PHILADELPHIA — They won 96 games in all those months not known as “October.” And if you were paying attention, it’s no mystery how the 2025 Phillies won those 96 games.
Pretty much every night, their starting pitcher was better than your starting pitcher.
Their stars were better than your stars.
And their home-field advantage was better than your home-field advantage.
It’s a foolproof formula, all right … until October arrived and those noted dream crushers, the Dodgers, showed up. It’s maybe a foolproof formula for beating all those other teams. But as one Phillie muttered late Monday night, “not against this team.”
So let’s hope the Philadelphia city planning commission hadn’t spent too many hours drawing up plans for the next World Series parade, because at this point, their team’s current rallying cry has basically come down to: Let’s not get swept.
“Postseason baseball is never easy,” Kyle Schwarber found himself saying Monday night, after a 4-3 loss that booted the Phillies to the bottom of a two-games-to-none canyon. And the Phillies’ DH knows all about that. It’s his 11th season in the big leagues — and he has played October-ball in 10 of them.
He has won a World Series. He has lost a World Series. He has seen it all, done it all, felt it all, experienced it all. And one thing he knows for sure is that matchups play a big part in who rides on the parade floats and who has to stand in the middle of a downtrodden locker room, explaining why it’s so quiet in here.
So Schwarber stood there, all right, uttering phrases no player on any team ever wants to utter during this time of year.
“You tip your cap,” he said at one point. But as gracious as that may sound, cap-tipping is just a hollow way of saying: That team played better than we played. And for two games in a row in this National League Division Series, that’s been pretty much the truth.
For six months, the Phillies were better than almost every team that rolled into Citizens Bank Park. But when this postseason started, that wasn’t the Nationals or Rockies on the other side of the field. It wasn’t even the Cubs or the Padres or the Brewers.
Kyle Schwarber admires a grand slam as Citizens Bank Park erupts in July. (Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)
We’ll never know how the story of the 2025 Phillies would have been told if October arrived and they’d drawn anyone other than the Dodgers behemoth that showed up in South Philadelphia this week. But that’s irrelevant now — because these Phillies drew the defending champs. And first-round matchups don’t get any more difficult than that.
“I’m sure there’s some thought, I guess, that this is the (real) World Series,” Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm said. “But whether that’s true or not, I think everybody knows how talented they are. It’s no secret. They’re a really good team.”
But even that doesn’t capture why the Dodgers were the Phillies’ all-time nightmare matchup. Remember all of those reasons we laid out that the Phillies were better than almost everyone else they played, from the last week of March through the last week of September? When it’s Phillies versus Dodgers, um … never mind.
Let’s show you exactly what we mean.
The battle of the rotations
Jesús Luzardo, like Cristopher Sánchez before him, had a strong start. But it wasn’t enough. (Hunter Martin / Getty Images)
Pretty much every night, their starting pitcher was better than your starting pitcher.
Two games into this series, here’s one thing it’s safe to say: This sure isn’t the Phillies’ starting pitchers’ fault.
Dodgers hitters are batting a mighty .167 against the two Phillies starters, Cristopher Sánchez and Jesús Luzardo. Sánchez carried a one-hit shutout into the sixth inning Saturday. Luzardo did the same into the seventh in Game 2.
You’re supposed to win when that happens … except that the two Dodgers starters, Shohei Ohtani and Blake Snell, were equally dominating.
Ohtani got ambushed with a three-run rally in the second inning Saturday, but then allowed one hit to the last 17 hitters he faced. Monday, it was Snell’s turn to spin off six one-hit innings — with just one broken-bat Edmundo Sosa single allowed to the 22 batters he dueled.
So do the math: That’s a span of 39 batters faced … and two hits.
And that isn’t just some fluky October hot streak. Over the last month, Dodgers starters have now made nine starts in which they went at least five innings and gave up two hits (twice), one hit (five times) or no hits (twice).
Get the picture? That massive pitching advantage the Phillies held over nearly every team they played was evident against “Those Other Guys.” But in this series, it’s turned into a total non-factor. And that’s a monstrous problem for a team built around a staff that is now missing its foremost top-of-the-rotation force, in Zack Wheeler.
