Internally, the Philadelphia Phillies called the break between the end of the regular season on Sunday and the start of the division series on Saturday their “Stay Hot Camp.”
The team earned the opportunity to use that time however it chose by finishing this season 95-67—the second-best record in baseball and, for the first time since 2011, the best in the National League East. A decade passed after that division title before the Phillies made it back to the postseason in 2022 as an 87-win, third-place wild-card team that came within two games of a championship after burning through better-on-paper teams all October. That Phillies squad—which had an air of rambunctious, upstart energy despite a top-five payroll—had struggled out of the gate, falling eight games under .500 by the end of May, before igniting at exactly the right time.
The 2024 Phillies have been more lukewarm lately. They took over the top spot in the division on May 3 and never relinquished it, but they played to a perfectly average .500 clip after the All-Star break. Before the break, their starting staff had the highest cumulative wins above replacement and the lowest collective earned run average among all teams’ rotations, while the lineup posted a combined 110 wRC+. In the second half, their starters’ WAR fell to 15th overall and their ERA all the way to 24th. The offense fared slightly better: a 105 combined wRC+ down the stretch. All of which was fine in a season without superteams, especially since they started the season scorching. This is just to say that perhaps a more apt moniker would have been “Get Hot Camp.”
Except then the Phillies would have to reckon with an uncomfortable truth: No one in baseball actually knows how to get hot. That’s what makes MLB’s postseason so maddening.
Entering October with their backs already up against the wall—and crash-the-party personas—suited the 2022 and 2023 Phillies (the latter of whom came within a win of the pennant). They (twice!) toppled the 100-plus-win Atlanta Braves (among others). And it wasn’t just the Phillies who seemingly benefited from being thrown right into the pressure cooker of playoff baseball. Both World Series teams in 2023 got there via the wild card, and the eventual champion Texas Rangers had to navigate an especially grueling, extra-long, cross-country road trip just to bring playoff baseball to their home park.
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