The Phillies are 20 games over .500 and far from satisfied

PHILADELPHIA — So little is going wrong with the Phillies these days that the new chic cottage industry around Citizens Bank Park is to wonder if they’re peaking too soon. If you’re not careful, the pivot from “are the Phillies good enough?” to “are the Phillies too good?” may induce whiplash.

That hacky contrivance is not one that will affect Rob Thomson anytime soon. The Phillies manager has been around baseball long enough to know slim the odds are of his ballclub sustaining a .708 winning percentage over 162 grueling games, a 114-win pace. He also knows that the club isn’t going to break protocol by erecting a “20 games over .500 on May 20” pennant over Ashburn Alley anytime soon.

So the response to the Phillies hitting that milestone Sunday in an 11-5 splattering of the Nationals was far from satiation.

“It’s great,” Thomson said. “It’s great to be where we’re at, but we’ve got a long way to go. We’ve got to keep grinding. So now our goal is to get to 25 games over.

“I’m serious about that. We have to stay humble, keep battling, keep competing and keep moving forward.”

It’s not to overlook what the Phillies have accomplished so far. They have tied the best 48-game start in franchise history, level with 34-14 marks set in 1993 and 1976. Only four MLB teams this century have managed that. One, the 2016 Cubs, won the World Series. One, the Dave Dombrowski-led Detroit Tigers of 2006, lost in the Fall Classic. The 2001 Seattle Mariners won 116 games; last year’s Tampa Bay Rays didn’t even win their division.

The Phillies are the fifth National League team since 1986 to start at least 34-14; all but one (the 1998 Atlanta Braves) made the World Series, with the 2016 Cubs and 1986 Mets winning it all.

For a team that struggled for a decade to reach .500, being 20 games over is not to be taken for granted. They sniffed 20 games over at 89-69 last year before losing three of their last four, a Wild Card berth clinched. The closest they got in the 2022 World Series campaign was 80-62 in early September.

So this means something, particularly for a club that identified slow starts each of the last two seasons as lowering their ceilings before May 1. But in a town whose expectation is nothing less than a World Series title, it means little. No one in the clubhouse seems under any delusions to the contrary.

“It’s obviously a cool landmark, but we also understand that April and May don’t really matter,” Alec Bohm said after five RBIs Sunday. “As much as it matters to get out to a lead and every win counts, it’s a long season. We’re looking to play our best baseball down the stretch.”

The way to do that isn’t to stop winning now. If anything, it’s to reinforce the good habits fueling the fast start. The Phillies have gotten out to a five-game lead in the National League East entering play Monday behind steady offense, less feast-or-famine than in years past. Starting pitching has been the cornerstone, allowing the bullpen to flourish with a manageable workload. Those traits will all be valuable even when inevitable regression to the mean occurs. Matt Strahm will allow a run again this season, Ranger Suarez’s ERA will stop looking like Bob Gibson’s and yet you still feel confident that the Phillies will be able to win in those situations.

“We’ve been fortunate in games that we haven’t played well to still win,” Thomson said. “We’re finding a lot of ways to win games. That shows you it’s a good team.”

Good, yes. Perhaps the mark a great team is the killer instinct shown to close out sweeps, Sunday marking the season’s sixth. Bryce Harper and other clubhouse leaders often talk of it as the bonus game – go out and win the series first, then grab the bonus to finish it off. That’s how winning streaks form and sustain.

Being able to do that speaks to a lack of complacency and a consistency of approach, both of which might come in handy if the team’s record inflates to a  point that might tempt a bit of resting on laurels.

“We keep going out there and taking each series one by one,” Sunday’s winning pitcher Aaron Nola said. “We’ve been fortunate enough to sweep a few series and win a good bit, almost every single (series) so far. We really enjoy these sweeps because they’re hard to come by, no matter who you play.”

“I think it’s just a daily thing,” Thomson said. “They come in, they prepare and they compete every day. If you do that, the sweeps are a residue of that.”

Source: Berkshire mont