledge that the samples are small. The numbers we pulled are real results, but the elusive nature of measuring defense in a playoff context means that we have to be careful about making any emphatic declarative statements based on them.
There are no advanced defensive metrics like DRS or OAA in the playoffs, mostly because the samples are too small to calculate them. So we'll circle around this problem by trudging through a few measures we came up with and let you draw your own conclusions.
Let's start with the topic du jour, after the Astros' game-saving antics yesterday: a metric we're calling outstanding plays, in which the Phillies have -- wait for it -- excelled.
We downloaded the data for every ball in play this postseason using Baseball Savant, along with the expected batting averages of each of those balls. Then we assigned credit for each ball being turned into an out, or not, based on that expectation. Finally, we defined an outstanding play as one where the credit for the play is at least one standard deviation better than the overall average. Simple, right?
It's not precisely the right way to use expected batting average, which is based strictly on the launch angle and exit velocity of a batted ball, but that's what we have to work with. So a 115 mile-per-hour smash hit right at the third baseman can qualify as an outstanding play by this method.
And by that admittedly convoluted definition, the Phillies have made 52 of them during the postseason -- easily the most of any team. Coming in second is the San Diego Padres at 37. The Astros, an elite defensive team during the regular season and employers of fence climber McCormick, are at 33 after closing the gap with seven in Game 5.
The list of Phillies victims is at 31 names, topped by Jose Altuve, who has been robbed four times. That includes a sliding catch by Castellanos to begin Game 3, the second time during this World Series Castellanos has claimed a spot on the highlight reel for his defensive acumen.
Castellanos, by the way, ranked 1,300th out of 1,305 defenders on the Fangraphs leaderboard in outs above average during the season with minus-11. (No. 1,305 was his outfield cornermate, Schwarber, at minus-13.)
Why has this happened? Is it because the same players who struggled during the season have suddenly turned into the 2014 Kansas City Royals or the 2016 Chicago Cubs defensively -- or because they have suddenly acquired a knack for standing in the right place when an opponent clubs a line drive?
Well, to start -- yes, positioning is part of it.
"[Positioning] is a constantly evolving thing," Dickerson said. "There's all kinds of algorithms that are built to try to predict where the ball is gonna be, and then there's also the guys that are out there playing the game that, with the PitchCom [system], know what pitches come in and maybe cheat a little bit to position."
But let's look further. During the regular season, the Phillies allowed a .303 average on balls in play (BABIP), ranking 25th in the majors (the same slot where they ranked in DRS). During the playoffs, the Phillies' BABIP allowed has dwindled to .260.
That sounds like a giant improvement -- but those numbers generally go way down for teams in the playoffs. Because it's only the best teams still playing, the personnel is usually better, and (Phillies aside) most of the defenses in the postseason are well above average. Still, that 43-point uptick for the Phillies ranks 45th among the 254 playoff teams of the wild-card era (since 1995). This year, only the Cleveland Guardians and St. Louis Cardinals improved more over their regular-season tally. (St. Louis' sample includes just the two games it took them to be eliminated by the Phillies in the wild-card round.)
The other reason that a team's BABIP allowed normally improves in the playoffs is that the numbers can be influenced considerably by the quality of contact allowed by the pitchers. The Phillies allowed a hard hit rate of 35.6% during the season -- good for second among playoff teams -- according to TruMedia, and 40.6% in the playoffs -- just seventh. Those numbers usually go up in the postseason, but this is a more drastic change than the average. Had the defense not stepped up, it could have been a real problem.
"[The defense] has shown up every single day and made a lot of plays for us," Realmuto said. "We're definitely a better defensive club today than we were two or three months ago and that's a testament to how much work the players and this staff has put in."
Here, we get into the hard-to-explain portion of the proceedings, when we start divvying things up by looking at the types of balls Phillies pitchers have allowed into play.
The Phillies' BABIP numbers allowed on non-line drives during the postseason are unremarkable. They are better than what they posted in the regular season, but they explain little of the overall BABIP improvement. No, what explains it is this:
Phillies postseason opponent BABIP, line drives
Regular season: .623
Postseason: .493
Those numbers are remarkable. (For one thing, they are a stark reminder of why it's a good idea for pitchers to avoid line drives.) But more importantly, the disparity between them is kind of ridiculous.
During the wild-card era, the average BABIP for a playoff team was .621 on line drives during regular-season play, per TruMedia. During the playoffs, that number rises to .640, a 19-point uptick. And yet, the Phillies defenders have sliced 130 points from their figure. It's the main reason why their defensive efficiency has taken such a leap, even though their pitchers have yielded more hard contact. It's not unfair to say that the defense has been a crucial partner in Philadelphia's fourth-ranked playoff ERA.
"You know, a lot of that is luck," Dickerson said, pondering the line-drive-outs observation. "You get near where you think it's going to be, and sometimes somebody has a line-drive out."
Luck, positioning, fate ... sure, it's hard to explain. But the bottom line is that this is a thing that has happened. A defense that was a millstone for the run prevention unit for six months is now legitimately aiding the Phillies' quest for a title.
Has it been likely? No. Is it a blueprint for other teams to follow? Absolutely not. Has it been fun, amazing and mystifying? Oh yeah, but in a good way, especially for the Phillies and their long-criticized defense.
"Everything I've read and heard, and the players read, about themselves was all derogatory, about how they're not going to defend," Dickerson said. "It is gratifying to me to see those guys have a little bit of vindication here, and play defense good enough to get us to the World Series."