Dave Dombrowski says it takes about 40 games to assess a team. Here’s how the Phillies are ‘shaping up’ at 19-22.
Forty-one games into the season, the Phillies are riding a 10-3 run with Don Mattingly as interim manager. But these three areas have room for improvement.
About three weeks ago at Wrigley Field, Dave Dombrowski said that it typically takes 40 games to get a true sense of what kind of team you have.
“Generally, I’ve said about 40 games of the season is when you start to say, ‘OK, where are we shaping up? Guys have had enough time,’” said the Phillies’ president of baseball operations. “But there’s no magic in that number. Sometimes it’s a little bit more, sometimes it’s a little bit less.”
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A lot has changed for his club since then. At the time, the Phillies were on a losing streak that extended to 10 games. And Rob Thomson was still the manager.
Following the Phillies’ 6-0 win over the Rockies on Sunday, they reached 41 games with a 19-22 record, now with Don Mattingly at the helm. Mattingly has a 10-3 record since taking over as interim manager on April 28.
So, to borrow Dombrowski’s words, where are the Phillies “shaping up” now under Mattingly?
Defense
The Phillies’ minus-20 defensive runs saved is the worst in baseball by a wide margin. The Marlins rank 29th out of 30 teams at minus-15.
Defense is one of the reasons Phillies pitchers have a 4.57 ERA, which is 23rd in baseball. The Phillies’ fielding independent pitching, which only considers outcomes pitchers have complete control over — strikeouts, walks, hit-by-pitches, and home runs — is 3.59. That’s fifth-best in baseball.
Infield coach Bobby Dickerson said last week he thinks luck is part of the reason why it seems the Phillies just aren’t getting to enough balls, but that the team does need to be better.
There seems to be some recent improvements, though. In March and April, the Phillies collectively posted a minus-8 outs above average, the StatCast metric that evaluates a fielder’s range. In 10 games in May, their OAA is minus-1, elevating them from the basement of MLB to around the middle of the pack.
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There’s still work to be done. The Phillies had a plus-11 OAA in 2025 en route to winning 96 games. But Mattingly believes that the team has been on the right track lately.
“What I talked about from the very beginning: better baseball,” Mattingly said. “It seemed like early on, anytime we didn’t make a play, it ended up costing us. You’re going to make errors, that’s going to happen. But you’re hoping to clean it up and then clean that part of it up, and then the mistakes you do make, you’re looking for your pitching to get you out of it, right?
“In some early games, [it] seemed like we made a mistake, and then they hit a chopper or dribbler, and then a guy pops us for a couple runs. So we weren’t able to overcome mistakes. Now we’re starting to be able to do that a little bit.”
Starting pitching
It has been 41 games of extremes for the Phillies’ starting pitching.
The rotation, which has been one of their biggest strengths over the past several seasons, has dazzled one day and cratered the next.
It has evened out to a 5.02 ERA for the starting staff, which is 27th in baseball. To be sure, that number doesn’t tell the entire story. According to FanGraphs, the rotation’s expected ERA based on amount and quality of contact is 3.87, which ranks eighth in the game.
So defense and luck is indeed part of it. But the main issue with the Phillies’ rotation is that it hasn’t consistently been going deep enough into games.
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Phillies starters led baseball with 929⅔ innings in 2025. They covered 41⅔ more innings than the Cleveland Guardians, the next closest.
This year, Phillies starters have pitched 209⅔ innings. Over 41 games, that averages out to roughly five innings per start.
In this era, workloads are carefully managed and starters are no longer expected to pitch complete games. But still, the deeper the starter can go, the less the team has to lean on its bullpen — and the Phillies relievers have already been hit with several injuries.
“Throwing a lot of pitches, obviously got to be a little bit more fine with the pitches with the [automated balls-strikes]. Just trying to get early outs. I think that’s what it comes down to,” said Aaron Nola, who has pitched into the seventh inning just once this season. “We’ve run into a couple teams that foul a bunch of pitches off, so I’ve been struggling to put them away with two strikes. I think that’s what runs my pitch count up.”
Cleaning up their defense will help with this, too: Making more plays means quicker innings, which keeps pitch counts low.
In the Phillies’ quest for more efficiency, Cristopher Sánchez has been leading the way. The Phillies have 14 quality starts — 12th in baseball — and he has accounted for six of them.
Zack Wheeler is up there, too: He has made three appearances since being activated from the injured list, but two of them have been quality starts.
Nola and Jesús Luzardo have three apiece, while rookie Andrew Painter is still searching for his first.
Right-handed hitters
For most of the season, a left-handed starting pitcher on the opposing team’s lineup card may as well have been a scheduled loss for the Phillies.
They lost 10 games against non-opener lefties until beating the Athletics on May 6 in a game started by left-hander Jeffrey Springs. (They ultimately took the lead against a right-handed reliever, though.)
The Phillies won another against Rockies lefty Kyle Freeland on Saturday, pouncing on him for six earned runs on 10 hits.
The Phillies are now hitting .217 (24th) with a .657 OPS (22nd) against left-handed pitching.
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Mattingly said it was hard to find one common thread in the Phillies’ struggles against lefties.
“Each guy’s individually different, right?” he said. “You can’t put [Chris] Sale and Freeland in the same category. They’re all different, right? They bring different challenges to your club. Hopefully we’re just getting better against them, and we’re going to be good against them. So that’s a good start. I think [we] beat two in a row, right? It’s a good start.”
But one obvious factor is the general underperformance of the Phillies’ right-handed bats, which are expected to carry most of the load against lefties. It’s no coincidence in the game they ran up the score against a lefty starter, multiple righties broke out.
Biggest of all was Alec Bohm, who hit two homers against Freeland — his first two since opening day. Three of Trea Turner’s four hits on the night were also against Freeland, and Adolis García added two against him.
Turner hit .323 against lefties last year. But including his three on Saturday, he has just nine hits against lefties this season for a .184 average.
A big game against Freeland, who has a career 4.58 ERA, hardly means the issues are solved. But it can be something to build on. The Phillies will face at least one lefty starter in their upcoming series against the Red Sox, with old friend Ranger Suárez scheduled to start Thursday’s game.
To have a chance, they will need their righties to carry the load again.
“When you get good lefties,” Mattingly said, “your righties got to be able to do something.”
Despite playing only two seasons for the Phillies, Aaron Rowand left his mark. Literally. Twenty years ago Monday, Rowand smashed into the center-field fence and broke bones in his face to make a catch. And if that didn’t instantly boost his popularity with the fan base, his answer four days later to a question about why he would sacrifice his body certainly did. Rowand joins Phillies Extra to reminisce about “The Catch,” his role in helping to change the culture around the Phillies, and a lot more. Watch here.
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