Brandon Marsh learned a lot clawing out of his last slump. He’s relying on those lessons to get right again.
Two weeks removed from being one of the Phillies’ three All-Star starters, the slumping Marsh has lost his everyday role. But he’s been here before and vows to “keep grinding.”
MIAMI — While Don Mattingly dissected the Phillies’ loss Tuesday night in the visiting manager’s office at loanDepot Park, his postgame comments were periodically interrupted by the crack of bat meeting ball.
The window next to his desk overlooked the batting cage, and behind the closed blinds, several Phillies players were getting in some extra swings. Brandon Marsh was one of them.
The team had just fallen to the Marlins, 1-0, in a four-hit effort. Marsh had gone 0-for-4, dropping his batting average, which had once led the majors, to .280.
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That number next to his name has been in steady free fall since the All-Star break, as Marsh finds himself in the first prolonged slump of his season. In 82 at-bats in July, the left fielder has a .146 batting average and .442 OPS. His struggles have gone along with the Phillies’, as they have a 3-9 record since the break.
Two weeks removed from being one of the Phillies’ three All-Star starters, Marsh has lost his everyday role. His struggles against lefties have returned; in July, he has a 48% strikeout rate and .330 OPS against left-handed pitching.
“Marshy’s just been struggling. I mean, that’s pretty clear,” Mattingly said.
Marsh is not a stranger to this. Last April, he found rock bottom. It was a slump so deep it overshadowed the career season he went on to put together over the next five months. But as he clawed his way out of it, he learned a lot about himself.
“Just keep grinding, man,” Marsh said. “Just gotta keep going. Baseball’s a hard game. Even the best fail more than they succeed, so you just gotta keep going.”
Marsh couldn’t identify one thing that has been going wrong for him with his approach at the plate this month. But his line drive rate has dropped from 24.4% across the first three months of the season to 11.1% in July.
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Accordingly, his ground ball rate (47.2%) and fly ball rate (41.5%) have spiked.
It all contributes to a .176 batting average on balls in play this month. BABIP measures how often balls put in the field of play result in hits, excluding strikeouts and home runs from the calculation. And it’s been one of Marsh’s biggest strengths not just this season, but since he broke into the league.
Luck can be one contributor to a high BABIP, but Marsh has sustained a .368 career marker, which places him behind only Ty Cobb (.378) among National League hitters with at least 2,000 plate appearances. The MLB average this season is .290.
In other words, Marsh historically has a knack for hitting the ball where defenders aren’t, but it just hasn’t been happening for him in July. (The only month in his entire career in which Marsh had a lower BABIP than this one? That would be the aforementioned March/April 2025, when it was .115.)
“Those pitchers are good, man. So you just gotta keep going,” Marsh said. “Yeah, maybe swinging a little bit too much out of the zone, could tone it back a little bit, but I’ve also hit a lot of those pitches in my career. Just going through a little grind right now. We’ll be all right.”
After Marsh’s extra work in the cage postgame on Tuesday, he snapped an 0-for-11 skid with a single off Marlins starter Jacob Gusto on Wednesday. He chased a pitch well below the zone to do it, but it resulted in a line drive to center that found some grass.
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It contributed to the Phillies’ early six-run rally against Miami, which they ultimately coughed up in their latest deflating loss, 8-6. In his two plate appearances after the hit, Marsh grounded out and struck out on a fastball above the strike zone.
“With him, like anybody else, we got to just keep working through it,” Mattingly said. “Probably his first prolonged struggle this year, so he’s going to come out of it, too. We just keep working and make sure he stays in a good head space, and keeps moving forward in this situation.”
The work remains the same. That’s one thing Marsh learned from last season: to keep moving forward and not to dwell on failure, or even success. Earlier this year, when he was leading the majors in batting average, he reminded himself not to focus too much on it. The nature of baseball is that everyone cools off at some point.
But just like he knew then he would slump again, Marsh knows now he will find his way out of it.
“There’s going to be a light at this end of this, and it’s going to get going again,” Mattingly said. “So we got to make sure we stay in that space, and because he’s not getting anything that’s happened at this point back, good or bad. So it’s really what happens. Nobody’s going to remember this little stretch of his if he gets hot and down the stretch, he’s helping us win games. You get past it.”
Jim Bowden spent 16 years as a general manager with the Reds and Nationals before becoming an MLB analyst and commentator. And with the trade deadline approaching — Aug. 3 at 6 p.m. — he joined Phillies Extra to discuss the Phillies’ needs, some potential targets, and what it’s like to be a GM in the frenzied days leading up to the deadline. Watch here.
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