“We all know that in the postseason, you face some of the best pitching,” Schwarber said. “We’ve got really good pitching. They’ve got really good pitching. Can I say who’s better? I don’t know. I just know our guys are freaking good.”
When do the stars shine?
Trea Turner walks toward the dugout after grounding out to end Game 2. (Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)
Their stars were better than your stars.
The architect of the Phillies has a saying.
“You win with stars,” the Phillies’ president of baseball operations, Dave Dombrowski, has said a thousand times.
So he assembled a team of stars, then sat back and watched it ride the star-power express. Trea Turner won the batting title. Schwarber mashed 56 homers, drove in 132 runs and led the league in doing both those things.
Then there’s Bryce Harper, who had one of his roughest seasons — by his Cooperstown-bound standards — and still finished 11th in the league in OPS (.844).
All of those men have had monstrous Octobers … just not in the October they’re currently playing in. Those three are a combined 2-for-21, with 11 strikeouts and four walks, in this series. They had zero hits with runners in scoring position until Turner singled in a run in the eighth Monday to cut the Dodgers’ lead to 4-2.
Not that the Dodgers’ megastars have lifted them to glory. Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman are a combined 4-for-25 — with Ohtani staggering through an especially messy 1-for-9, with six-strikeouts, funk.
So it may not be Advantage: Dodgers. But the Phillies are a star-driven team — and the Dodgers have shut down Schwarber, Harper and Turner in every big moment. So I asked Schwarber directly after Monday’s game: “Have your stars done enough?”
“I can only speak for myself,” he said. “I know that I haven’t.”
He is one of the most accountable superstars in his sport. So of course, he began recounting at-bats in each of these games that are still tormenting him, and let his frustration show.
“You want to get something going,” he said. “You want to get anything going. And for me, I just didn’t come through in that spot. So I can look myself in the mirror and say that I want to be better. I’m going to be better.”
There’s just one problem, obviously. They are all running out of games to be better.
You can’t even go home again
The Phillies and their fans look on in the ninth inning of their Game 7 loss to the Diamondbacks in the 2023 NLCS. (Rich Schultz / Getty Images)
And their home-field advantage was better than your home-field advantage.
The home of Red October used to be a terrifying place for opponents this time of year. But all of a sudden … not so much.
If you run it back to Games 6 and 7 of the 2023 National League Championship Series, the Phillies have lost five of their last six games at Citizens Bank Park, one more excruciating than the other. It’s the first time they’ve gone 1-5 (or worse) in any six-game postseason span at home since the 1976-78 Phillies lost six in a row in three straight first-round exits.
So that’s not good. But it’s especially jarring after a season in which this team …
• Had the best home record in baseball (55-26).
• Had the best run differential at home in baseball (plus-100)
• Went 22-3-1 in their 26 series at the Bank — the best home series winning percentage of any National League team in the division-play era (1969-present).
The Phillies were swept by just one team at home all season — the Brewers, in a series played more than four months ago. But the Dodgers stomped into town this month and weren’t impressed with any of that.
“Does it suck that we didn’t get a win here? Absolutely,” Schwarber said. “But now we have to go out there (to L.A.) and we have to focus on one game at a time.”
Yeah, it’s come to that, all right. It’s one-game-at-a-time week in the big city. Do they even want to know that teams that lose the first two games at home in best-of-five series are 3-31? Or that over the last 25 seasons, only eight of the 20 teams that lost the first two games at home even forced a Game 4?
Nah, they don’t want to know any of that. They just know they’ve spent a beautiful summer overpowering all those other teams exactly how they drew it up — with pitching, star power and the most intimidating home fans in America.
Then the Dodgers stopped by in October for an NLDS heavyweight title bout — and the Phillies are already staggering through a standing 8-count.
“Yeah, that’s how it feels,” reliever Orion Kerkering said. “Just like a big boxing match, and they took the first two rounds. Hopefully, we’ll take the next three, four or five rounds and we’ll be good to go.”
Not to be confused, of course, with good enough to go home.
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