I saw this post come up on my Bluesky feed and shook my head.
Tim Kelly does a great job covering the team for On Pattison, so this is not a criticism of him. He’s merely echoing what the organization is telling the public, including this quote of Dave Dombrowski’s assessment of Bryson Stott’s 2026 season.
“…We like Stott, think he can be better than what he is, even,” Dombrowski said. “He had a really good June, July, August. I don’t know why he can’t be that player all the time.”
The article went
on to note that…
Stott was really good during the summer months, hitting .286 between June and August. During that stretch, he shifted to third base to make room for Luis Arraez at second base and didn’t skip a beat at the plate. FanGraphs says that between June and August, Stott not only led Phillies position players in WAR, but his 2.8 mark was 13th among all qualified position players over that period.
However, Stott hit just .217 between March and May. He posted a .692 OPS in September, and then recorded only two hits in 13 at-bats in the NLWCS.
And there’s the rub. Stott has always had stretches where, for two months, he looks like one of the most productive all-around players in Major League Baseball, a star in the making. Then there are 2-3 months where he looks utterly lost at the plate, and he has posted a dreadful .515 OPS in 142 career plate appearances over 10 playoff series.
Bryson Stott is what he is. There is no “better version.” Baseball Reference’s WAR listed him at 1.8 on the season, 3rd-best on the roster among position players. His 3.8 Fangraphs WAR was the best, better than Bryce Harper’s 3.3 or Kyle Schwarber’s 2.9. Based on the eye test, I believe the 1.8 bWAR is more indicative of his true value to the team, but even if we met somewhere in the middle, we could say Stott is a 2.5-to-3-win player whose value comes mostly from defensive versatility.
He’s hit his ceiling, and if Bryson Stott is your 5th or 6th-best player, or one of about 5-6 guys on a team that can pile up 2-3 wins, it’s all good.
But this is as good as Bryson Stott is ever going to get.
He’s not going to be an All Star. He’s never made a Midsummer Classic roster and I don’t expect that to change. His OPS+ in his five years with the Phillies is remarkably consistent: 85, 103, 86, 96, 98. Over the last three years, his OPS has hovered between .671 and .736. His 36 doubles were a career high this season, so that’s great, but the inconsistency and his 2-3 month death spirals are a bit hard to take.
He’s not alone.
The players on the 2026 roster that finished with the lowest OPS+ of any team in baseball this season has a mountain to climb in order to be a top-10 unit. Even in a year in which offense was depressed, the Phillies were still among the most punchless in baseball. At his year-end presser, Dombrowski pointed to position player coaches seemingly not using the data sent to them by the analytics team to its fullest capacity.
“They supply good information that we are looking to improve upon,” he said. “I think they’re very good. They have a good foundation. For example, they work with [pitching coach] Caleb [Cotham] all the time. From the pitching perspective, we’re known as being very progressive.
“It’s not only how you get the information, but then how other people want to use it, too. That is information we need to do a better job at using. That’s not the analytic people’s fault. That’s something we need to do a better job and emphasize on ourselves.”
To be clear, I’m all for the move to replace Kevin Long as hitting coach, but his successor is going to need players with actual upside in order to turn things around.
Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber are a good place to start. The Phillies were the only team in baseball to have two players in the top-15 of OPS (Harper 13th, Schwarber 15th). Harper’s 2026 numbers are almost identical to his “non-elite” season of 2025. Schwarber’s brutal second half prevented him from matching his otherworldly power numbers from the season prior, but they were still very good. Both players turn 34 next year. The best we can hope for is that they maintain their current output.
Incredibly, only six players (Harper, Schwarber, Stott, Derek Hill, Edmundo Sosa and Brandon Marsh) finished with a WAR that was better than replacement level. Three of them were bench players, and Marsh was, statistically speaking, the worst player in baseball after the All Star Game. The following players all had WARs either at 0.o or were in negative territory:
J.T. Realmuto (0.0), Trea Turner (-0.1), Bryan De La Cruz (-0.1), Luis Arraez (-0.1), Justin Crawford (-0.2), Alec Bohm (-0.2), Garrett Stubbs (-0.5), Felix Reyes (-0.6), Gabriel Rincones, Jr. (-0.7), Rafael Marchan (-0.7), Otto Kemp (-0.7), Adolis Garcia (-0.8).
