From .095 to a breakthrough: How Brandon Marsh’s turnaround started by just showing up

Brandon Marsh had hit rock bottom.

The 2025 season had barely begun, but it already felt lost. Questions have followed the Phillies outfielder throughout his career about his ability to hit left-handed pitching. But in March and April, Marsh was struggling no matter who was on the mound.

In his first 17 games, Marsh had a .095 batting average and a .167 slugging percentage. When he hit the injured list at the end of April with a hamstring strain, he was in an 0-for-31 slide. It was the deepest slump of his career.

» READ MORE: The odds say the Phillies are underdogs against the Dodgers in the NLDS. The odds are correct.

And it was weighing heavily on the typically easygoing outfielder.

“I just feel like I’m letting my guys down,” Marsh said after another two-strikeout night. “And I need to be better for them.”

The Phillies hoped some time on the shelf while Marsh rehabbed the hamstring strain could give him a chance to reset. He eventually headed out on a rehab assignment with triple-A Lehigh Valley, where he was reunited with old friend Garrett Stubbs in the IronPigs clubhouse.

Stubbs spent most of the 2025 season in triple A since he had minor league options remaining, while fellow catcher Rafael Marchán did not. When Marsh reported to Lehigh, Stubbs could tell his friend was struggling.

“It’s hard,” Stubbs said. “It’s a lot of people talking about you all the time. Especially when you’re doing bad, the conversations can get pretty negative pretty quick.”

Before one of their games, he pulled Marsh aside.

“Buddy, it really can’t get worse,” Stubbs told him. “So just show up, and just play, and just let the game happen.”

Throughout Marsh’s struggles, Phillies manager Rob Thomson, hitting coach Kevin Long, and the rest of the staff had been giving him plenty of advice and words of wisdom. He had no shortage of people he could lean on in the clubhouse.

But for some reason, it was that reminder from Stubbs that flipped a switch.

“He was just like, ‘Dude, just show up,’” Marsh said. “‘Every day is a new day,’ just the cliche stuff. But it really did help me, just settle me down and just calm me down and put it into perspective.”

When he next walked into the Phillies clubhouse, Marsh had a brand-new mentality.

“Screw it,” he said. “For lack of a better term.”

Time with Stubbs and other friends in Lehigh, like infielder Christian Arroyo, helped Marsh stop concentrating on the big picture of his season.

The big .095 next to Marsh’s name on Phanavision didn’t bother him so much as the poor quality of his at-bats. During his slump, Marsh felt like he was missing pitches he usually crushed, and chasing other pitches he usually avoided. So that was what he focused on to dig himself out.

“I still had the care, and the effort and preparation to do what I needed to do, but just mentally, I was just like, pitch by pitch, at-bat by at-bat,” he said.

The results followed almost right away. Marsh had two hits in his first game off the injured list on May 3 — two more hits than he had in the entire month of April. And slowly but surely, that number next to his name started to rise.

» READ MORE: How far will the Phillies go in the playoffs? Outs 13-21 will likely determine their fate.

He sustained it, too. Since that trip to Lehigh Valley, Marsh has been a completely different hitter. Excluding his first 17 games, he had statistically the best season of his career with a .303 batting average and an .836 OPS.

Underlying those numbers, Marsh vastly improved his approach against breaking pitches, which had been an exploitable weakness in his game. His .172 average against breaking pitches in 2024 rose to .298 this year.

After Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski added Harrison Bader to the outfield mix at the trade deadline, he said the rest of the Phillies’ improvements offensively would have to come internally.

Marsh has risen to the occasion. So have Alec Bohm, Bryson Stott, and Max Kepler, who all struggled at points this season but managed to turn things around.

“I’m not surprised, because we always thought that they were very solid players,” Dombrowski said this week. “You hear the expression all the time. I mean, I’ve heard it my whole career. Look at the back of the bubble gum card. It’s generally quite true, though. ... So I think that they’ve come back and played like we were hopeful they would.”

Stubbs and Marsh are close friends, and kept in touch throughout the season. But the next time they shared the same clubhouse, when Stubbs rejoined the Phillies in September after rosters expanded, he noticed Marsh was far more relaxed.

Stubbs is proud of his teammate, but he won’t take any credit for the changes Marsh made.

» READ MORE: The Phillies’ Harrison Bader has been painting since he was a kid. And it’s helped shape his game.

“I can say whatever I want. It’s up to him to actually really go into that mindset and turn things around,” Stubbs said.

Stubbs has developed a reputation as the Phillies’ “chief vibes officer,” but there is more that goes into that than curating a playlist or designing a T-shirt. A big part of Stubbs’ role this year, especially with younger players in triple A, involved having an open ear.

“I take a lot of pride in being able to have those conversations with my teammates,” he said. “It’s not like I necessarily start them all the time, but I think that they feel like they can come talk to me about whatever, and I’ll tell the truth and then do whatever I can to help them get back, because that’s my mindset, of wanting everybody in here to be playing their absolute best.”

In a clubhouse full of different personalities, knowing how to approach those conversations is its own skill. Stubbs compared it to working with different pitchers on the mound as a catcher.

“There’s different guys who you go out there and kind of grab their shoulder and try to bring them back down to earth,” he said. “And there’s other guys that you go out there and you kind of spark a fire under them. ... At the end of the day, it’s not necessarily numbers out there playing the game. It’s human beings.”

Slumps are part of baseball. Marsh knows he will eventually go through another. So will each of his teammates.

» READ MORE: Phillies vs. Dodgers: NLDS schedule, pitching matchups, ticket info, how to watch, and more

But he also trusts he has the experience to pull himself back out before reaching rock bottom again.

“I’ve never experienced something like I did in April this year,” he said. “I’ve been through slumps for sure, plenty of times, but this was by far the worst one on paper, and it was harder to climb out. For sure, [next time] might approach it a little differently.”

“But,” Marsh added with a smile, “I can just give Stubby a call.”