4 Phillies role players who are pulling their weight
How have these Phillies role players fared in their time in the spotlight this season?
It was J.T. Realmuto’s meniscus surgery that propelled Philadelphia Phillies fans to begin worrying about their team being snakebit by injuries. Five weeks earlier, star shortstop Trea Turner went down with a hamstring pull that pushed him into a careful rehab. Then, a bit over a week before the Phillies announced their star catcher’s procedure, fourth-year left fielder Brandon Marsh tweaked his hamstring and missed nine games.
What would happen if Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola or Ranger Suárez went down? You don’t really replace the talent and experience of Wheeler and Nola, and this year the same is true of Suárez. The Phillies’ first answer this year would be Spencer Turnbull.
Turnbull has been a career 4.31 ERA hurler used principally as a starter. This year, however, he is showing some veteran, savvy impulses. He has done whatever the Phillies have asked, and done well to the tune of a 2.79 ERA in 15 games, including six starts.
He's now 3-0, and clearly, moving to Philly didn’t throw Turnbull off his vibe, or whatever happened to Castellanos and Turner.
4 Phillies role players who are pulling their weight
The question sneaks into the mind: Do the Phillies actually have the plug-in players to maintain their torrid pace if any more starters go down? The only way to tell is to look at what several subs have done at catcher, shortstop, and left field, and consider what would happen if other key players went down.
The bottom line on Phillies replacements is that the team is better suited for problems than it has been many years in the past. For example, should David Dahl and Marsh go lame together, the Phillies have Johan Rojas and Jordan Luplow stashed on the IronPigs roster.
At this point, though, everybody in Philly expects this team to show up, at minimum, in the NL Championship Series. Here are some of the role players who have helped get the team to this point.
Edmundo Sosa
Edmundo Sosa certainly answered his call to replace Turner at the beginning of May and maintained excellence at the position for a solid month. While his average has now fallen below .300 — it was .303 on June 4 — he still hit safely in nine of the 11 games he played in June before Turner’s return. He has driven in 19 runs on the year, 17 of which came after he took over from Turner.
What was Turner doing before his injury?
Well, he was certainly doing better than in the early months of 2023. When Turner went down in the fifth inning against the Giants on May 3, he was hitting .343, with two hits in three at-bats in that contest. He had 10 stolen bases for the season. (Sosa has three swipes.)
Turner and Sosa have a nearly equal number of at-bats this season, 147 to 135 in Turner’s favor. And despite a distinct edge in stolen bases, Turner has only scored four more runs, 28 to 24. Interestingly, Sosa now holds an edge in RBI, 19 to nine. Turner’s OPS is 13 points higher at .835.
In terms of defense, Sosa’s shortstop fielding percentage this year is 20 points above league average at .992. Turner’s is eight points below the league at .964.
Nobody had Sosa evenly replacing Turner on their bingo card for 2024. Neither did anybody have Sosa bombing Ashburn Alley with a 439-foot homer.
David Dahl
David Dahl was tearing up the opposition at Triple-A Lehigh Valley, batting .340 with 26 RBI, when he was called up to replace Brandon Marsh in left field. Marsh’s sample size is much larger, with 205 plate appearances to Dahl's 34.
Dahl, a former All-Star in Colorado, started off doing his best imitation of Sosa imitating Turner. He homered in his first game against the Brewers and in his third game against the Mets. His on-base percentage lags far behind Marsh’s (.206 to .341), but adjusting for sample sizes, Marsh only leads with 0.13 RBI per plate appearance to Dahl’s 0.10.
Defensively, Dahl is largely a left fielder only at this point in his career. Marsh can play all three outfield positions, and has this season. In left field, the league fielding average the day after Marsh returned to action on June 16 was .982. In 68 chances, Marsh had two errors and a .971 fielding percentage in left before his injury. Dahl had none in his substitution stint in only 12 chances. Marsh has two assists from left and one from center. Dahl has one assist from left.
It’s difficult to predict, with so few plate appearances, how Dahl might fare with a longer tenure in the outfield for the Phillies this season, but it’s certainly not as though left field went down the drain for the games he replaced Marsh. In terms of RF/9 June 16 (putouts + assists / innings played), Dahl’s figure was 2.04, Marsh’s 1.71.
At this point, Dahl is staying with the team despite Marsh’s return.
Garrett Stubbs/Rafael Marchán
Finally, we arrive at the fill-ins for J.T. Realmuto. Realmuto’s meniscus repair is a reminder of the fact that the three-time All-Star is very likely to age just like everyone else, that he is not actually an iron man, and he is 33.
Garrett Stubbs is quite a capable backup, but not nearly as good at most of the things that Realmuto can do as a catcher and a hitter. Stubbs is a better bunter, and although Realmuto is not slow for a catcher — or hasn’t been until now — Stubbs is a faster runner.
Rafael Marchán was added to the Phillies active roster in the wake of the plan for Realmuto’s surgery. And here’s where all Phillies fans sort of throw up their hands and say, “Well, we still have the better part of a month to see how that’ll work out.”
When Realmuto stopped playing for his procedure, he was hitting .261 with 20 runs driven in, eight doubles, a triple, and seven home runs. He had scored 28 runs. In his time with the Phillies since 2019, FanGraphs has calculated Realmuto's WAR at 22.1. That figure would likely be higher if not for the shortened 2020 season.
So, mere days later, it’s borderline silly to examine what Stubbs and Marchán have done so far. But that won’t stop us. In the games since Realmuto has gone on the IL, Stubbs has gone 4-for-19 with two stolen bases. (Realmuto has one.)
Marchán has played in five games since Realmuto’s surgery. He is hitting .333 with five hits behind a 4-for-4 evening against the Padres on June 16 in a 9-2 Phillies win. The Phillies are 3-2 in his games. In all games when Stubbs has played this season, the team is 14-9. With Realmuto behind the plate, Philadelphia is 35-16.
Realmuto has been a workhorse. One can only wonder whether the next three-plus weeks will be pivotal in this great season thus far, just because Realmuto will be absent. While he’s out, there are at least feisty replacements for him.
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