Inside the hitters’ meeting that sparked the Phillies’ on-base percentage turnaround this month
Halfway through the month, the Phillies are leading the majors with a .362 on-base percentage in August, a stark turnaround from a few weeks ago when they were tied for last.
MINNEAPOLIS — Pick a date, almost any date during the season, and the Phillies have ranked near the bottom of the majors in on-base percentage.
It’s a fundamental problem.
“Because everything we’re trying to do up there,” Kyle Schwarber said, at risk of stating the obvious, “is based around that result of trying to find a way on base.”
The numbers never really added up, though. Going into the last week of July, for instance, the Phillies reached base at a .303 clip, tied for last. But they also had the fourth-best hard-hit rate and were near the middle of the pack in barrel rate, which measures how often a hitter makes contact with the optimal combination of exit velocity and launch angle.
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Maybe it was bad luck. The Phillies were batting .281 on balls in play. (Major league average is .289.) Or maybe it was self-inflicted. As a team, they swung at the second-highest rate of non-strikes (34%).
Whatever the case, they needed to figure it out.
So, they had a meeting.
Hitting coach Kevin Long, his two assistants, and hitting analysts meet with the players before every series to go over strategy and review scouting reports on opposing pitchers. But this was different, multiple players said over the weekend.
In getting together in the last week of July — before the deadline trade for contact-hitting savant Luis Arraez — Long and his staff highlighted things the Phillies were doing well before inviting the players to brainstorm why it wasn’t translating into better on-base results.
“I think there was a stigma there of us being last in on-base, and that can wear on a group, right?” Schwarber said. “But the room starts talking, guys start giving their opinions, and then it’s like, all right, how do we work through what we want to work through to get to where we need to be?
“As a group, it was a pretty good conversation, and I feel like we’ve been building on that and doing some really good things.”
In fact, halfway through the month, the Phillies are leading the majors with a .362 on-base percentage in August.
To make sense of the relative traffic jam on the bases, the easiest place to start is here: a 29% rate of swings at non-strikes so far this month, far below their 33.2% season average — and even the 30.4% league average.
But there’s more. The Phillies are walking nearly twice as often, from a 7.8% rate through July 31 to 13.1% this month. Bryce Harper says his dad tells him he’s at his best when he’s walking. With Arraez batting behind him, Harper has drawn 21 walks in 15 games in August. Bryson Stott (15) and Schwarber (13) are also walking at a higher clip.
As a team, the Phillies appear to be staying true to Long’s long-held philosophy of being “selective-aggressive.”
It’s more than that, though, according to Schwarber. Because if the last few years have taught the Phillies’ hitters anything, it’s that chasing pitches out of the strike zone is “the nature of the beast of the game,” Schwarber said. It’s in their DNA. Most of them won’t suddenly stop doing it, even though they don’t mean to.
And besides, every hitter is unique, with different strengths and vulnerabilities. There wasn’t a paint-by-numbers approach to figuring out how the collective group could reach base more frequently.
But several players cited something that J.T. Realmuto brought up in the meeting that seemed to resonate.
Stay aggressive to your plan.
“There’s going to be times when, yeah, we’ll have a team approach on some guy or whatever it is, but also, everyone’s got their own individual plan, right?” Schwarber said. “So, if you have your plan, that means that you’re going to be aggressive to the things that you want to do.”
In talking it over, the hitters concluded that many of them were often deviating from their plan and letting the pitcher dictate an at-bat.
“I think it just kind of brought out that, look, we’ve kind of got to clean it up a little bit,” Alec Bohm said. “We’re swinging ourselves out of innings, out of at-bats, and the numbers say there’s not a lot of strikes coming over the plate to a lot of us.
“So, let’s at least be looking for something [specific]. And if we’re going to go down, let’s go down with a plan and not just be up there free-swinging. I think that kind of landed with everybody, and I think we’re definitely responding in a good way.”
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The Phillies have 37 games left and a one-game lead for a National League wild card. Applying more pressure to opposing pitchers would help ease the burden on theirs. One-quarter of the Phillies’ games have been decided by one run.
Two weeks of getting on base at a higher clip doesn’t erase four months at or near the bottom of the leader board. But Arraez brings a contact-oriented approach and lengthens a lineup that has lacked a cleanup hitter to provide protection to Harper.
Maybe it’s all sustainable. Maybe not. Maybe they’ll look back at a hitters meeting in late July as a turning point.
“The biggest thing we were able to accomplish in that meeting was highlighting a lot of things that we do well,” Schwarber said. “Those are things that can get your brain going in a different way, and then it’s like, ‘OK, we’re last in on-base. How do we kind of maneuver this?’
“I felt like it was just a really good conversation that we had. There was input from everyone in the room, so I felt like that was a really good way to go about it.”
Tony Gwynn Jr. is a former major league outfielder and son of late Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn. Over the last two years, he got to know new Phillies second baseman Luis Arraez, whose contact skills at the plate often draw comparisons to Gwynn. Tony Jr. joined Phillies Extra to discuss his father, Arraez, and the bonds that connect them. Watch here.
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