Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The Phillies run into a left-hander, and suddenly, the lineup looks like it’s guessing.
Take Brandon Marsh. The Phillies are committed to playing him every day, lefties included. They believe he can handle it. The numbers? They’re still skeptical. Over the last two seasons, he’s hitting .213 with a .298 on-base percentage against left-handers. And he’s never had more than 110 plate appearances against them in a season since arriving in 2022. In fact, he had just 90 last season.
And Thursday afternoon? Let’s just say it didn’t strengthen the case. Marsh and Bryson Stott, hitting eighth and ninth, took their best swings against lefty Jose A. Ferrer … and missed. A lot. A combined 0-for-8. Six strikeouts. Two on, nobody out in the eighth? Two more whiffs.
To say this was only a Marsh or Stott issue would be incorrect. The Phillies whiffed 19 times as a team—marking the second-highest total in MLB Opening Day history.
“Obviously, we don’t want to punch out 19 times,” Bryce Harper said following Thursday's win. “It’s kind of like, ‘All right.’ I mean, it’s not fun to do that. And we can’t do that as a team. But today, we made it happen. We made it work. And we’ll take it right now."
It would be an overreaction to say the lineup you saw Thursday was the same one that spent the last 100 games—and the postseason—flailing at pitches and abandoning plate discipline. But it’s also fair to wonder: Have we seen this movie before?
A team that either lacks a real approach at the plate or can’t seem to maintain the discipline to lay off pitches out of the zone. The shadows? Sure, they were an issue. MacKenzie Gore? He can look dominant in spurts. But let’s be honest—this is a storyline worth keeping an eye on.
