The life of a reliever is an up and down thing. In one season a genie, making the wish for a clean inning or an escape from a jam their command. In the next, a goat, wishing they could find their command. This back and forth between brilliance and befuddledness is part and parcel of the job for most relievers. But the up and down nature of José Alvarado’s past two seasons is far, far more extreme than that a reliever typically experiences. He began May of 2025 as a key component of the Phillies bullpen,
providing effervescence to the club as commentators, never willing to pass up a colorful factoid, excitedly burbled about his spectacular espresso consumption. Soon, though, he was in the news for another type of consumption, far less charming than the coffee thing. Exogenous testosterone might energize like coffee, but it isn’t legal, at least not by MLB’s rulebook. He was suspended for 80 games, and when he returned he was no longer in good stead with the Philadelphia faithful. His 2026 did not see much in the way of cheerful coffee stories.
2026 Stats:
68 G, 58.1 IP, 70 K, 31 BB, 40 R (38 ER), 0.6 fWAR
What went right
Sometimes the best ability is availability. The Phillies needed innings from the bullpen, and Alvarado delivered them: his 58.1 innings pitched made him the third-most prolific Phillie reliever behind Tim Mayza and Jhoan Duran, and he appeared in more games than any other hurler on the team. The results he produced in those innings were not spectacular (more on that in a bit), but they were sufficient to keep him as a go-to option for a team that simply could not afford to have another reliever fall out of favor.
What went wrong
But while you could take the frequency of Alvarado’s appearances to indicate that he did enough to keep the team’s trust, you could argue instead that the team turned to him so often in 2026 simply because they were out of options. His share of the bullpen workload would be hard to replace, and the Phillies spent much of 2026 trying to figure out how to handle the issue of Orion Kerkering’s struggles, along with other bullpen problems. If the Phillies hadn’t had so many other issues to fix, Alvarado probably would have had his role reduced. His 4.78 BB/9 was third-worst on the team; the fact that the two pitchers who posted worse ones (Orion Kerkering and Seth Johnson) were fellow relievers helps to explain why he had such a big role despite a less than great performance. His K% rate of 25.6% was down a bit from last season, and well down from his career-bests in the high thirties. He struggled to strand runners, with his left on base rate (66%) being the lowest of his career. Batters put it in the air against him more than ever before, with his ground ball rate dropping by over 10% from 2025 (though, interestingly, his HR/FB was the lowest it had been in years, limiting some of the damage).
Final Grade: C
A month or two back I wandered into my favorite coffee shop and got an Americano that had me flying. The caffeine boost hit me like the sweet spot of a bat against a ball; everything, suddenly and surely, seemed bright and beautiful and wonderful. If only every cup could be like that. But most aren’t. Alvarado’s 2026 was an entirely serviceable cup of Joe; certainly no fine espresso, but enough to caffeinate, to get you through a rough morning. The context of a cup matters; a watery cup from a truck stop won’t disappoint as much as one from a café that’s given you great brews before. Alvarado provided something the team needed in 2026, though in unspectacular fashion.
