For those of you who wanted change, you are far more likely to get it than at any point up until now.
Depending on how things finish up this weekend in Atlanta, it’s hard to see how the 2026 season ends with the ultimate goal of a World Series parade taking place. The NL East is already lost, and the Phillies appear to be on their way to becoming the best team in history to lose 90+ games.
Whether you loved or hated the off-season, almost everyone believed this team was going to play October baseball.
Sure, not all of you, but most. They were another year older, but still appeared talented enough to grind their way through another 162 games and return to the postseason. But they have dug themselves such a large hole in the first month of the season that it will likely take the next five just to put themselves in a wild card position.
You don’t lose 10 games in a row simply because of bad luck. A championship caliber club doesn’t lose 10 in a row because they suddenly became terrible baseball players overnight.
No, the 2026 Phillies have been the worst team in baseball coming into Saturday night’s second game against the Braves in Atlanta in large part because of Dave Dombrowski’s underestimation of the importance of what goes on inside a player’s ears.
The Phillies appear psychologically broken, and it’s understandable why that may be. I talked about it numerous times over the winter as Dombrowski and the front office stood pat with the same core of players that had come up torturously short the last three Octobers.
Asking this same group of players to come back, with all the baggage they’ve acquired, all the same doubts about their abilities, all the same disappointments and frustrations, and expect everything to work out was wishful thinking more than a solid plan.
Sure, every team goes through slumps. Some of them occur at the beginning of the season. But when you watch these Phillies, you can see something is off. This play from Friday night is just the tip of the iceberg, but it encapsulates how much things have gotten into their heads.
A simple ground ball to the shortstop with two outs and runners on 1st and 2nd… it doesn’t get any easier than this. But Turner failed to notice Ronald Acuna Jr. get a good jump off of 1st and beat Bryson Stott to the bag at 2nd. He then got freaked out and sailed his throw to 1st as a result. There were multiple mental and physical errors on that play alone, and it’s not the first time something like this has happened in the season’s first month.
The players have acknowledged that the only metric for success with this team is a World Series championship. So you can understand if, subconsciously, the regular season doesn’t hold as much interest for them as it once did. You can understand if they didn’t enter this season, with 162 games ahead of them, with fire in their bellies. For this group, it’s all about getting to October, and then performing better than they have the previous three.
To a man, they will absolutely deny this. But human nature is what it is.
The Phillies are trapped inside a bubble of frustration, and the danger of not jettisoning some of the existing core and replacing them with new people was failing to pop that bubble. When Orion Kerkering threw that ball to the backstop at the end of Game 4 of the NLDS in Los Angeles, everyone felt big changes had to happen.
Sure, maybe the talent on the field didn’t mix terribly well, but it worked well enough to win the division by 13 games and return to the playoffs for a fourth straight time. But bringing people from the outside would have helped pop the bubble. Bringing in people whose mindset was not solely “World Series-or-bust” could have helped the rest of the group realize there was still a reason to get up for the regular season.
Or, it simply could have shaken people out of their doldrums.
Instead, as this season has unfolded, the Phils have thus far found themselves unable to pull out of their initial tailspin. As a result, the division is already lost before the calendar has even turned to May. All that’s in play now is a wild card, and that becomes more of a longshot with each passing day.
The psychology of the Phillies needed to change, and it was going to be impossible for that to happen without bringing in players from outside the organization (and no, the additions of Adolis Garcia, Andrew Painter and Justin Crawford weren’t going to move the needle). Sure, the Phils needed another middle-of-the-order bat, and failing to acquire one has resulted in the team yet again playing without a true cleanup hitter, but beyond the sheer baseball of it all, it would have helped in the locker room, too.
Would a new manager’s voice have helped change the team’s perspective? Would moving players like Alec Bohm and/or Stott and or Brandon Marsh have shaken things up in a good way? Would acquiring a big bat like Eugenio Suarez, landing Bo Bichette, or inking one of the Japanese stars, helped?
It’s obviously impossible to say, but it seemed obvious to me, from the moment the Phils slumped off the Dodgers Stadium field last October, they needed a mental reset. Someone to come in there and convince them they weren’t destined to always fall short. Someone to give them a jolt of energy.
Perhaps that will soon happen. Dombrowski and John Middleton will obviously look at every aspect of this team in an attempt fo salvage the season. After all, there is no rebuild coming, not with Bryce Harper, Turner, Kyle Schwarber, Aaron Nola, Cristopher Sanchez and Jesus Luzardo all signed to long-term extensions. If anything, there will be a re-tooling, not a rebuild.
A managerial change or other coaching change is more likely with each passing day and each succeeding loss. Change is coming.
Psychologically, for this group, that is almost certainly for the best.
