ATLANTA — The first pitch Trea Turner saw Thursday was a fastball a few inches inside. He fouled it back. The second pitch Turner saw was a fastball, down and away but a strike, and he fouled that off the catcher’s mask. Turner looked to the sky. He was upset.
He saw 14 more pitches the rest of the night, a 3-2 Phillies loss to the Atlanta Braves. Only two of them were fastballs. He grounded out on a slider, popped out on a slider, flied out on a slider, and bounced into a back-breaking double play on a curveball to end the eighth inning. All of the pitches Turner put in play were strikes. He did not chase.
He just never got a fastball to hit. This is not a new phenomenon. No team in baseball has seen fewer fastballs since the All-Star break than the Phillies. The scouting report is clear.
Opponents know how to pitch the Phillies right now.
“Sure,” manager Rob Thomson said after Thursday’s loss. “And we know that. We just have to slow it down.”
The Phillies are tied for the worst record in the National League since the break. It’s not all on the bats. But the offense, save for a few games against the Washington Nationals in which they saw 60 percent fastballs, has not had a rhythm for five weeks. The Phillies scored six runs in three games at Truist Park and departed here with a six-game division lead.
It was jarring how obvious Atlanta’s attack plan was Thursday night. The Braves threw 130 pitches and 49 of them were fastballs. That marked the third-fewest fastballs (38 percent) the Phillies had seen in a game this season. From the final out of the second inning to the final out of the eighth inning, Braves rookie righty Spencer Schwellenbach retired 15 straight Phillies on off-speed pitches.
Schwellenbach used his fastball less Thursday than he had in any of his previous 13 big-league starts. His prior low came on July 6 — against the Phillies. That night he did not face Kyle Schwarber or Bryce Harper, who were injured.
“I kind of just tried to do what I did the last time with them,” Schwellenbach said. “Same scouting report. Harper and Schwarber in the lineup this time around, but watching the last couple of games, they struggled with curveballs. … Later in the game that’s kind of what I leaned on.”
Spencer Schwellenbach held the Phillies to two runs in 6 2/3 innings. He had nine strikeouts. (Jordan Godfree / USA Today)
The Phillies scored a run in the seventh inning when Schwellenbach strayed from the plan. Bryson Stott smacked a fastball off Schwellenbach’s glove for an infield hit. J.T. Realmuto crushed a fastball into right-center field for a double. Pierce Johnson relieved Schwellenbach, then threw curveballs 20 times in 24 pitches to record five outs.
“We hit some balls hard, but they don’t fall,” Turner said. “And then you press a little bit, or try to change some things, and it doesn’t work out. So, just got to get it rolling. I think all of us in general. It’s kind of weird that we’re all struggling at the same time.”
Some of the team’s hitters noticed a shift in a late-July series in Minnesota when Twins pitchers threw off-speed pitches more than half of the time. The Cleveland Guardians and New York Yankees attacked the Phillies with more off-speed than fastballs in the following homestand. Then, when the Phillies went to Seattle, they saw more off-speed pitches in a series than they had all season.
Of the eight series in which they’ve seen the highest percentage of off-speed pitches, five have come since the All-Star break.
“I think you’re talking to the guy that sees the most breaking pitches in all of Major League Baseball,” Nick Castellanos said. “Last time I checked, I think it was me first and Oneil Cruz second.”
That is accurate.
“So, I mean, it’s one of those things,” Castellanos said. “We’re a good-hitting team. We all swing the bat. And a lot of times they’re not going to challenge us.”
Phillies hitters have seen 49 percent non-fastballs since the All-Star break. That is the highest percentage in baseball. That rate, over a full season, would be the highest percentage of off-speed pitches an MLB lineup has seen since the league’s Statcast system came online in 2015.
Opponents have thrown the Phillies 29 percent fastballs in the strike zone, the second-fewest in baseball, since the break. The Phillies slugged .476 on those in-zone fastballs. They slugged .374 on all of the off-speed pitches. It has disrupted hitters’ timing.
“Just looking back at the Minnesota series, it was changeups and sliders first,” Stott said earlier this month. “And then you’re like, ‘All right I got to wait. I got to slow down.’ And then it’s the heater. They were throwing 90, 91 and it felt like 100. Not just me personally that series — it was a lot of guys clipping underneath the ball.”
There are certain scars from last October and, whenever the Phillies go into an offensive slump, the easiest answer is they are chasing too many pitches out of the zone. Their chase rate has ticked upward since mid-July — but only slightly. They can always chase less. But Turner pushed back against that as the prevailing narrative. He struck out once in 11 at-bats in the Braves series.
“I was hitting in a lot of two-strike counts,” Turner said. “It’s frustrating. I’m not striking out. So what’s the problem? Usually, putting the ball in play for me is a good thing.”
Maybe the problem is the lack of fastballs. Turner saw 47 percent off-speed pitches before the All-Star break. But since the break, teams have attacked him with off-speed 56 percent of the time. He is batting .234 (15-for-64) on off-speed pitches since July 19.
The Phillies saw the eighth-most off-speed pitches during the first three months of the season. Opponents have doubled down on that strategy since mid-July. An adjustment is required.
“Just slow it down a little bit,” Thomson said. “Try not to do too much. Use the field. All those things I always talk about.”
Rob Thomson will have the Phillies hit on the field against the curveball machine before Friday’s game in Kansas City. (Brett Davis / USA Today)
The Phillies had regular on-field pregame sessions earlier this season with a curveball machine. They have done less work with it on the field in the past five weeks, although Thomson said most of the hitters see off-speed pitches in the underground cages before games.
But, before the Phillies boarded their late-night charter flight to Missouri, Thomson had already decided something: The team would hit on the field against the curveball machine at Kauffman Stadium before Friday’s game.
“They do it in the cages every day,” Thomson said. “But I think it’s more beneficial on the field because you get to see the flight of the ball.”
There are 35 more games to make it right heading into October.
“I don’t think it’s anything we’re necessarily doing wrong,” Turner said. “We’re preparing. We do all the stuff we normally do. We’re having fun. We have a good mindset. We’re just not clicking. … Obviously, we want to play well, but it’s starting to get to that point in the season where it’s a play-well-or-go-home-type deal. I don’t think we’re under any stress or pressure or anything like that. We just want to play well. We know what we’re capable of. And we expect it out of ourselves.”
Very little matters if Schwarber, Turner and Harper cannot power the offense. But they are not alone. The league has taken a strong stance on how to beat the Phillies’ hitters.
The stars have to be better — whether they see fastballs or not.
“We’re waiting for them to get going,” Thomson said. “And they will. But we’ll do some work in Kansas City and see if we can knock it out.”
— The Athletic’s David O’Brien contributed to this report.
(Top photo of Trea Turner: Jason Allen / Associated Press)