And only four players finished with an OPS better than .750: Harper (.865), Schwarber (.857), Hill (.783) and De La Cruz (.762). Again, only two of them were regulars.
The veterans on this team are what they are. Not a single one overachieved last year and the vast majority underachieved. Below is the OPS change from their 2023-25 numbers to what they generated in ‘26.
- Trea Turner (-.123)
- J.T. Realmuto (-.122)
- Brandon Marsh (-.074)
- Alec Bohm (-.065)
- Bryce Harper (-.016)
- Kyle Schwarber (-.009)
This lineup is a collection of free swingers. There is no patience, there is no plan at the plate, they just swing. Here is where they rank in terms of swing percentage since their first playoff berth in 2022:
- 2022: 48.3% (T-10th most)
- 2023: 48.4% (9th-most)
- 2024: 48.7% (8th-most)
- 2025: 48.7% (4th-most)
- 2026: 48.3% (6th-most)
In 2026, the best offenses in baseball were also the most patient.
The Brewers, who won 103 games and are playing in the World Series starting Friday night, swung at 43.7% of pitches this year, the lowest number in baseball. The NL’s best offensive team in the regular season, the Cubs, swung the second-least, 45.2%. The Guardians, one of baseball’s final four this year, swung 46.1% of the time, 5th-lowest, and the Dodgers’ 46.2% was 7th-lowest.
Milwaukee, as the 2025 No. 1 seed entering the playoffs, also finished with the lowest swing rate in baseball, 45.0%. The Dodgers were 4th-lowest, and they won it all. The AL-pennant winning Blue Jays had the 5th-highest swing rate, 48.6%, just below the Phillies’, and the Phils’ high swing rate didn’t prevent them from finishing the second-best record in the NL a season ago, so it’s not always a one-to-one correspondence.
But if you’re going to swing a lot, you better hit for a lot of power. In 2025, the Phils’ .431 team slugging was 4th-highest and they hit the 9th-most home runs, Toronto’s team .265 average was baseball’s best and their .427 slugging was 7th. This season, Toronto slugged .381, 26th in MLB, while the Phils’ .395 slugging was 24th. Toronto also swung a ton without much impact, 49.2% of the time, 5th-most in baseball.
In Philly and Toronto, you had two lineups who swung a lot and didn’t do much with all those swings. You can’t ask a lineup that is hard-wired to swing a lot to suddenly grow more patient and swing less.
Sure, it may work for a time. The three weeks in the beginning of August where the Phils suddenly morphed into a more patient lineup was bliss. Not coincidentally, the offense had its best stretch of the season, and the team had its most successful month overall. But it only lasted for those three weeks. Once teams adjusted and the calendar flipped to September/October, the hacking Phillies couldn’t resist their natural impulses.
Which brings us back to Dombrowski and his off-season plan. I am sure there will be attempts to bring new players onto the roster, but the degree to which he will make changes, at this point, feels slight. There’s a chance they bring Bohm back on a qualifying offer. They’ve already committed to Turner remaining at shortstop to start the season. They’re talking up Aidan Miller, who missed virtually the entire 2026 season with a back injury, and Bryan Rincon, who has never played above AA, as offensive contributors for 2027.
“We need to complement those guys with some other players,” Dombrowski said at his year-end presser. “So that will be our goal. Some of them may come internally. I’m not going to put it on his back, but we think a guy like [Philadelphia’s No. 2 and MLB’s No. 59 overall prospect] Aidan Miller is a really, really good player. You see all the young players that have jumped into playing this year and the years that they had. Aidan Miller, when he’s healthy, he’s as good as any of them.”
Everyone hopes Miller and Rincon will be ready to make an impact at the big league level, but it’s a strategy based more on hope than real conviction at this point.
Schwarber and Harper can be the front runners of a solid offense, but they need players around them who either see more pitches and swing less, or double down on power. Too often this team swung a lot with little power behind it.
Perhaps a new hitting coach that makes better use of data can do that. It’s more likely 2-3 parts of the batting order needs to be replaced by different players, with a stronger bench that will allow the regulars more days off to keep them fresh.
