Some of the difficult decisions awaiting Phillies this offseason originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
Dave Dombrowski and Rob Thomson will take a seat at the podium in the media room Tuesday at Citizens Bank Park and field questions for the better part of an hour about the Phillies’ 2024 collapse, their mostly pathetic NLDS performance against the Mets and how they can break out of the backward trend they’ve fallen into.
Don’t expect a ton of specifics related to individual players’ futures, that’s not the style of Dombrowski or pretty much any modern executive, but neither man should be in mince-words mode after the way this season of World Series-or-bust aspirations crashed and burned.
The Phillies face plenty of questions and decisions this offseason. Among them:
How do they fix the offense?
They ran back most of the same team from 2023 to 2024 and that is unlikely to happen again, given the record payroll and finite window to win with the current core of Zack Wheeler, Bryce Harper, Aaron Nola, Trea Turner and the rest.
Harper thinks his prime can last another decade, and most players in that clubhouse will say they don’t believe the window has closed or is closing, but that’s what athletes say. Father Time doesn’t need to make his case, he strikes and that’s that. This specific group — the one that includes Wheeler, Kyle Schwarber, Nick Castellanos … all the guys not under decade-plus contracts — might have very well just watched its three best chances come and go.
The lineup has to be fixed. Left field and center field are a problem. Johan Rojas is gifted defensively but can probably only be in the lineup of a contender if the other eight spots are rock-solid. He is far down the list of who to blame for the NLDS performance but is the easiest and clearest place to start when thinking about offensive improvement in a mostly inflexible lineup.
The Brandon Marsh platoon situation also requires addressing. Platoons can work — the Mets utilize one with Jesse Winker and J.D. Martinez — but you’re asking for trouble when running platoons at multiple positions. There were times this season the Phillies did so in three different spots. It requires so much to go right, for a handful of players to all live up to their billing. Often, it sounds better in theory than it works in practice.
If the Phillies keep Marsh as a platoon outfielder, his partner needs to be someone more productive than Austin Hays. Part of Hays’ weak second half was about a…