A new baseball season is weeks away. And the Phillies have their roster ready to go.

Expected to be in the outfield for Opening Day will be Justin Crawford (an unproven rookie without any power), Brandon Marsh (who can't hit lefties) and Adolis García (who has a career on base percentage below .300). And don't worry, if someone is hurt, Otto Kemp will be ready to step in (with his .234 batting average from last year).

And this is all after the team parts ways with $100-million man Nick Castellanos, the worst defensive outfielder in Major League Baseball, whom the team has announced publicly it will pay upwards of $20 million this season to play for a different team.

Are you excited yet?

“I think we’re content where we are at this point,” Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski said last week when asked about his team's outfield.

The Phillies are banking on potential. García has a lot of power and Marsh is a good defender. Crawford is in everyone's top 100 prospect list and the former first-round pick has shown a lot of promise in the minors. 

This is a team looking to contend for a championship.

And yet, for all the attention paid to the short-lived and unsuccessful pursuit of Bo Bichette, there was no reported chatter at all about seriously improving the outfield. Their most exciting outfielder from 2025, trade deadline acquisition Harrison Bader, wasn't even considered this offseason as he signed a reasonable $22 million deal with the Giants (roughly the same AAV García signed for).

It's odd, frustrating, and sadly, it's nothing new.

The Phillies have not had even an above-average outfield, that did not include current first baseman Bryce Harper, since 2009 — 17 seasons ago — when all three of their outfielders were All Stars (Shane Victorino, Jayson Werth and Raúl Ibañez). 

The outfield has been bad.

Here's a look at the team's total outfield WAR (wins above replacement, via baseball reference), in every season since that 2009 pennant-winning campaign — along with their rank among all 30 outfields:

*Outfield included Bryce Harper before his position change in 2023. He won NL MVP with a 5.9 WAR in 2019.

The best free agent signing in Phillies franchise history worked out. Harper carried the outfield to a top-11 rating in 2021 and 2019 all by himself, but he's a first baseman now. His time in right field aside, Phillies fans haven't seen a group of reliable outfielders in more than a decade.

And they've had to stomach more than just mediocrity. Below is a list of outfielders who have started — yes, these guys all started — on an Opening Day in a Phillies uniform since 2012:

• Max Kepler: After his one year in the outfield at Citizens Bank Park he was suspended for violating the league's substance policy.
• Jake Cave: He started on Opening Day in 2023. He was out of the majors by 2024.
• Andrew McCutchen: Cutch's career batting average is .271. He hit .237 over three seasons in Philly.
• Matt Vierling: Homegrown and solid at times, he was flipped for Gregory Soto and Kody Clemens.
• Adam Haseley: A total flameout as a first-round pick, he stepped away for personal reasons in 2021 and never broke through in an attempted comeback with the White Sox.
• Roman Quinn: He was fast, that was about it.
• Aaron Altherr: A career .219 hitter.
• Nick Williams: His WAR over four MLB seasons is -1.8.
• Michael Saunders: He started on Opening Day in 2017. He was released on June 23.
• Howie Kendrick: Philly flipped Darin Ruf and Darnell Sweeney for Kendrick and then flipped him for a minor leaguer in July.
• Cedric Hunter: Hunter had three hits in 36 plate appearances with the Phillies.
• Peter Bourjos: He was average in his one season in Philly — an abstract name if nothing else.
• Ben Revere: He hit his first career homer as a Phillie in his 1,466th at-bat. Kyle Schwarber has 141 of them over 1,762.
• Grady Sizemore: The injury-prone former All-Star had a four-hit game in 2014. He only hit 61 more of them over his other 98 games in Philly.
• Tony Gwynn Jr.: The son of the all-time great had a .152 batting average, and .190 slugging percentage, as a Phillie.
• John Mayberry: Our second straight nepo-outfielder, Mayberry had a career .235 batting average.
• Marlon Byrd: The Phillies brought back a fan favorite at age 36 in 2014. He actually wasn't half bad, hitting 25 homers and 85 RBI.
• Domonic Brown: He was one of the most highly-touted prospects in recent team history and made an All-Star team in 2013 with 23 home runs at the break. He hit a total of 19 more in two and a half seasons after that. 
• Ben Francisco: Mercifully our list is done here, with a throw-in outfielder from the Cliff Lee trade with Cleveland.

A few honorable mentions here: Cody Asche started 115 games in left field, Jeff Francoeur had a -0.8 WAR in 2015, Tyler Goeddel started 92 games in 2016 with a .192 batting average — his only MLB experience.

Let's just say there were more misses than hits.

Not surprisingly, the Phillies did not spend much money on their outfield during the lean times from 2012-2018. But for some reason they also aren't spending much now — relative to the league — as they've become perennial contenders.

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In the upcoming 2026 season, Philadelphia is expected to spend $35.2 million on its outfield, more than $50 million less than the Yankees are, and 12th most in the league. They had no interest in Kyle Tucker or Cody Bellinger, the top free agent OFs this past offseason. It's clear they wanted to keep a pathway open for Crawford. If he's a success it would be bucking an outrageously prominent trend.

Since 2012, the Phillies have drafted 68 outfielders in the amateur draft. They've also signed 62 international free agent outfielders. Of those 130 youngsters, there are just seven whose names you might know:

• Dylan Cozens, a second-round pick in 2012, had 44 career plate appearances in the majors
• Mickey Moniak was the first overall pick in 2016 and he had a -0.8 WAR with the team before being traded for Noah Syndergaard.
• We documented Haseley just above, the eighth overall pick in 2017.
• The jury is still out on international signee Johan Rojas, who has talent but has yet to cash in on it with the Phillies.
• Vierling was a fifth rounder in 2018 and is probably a fourth or fifth MLB outfielder at best.
• Crawford and Dante Nori are first-round picks with high expectations, with Crawford expected to make the leap to the majors soon. Nori was a 2024 first rounder.

You'd be hard pressed to find another name you recognize from the other 123 outfielders the Phillies scouting team has added to the organization. 

All of this is hard to swallow and hard to really contextualize. The Phillies' only homegrown All-Star outfielder since 1979 is Brown. Before that, Greg Luzinski, a 1968 first rounder, was their most recent drafted or internationally signed All-Star outfielder (Odubel Herrera and Victorino were Rule 5 picks, Bobby Abreu, Ibanez, Lenny Dykstra, Glenn Wilson and Von Hayes all started their careers with other organizations).

There might be more than a little pressure on Crawford — the weight of decades of organizational outfield failures are sort of riding on him.

The Phillies have had one glaring weakness since the days of Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins, and it's not going to get better anytime soon. 

Interestingly, the Eagles, across the sports complex had a history of never drafting a first-round linebacker, sort of an organizational mentality since 1979. Last spring they selected Jihaad Campbell and his rookie year was pretty solid. Perhaps Crawford will be the one to shake off another Philly trend, or perhaps Nori after him. 

One way or another, the outfield issue needs to turn around. If this version of Phillies excellence fizzles out without a World Series win, it'll be easy to single out the biggest reason why.

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