NEW YORK — It had been over for more than 20 minutes, and the Philadelphia Phillies had a bus to board that would take them to their charter flight headed to Chicago, where mercifully, a day without baseball awaited them. But Bryce Harper sat at his locker, still in full uniform. He untucked his dirt-crusted jersey. He scrolled through his phone. Harper let it linger for a moment while everyone around him moved.
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The Phillies have lost 13 of their last 17 games played at Citi Field. The New York Mets bullied them last October, and after three days in New York, it’s impossible to ignore the gap between the two clubs.
“I mean, you can see that right now, obviously,” Harper said. “They played us really well. And they’ve beaten us. So I think as a team, we have to try to flip that. Play better baseball against them. Do the things we can to win games. No matter if it’s the Mets or anybody else, right? We have to just understand we’re a really good team, too. You’re going to go through ups and downs in the season, but obviously, we have to figure it out now.”
This is the Phillies right now: They have one of the highest on-base percentages in baseball, but have struggled to hit with runners in scoring position. Then, late in Wednesday’s 4-3 loss, they had two hits with runners in scoring position who couldn’t plate a run.
The Phillies had 13 of the 18 hardest-hit balls in the game, and only five landed as hits. The second-softest batted ball of the entire game, Starling Marte’s broken-bat blooper to center field, won it for New York.
“It’s the randomness of the game,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. “It really is. I mean, we’re not going to tell guys to start swinging uphill. If you hit a ball hard, you hit a ball hard.”
But this is not all about luck. That does not explain three extra-base hits in three games at Citi Field, or an offense that ranks in the bottom third of baseball in home runs. They are 25 games into this endeavor, and it’s not dissimilar from a year ago when the Phillies started 15-10. (The team’s .721 OPS is better than last year’s 25-game mark of .710. They have scored 111 runs in 2025 compared to 108 over the first 25 games last season.) The Phillies have rarely looked relaxed this season, a year after the burden of high expectations was apparent.
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“Part of it’s luck,” Thomson said. “Part of it is, at times, being tight. But I don’t sense our guys being tight.”
Harper has an idea.
“I mean, we just have to win,” Harper said. “It takes care of everything, right? I mean, it takes care of (the) mindset. It takes care of what you’re feeling or anything else like that. It doesn’t matter if one guy’s struggling or not. You come to win, and winning takes care of it all. So as a team, we have to be better.
“It’s a really good Mets team over there. They played good baseball this series, obviously. But it doesn’t matter. I think as a team we have to really understand what we want to do, how we want to do it, where we want to go as a team. We just got to play better baseball.”
The Mets’ Pete Alonso is safe at home after scoring the winning run as Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto is late with the tag. (Al Bello / Getty Images)
Thomson is not deaf; he hears the noise. The Phillies have lost 10 of 16. They are 13-12. They haven’t had timely hitting. The bullpen is leaking. Does he sense a different energy from his club?
“Same guys,” he said before Wednesday’s loss. “Experienced group. They’ve been through this before. I feel like everybody around us is panicking, you know? We’re over .500, and first time we’ve lost three in a row, and blah, blah, bah, blah. So we’re fine.”
Maybe, then, that is the disconnect that has colored this April. The Phillies take pride in being the same — last season’s club raced to 95 wins and a division title before encountering the red-hot Mets in October. They were a talented team. Still are. But a pessimist would look at the diminishing returns and aging roster and relative inactivity over the offseason, and contend that this is bad. This isn’t something the Phillies should lean into, being the same. Baseball is like life, they say, and life in 2025 demands immediate satisfaction. The Phillies were supposed to atone in April for an early postseason exit; all they’ve done is reinforce whatever bad vibes onlookers had about them.
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Thomson disagrees. Can he see the current gap between the Phillies and Mets?
“Oh, no,” Thomson said. “No.”
Why not?
“Because we’re a good team,” he said.
The manager is not blind either. He will protect his players, even if he thinks the play has been lackluster. His hands are somewhat tied; the Phillies pulled one lever Wednesday by summoning Weston Wilson from his minor-league rehab assignment. He started in left field against a lefty, reaching base twice — once on a single and once on an error. Thomson played Edmundo Sosa over Bryson Stott, who has been as reliable as anyone else in the last few weeks. But Stott was there, in the guts of the game, and batted with the bases loaded and one out in the 10th inning. The Phillies had scored the automatic runner. They need more.
Stott flied out to shallow center field. That was the game — not the bullpen, not the vibes, not the odd decision by the umpires to overturn an Edwin Díaz balk that should have been a balk. The Phillies won’t return to Citi Field until late August. By then, everyone will have an idea of this team. Had they started strong — say, won two of three against the Mets — everyone knows the talking points. Let’s see it in October.
So, inside the clubhouse, they’ll stick with what they believe. It’s how the Phillies guard against playing too tight.
“We know what type of team we are,” Zack Wheeler said. “We know how good we are.”
Harper has heard all of it. Earlier this month, he delivered a soliloquy about wanting the Phillies’ younger players to relax and have fun. It’s easy to say the team lacks energy when they are losing. In Harper’s mind, winning creates the energy. Not the other way around.
So, 25 games into this season, it’s a little adversity for this team that claims to be good.
“You guys say it’s a little early, right?” Harper said. “I don’t like that. Just because you should want to play good baseball all year long, from April all the way til November. Obviously, that’s not going to happen. You’ll have your ups and downs and you try to stay as even-keeled as you can. But we’re a good team in here, and we expect to win. And winning takes care of it all.”
Maybe it’s a good time to have a day without baseball.
(Top photo of Bryce Harper: Dustin Satloff / Getty Images)
This news was originally published on this post .
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