Imagine this: it’s a brisk October night at Citizens Bank Park, where the Philadelphia Phillies are hosting the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series. The game is tied, the series is tied, men on first and second, and there’s two outs in the bottom of the eighth. The Phillies’ lineup just turned over and Kyle Schwarber is at the plate.

Schwarber is a home run waiting to happen — he contended for the major league lead in long balls all year. It feels like he could break the tie at any moment. First pitch, he swings on an inside pitch. 0-1. The second turns the count to 1-1. Then 1-2. Another ball. 2-2. Schwarber fouls off a curveball outside the zone to keep it even. Finally, he chases again — a slider down and away.

Schwarber strikes out. Inning over and rally over. The opportunity fades away and the Dodgers go on to rally in the ninth to take a 3-2 series lead. The momentum shifts in the blink of an eye, and the Phillies must try to recover before Game 6. 

Seeing that scenario unfold wouldn’t surprise me. Days into September, Schwarber swings and misses at more pitches outside the zone than almost anyone. Part of that is because he’s a home-run hitter, but it also fills into a larger picture. As a team, the Phillies rank bottom-five in both chase rate and first-pitch swing rate. That’s terrible for any squad, let alone one with championship aspirations. 

Since we began tracking analytics like these in 2015, no team has won a pennant after ranking in the bottom-five in both categories during the regular season. Now, there have been four teams since 2020 to make the Fall Classic after having one of the five highest first-pitch swing rates and a couple to make it after having bottom-five chase rates throughout the year. That’s what I find concerning about the Phillies — they’re facing two weaknesses, weaknesses that have a history of costing contenders individually, at once. And even though they have Schwarber, who leads the National League in home runs, they aren’t hitting homers at an elite pace as a team — they rank 10th in the MLB in total bombs. On the surface, it doesn’t seem horrible, but for a team that seems to swing for the fences, it certainly isn’t great.

These two problems — chasing pitches and constantly swinging early — have the same effect. Both limit how many pitches batters see, both limit how deep batters stretch counts, both limit the odds of a pitcher making a mistake, both limit opportunities for batters to see pitches and familiarize themselves with the styles of individual pitches. But together, they will compound. 

Think about the opposite scenario: a team that doesn’t swing at first pitches or chase balls out of the zone. Think about how much they would force pitchers to enter the zone and how many pitches they’d have to throw. Think about how hard pitchers would have to get an out. Imagine a pitcher having to expose their entire arsenal just to get through the first inning. Imagine how many pitches he’d have to throw. 

Now remember the Phillies are the opposite. That means pitchers don’t have to be precise on each toss. They don’t have to spend extra energy on extra pitches, just trying to get the Phillies to bite — because they’ve proven that they will self-destruct. They simply have to avoid pitches down the middle. And come playoff time, that could cost them. The lack of long at-bats in the eighth inning of Game 1 could mean the setup guy for the Dodgers only threw 10 pitches and therefore can pitch in Game 2. But if they would have been a little more patient in Game 1, they would have set the Dodgers to overuse their top relievers, and later in the series, they would be facing a fatigued bullpen. And the longer the series goes, the more costly those first-pitch swings become because they miss out on more and more opportunities to see those opposing pitchers.

As fans, we talk about how home-run hitting players and teams like the Phillies are prone to strikeouts as if it’s an accepted fate, and it’s a problem. Last week, I wrote about how Cal Raleigh is breaking that mold this season,  but it’s still common for power hitters to have high strikeout rates. Why do we do this, though? Why do we give power hitters permission to swing at bad pitches or to not go deep into counts? Because we want to see home runs? Because we think it has to be that way?

Regardless, though, the numbers show, and history shows that the Phillies’ hitting style is unsustainable. Unless they adjust, they’ll keep running into the same wall: too many quick outs, too few opportunities to grind pitchers down, and a style that has yet to carry any team to a pennant.