October 07, 2025
The Phillies are still alive.
That's the good news.
The core that fans have come to love, and that has nearly won a World Series, might be playing its final game (or games?) later this week.
Ranger Suárez could be gone. Kyle Schwarber, too. And J.T. Realmuto, he's also slated to be a free agent.
This team is about as talented as any in baseball and no team has played in more postseason games since 2022. Is the road really going to end this quickly? Or can they get it together for an unlikely but not unprecedented come back?
Here are some thoughts that have been burning in my brain since the Phillies' rally fell short Monday evening, with a focus on the likelihood of an NLDS comeback:
After entering the eighth inning trailing by three, the Phillies fired off three hits in a row, resulting in two runs, with no one out and Nick Castellanos on second base.
Rob Thomson told his team to bunt, and Bryson Stott laid one down. After the game, the manager told media members that he wanted to "play for the tie" at home, with the intention of moving Castellanos to third with one out, and drive him in with a simple sac fly or ground out.
This is why the Phillies lost on Monday. Here are the reasons why this bunt was an absolutely horrible idea.
.@JimmyRollins11 had to take another look at Nick Castellanos' base running with the MLB on TBS crew pic.twitter.com/fBHN3jPNT3
— TNT Sports U.S. (@TNTSportsUS) October 7, 2025
Since the early 1980s, when the five-game series sprang up as part of the expanding MLB playoff field, there have been 92 instances with a team trailing 0-2. Exactly 10 times the 0-2 team has come back, just over 10%. Of those 10 times, seven comebacks were achieved by the team at home in Game 5 — i.e. the higher seed.
The most recent of these comebacks was in 2017, when the Yankees did it against Cleveland in the ALDS. The most recent National League comeback was in 2012 when the Giants did it to the Reds. The most recent NL playoff comeback involving the higher seed winning three games in a row came all the way back in 1984 when the Padres came back against the Cubs.
Those 2012 Giants, by the way, won the World Series. There is some precedent for these kinds of comebacks but they are still extremely rare.
In order for them to achieve the comeback, the Phillies must not only win three games in a row, but they need to win back-to-back games out at Dodgers Stadium.
During the 2025 regular season — a 162-game span during which the Phillies won the second-most games in the majors at 96 — they put together 10 win streaks of at least three games (the longest of these was nine). They had five series sweeps during the season as well.
Not only did the Phillies win four of six meetings with the Dodgers this summer, they actually won their first two games there — one of them in extra innings — back in September.
The Phillies have done what they need to do to comeback in the NLDS already in the regular season. They haven't done it under this much pressure before, but they've done it.
The Phillies fans were deafeningly loud during the most exciting parts of Game 2 (as they are in every playoff game). But they were also deafeningly quiet.
After they got down 4-0 in the seventh inning, it was sort of bizarre that more than 45,000 people all assembled in one relatively small space could get so quiet. It reminded me of when Bruce Springsteen is on stage at a stadium, at the end of Jungleland, with the crowd in the palm of his hand. I could literally hear the concise "beeps" of the machine used to start and stop the pitch clock being operated in the press box.
Castellanos has never been one to mince words, and perhaps he is saying what the rest of the team is thinking. The rowdy and emotional crowd helps, but it also hurts (h/t The Athletic):
“The stadium is alive on both sides, right?” Castellanos said. “When the game is going good, it’s wind at our back, right? But when a game is not going good, it’s wind in our face. So, the environment can be with us, and the environment can be against us.”
In Los Angeles, there won't be swirling winds. It'll be wind in their faces. Maybe that's what they need to kick them into gear.
Entering Monday's NLDS Game 2, the Phillies were lacing their cleats up for their second game in eight days. When Yoshinobu Yamamoto throws the first pitch Wednesday night at 6:08 pm, it will have been three games played in 10 days.
This sounds more like an NBA schedule than it does Major League Baseball.
The Phillies' reward for having one of the best records in the sport during the marathon regular season was that they got to have five days off — a bye through the Wild Card round — and then play in an NLDS series that has three days off built into it.
There is a rhythm to baseball and a large sample size that differentiates it from the other sports. Kyle Schwarber played in all 162 games this season. Sixers former MVP (and oft-injured) center Joel Embiid hasn't played in 162 games combined over his last three seasons.
The time off clearly has impacted the Phillies' bats, which were ice cold for long stretches in each of the first two games. They tried having workouts and even a scrimmage during that time off. But even staying loose and fresh doesn't combat the fact that the Phillies had a day off before Game 1, before Game 2 and before Game 3. Maybe playing on back-to-back days in Los Angeles this week will help them get in a better groove.
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