An Unsuccessful Attempt To Prove How Weird The Phillies Offense Is

The Phillies have some weird-ass hitters that love the extremes. Even the nice ones could possibly be described this fashion. Trea Turner had a very slow start that he has now thoroughly bounced back from; he has a 3.7 fWAR as the top of the season approaches, despite the undeniable fact that over the course of his 100-or-so pre-ovation games, he’d racked up a mere .657 OPS. Bryce Harper, who’s coming off elbow surgery, got his power back around August. He hit 10 home runs within the month, tripling his total for the yr.

After which, in fact, there’s Kyle Schwarber, who I do not really prefer to speak about, but who must be mentioned in any story during which the words “weird” and “hitting” appear in the identical sentence. Schwarber has 44 home runs—this is excellent, enough for a share of third in all of MLB, and as many as Shohei Ohtani (may he heal rapidly). But Schwarber also has 0.4 rWAR and 1.3 fWAR on the yr, which suggests that advanced stats grade him as around substitute level, even with those 44 home runs, because he’s such an impossibly poor defender. Not great! Nevertheless, Schwarber has a formidable 120 wRC+, which principally implies that he’s 20 percent higher than league average at hitting the baseball. That shouldn’t be weird; that is sweet. But how Schwarber gets there may be very weird. He bats lead-off. He has a .197 batting average. He’s second within the league in walks. He leads the league in strikeouts. He has a .345 on-base percentage. He’s unfathomable. He’s Kyle Schwarber.

This type of thing shouldn’t be unprecedented, to be fair, albeit often in smaller doses. Schwarber’s pulling off a jacked-up version of Yasmani Grandal’s 2021 season. These are two three-true-outcomes kings doing what they do, except Schwarber is throwing in worse positional adjustment because of being a left-fielder, and in addition Grandal managed to tug his batting average as much as .240 by the top of the season. Schwarber looks to be maintaining his season-long pace through the remaining games on the schedule. There’s literally nobody doing it like Kyle Schwarber straight away. In the event you give it some thought that way, we’re all blessed to witness it.

I used to be reminded of all of this during an August series that the Phillies played against the Giants, a series that was most notable for the undeniable fact that each the second and third games involved come-from-behind moments for the Phillies against Giants stopper Camilo Doval, who finished with a 2.60 ERA going into the second game. In that fateful game, Doval threw two balls to Schwarber before deciding to intentionally walk him, just for Trea Turner—our other Phillies principal character—to walk off the Giants with a hard-hit single. Within the third game, it was Bryce Harper who hit the solo home run against Doval within the ninth inning, dragging his ERA as much as 3.09. It had an identical effect—the Phillies tied the sport and went to extras. There isn’t a must go into what happened after that.

All of this—and a few moments in Philadelphia’s recent series against the Braves—made me wonder why the Phillies can rack up runs against good pitchers like Camilo Doval, but struggled against the plethora of interchangeable middle relievers that Gabe Kapler threw at them seemingly at random, discarding one for an additional as soon as they hit the three-batter minimum. (Gabe Kapler is a freak, and he doesn’t take care of the allotted room in your scorebook for pitchers in the sport.) Perhaps if the Phillies could rating some runs against those pitchers, Kapler would stop making so many selections every game, and so I would not must cope with watching 10 Giants pitchers over the course of 1 nine-inning game. I’m very nearly off topic here but my query was: have the Phillies ever considered doing that, relatively than saving all their efforts for Camilo Doval and his 2.60 ERA?

Those Giants middle relievers, including the Tyler-Taylor “Weird Delivery” Rogers twins, weren’t schlubs, to be clear. Many were, in reality, also sub-3.00 ERA pitchers on the time. Such “facts” didn’t deter me then, and is not going to deter me here. I had confirmation bias on my side, and I used to be going to do some statistics to prove that I used to be actually right, and that the Phillies struggled against random relievers with mediocre-to-bad ERAs and hit well against competent ones.

The issue with setting out on a brave statistics expedition is that 1) sometimes you might be improper and a couple of) worse, sometimes you wind up with something uninteresting. Common sense dictates that teams or players that hit well against good pitchers may also hit well against bad pitchers; this may, on balance, be true even of weirder hitters like those on the Phillies, although they could look weirder in getting there. And confirming that would not really be interesting since it would not really inform you much that won’t already known, even though it might provide you with the data you wish when arguing against feral Phillies fans who’ve gotten it into their brain that the team hits higher against good relievers than against bad ones. Even if you happen to didn’t confirm the expected end result, it could possibly be mostly chalked as much as variance. Players aren’t changing their approaches based on the ERA of their opponents. On this case, they are only going up there to hit within the weird ways in which they do.

Anyway, because I’m a paragon of bravery and in addition because I dedicated hours of my life to this project, you continue to get to the see the outcomes. I set a minimum innings requirement for the relief pitchers at 20, mostly since the “good reliever” vs. “terrible reliever” binary relies largely on vibes and popularity, and a pitcher with a spotless ERA and one inning pitched doesn’t fall into either category. I defined a “good reliever” as a pitcher with an ERA of 4.00 or under at the present point of the season, and a “terrible reliever” as a pitcher with over a 4.00 ERA. I did this since it adheres to the binary that I even have constructed in my brain, which is inherently retrospective; it’s, obviously, not especially scientific.

After which it was only a matter of grouping by team and calculating the wOBA (our chosen catch-all metric of offensive production) of every team in each situation. Which gets you a plot that appears like this:

While many of the teams fall in line about how you’d expect, with the perfect hitting teams doing higher than average against all relievers and bottom-hitting teams doing worse, the Phillies do stand out a bit bit. It just happens to be within the, uh, exact opposite way that I’d thought.

The Phillies, just like the Texas Rangers, perform around league average against good relievers, but perform notably higher than league average against bad ones. In the event you take a look at their wOBA+ against bad pitchers, which on this case just means the Phillies’ wOBA divided by the league average wOBA against bad pitchers and converted right into a percentage, it sits at 111. That is about 11 percent higher than league average.

Team wOBA/wOBA+ Against Bad Pitchers (ERA < 4)
1. Texas Rangers – 0.434 / 113
2. Philadelphia Phillies – 0.426 / 111
3. Los Angeles Dodgers – 0.418 / 109
4. Toronto Blue Jays – 0.408 / 107
5. Atlanta Braves – 0.399 / 104

Even when I used to be improper, that is still something! All of that effort didn’t exactly go to waste, which is the type of statement that seems less convincing once you type it out like this, but which I feel is true. I disproved my previous misconception, and I generated a pleasant little graph, and it has the Dodgers at the highest right corner and the A’s and Sox in the underside left, as God intended. I prefer to think that it was Kyle Schwarber who taught me to have this adaptive capability for reflection upon my very own statistical output. Thanks Kyle Schwarber.