Have the Phillies built baseball’s deepest rotation? originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
If it can remain mostly intact over a six-month regular season, the Phillies’ starting rotation has a chance to be the very best in baseball in 2025.
The group was already beginning from a position of strength with Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, Cristopher Sanchez and Ranger Suarez before adding another lefty in Jesus Luzardo. It’s a rotation with an ace (Wheeler) and four guys who have shown over the last two seasons that they can be No. 2-level starters.
The only pitching staff in baseball that accrued more Wins Above Replacement last season than the Phillies was the Braves. The Phils ranked second in the majors in groundball rate, generated the second-highest chase rate from their opponents and had the fifth-best strikeout-to-walk ratio.
And keep in mind, that was for a staff that had no No. 5 starter and struggled mightily anytime it had to use one the final two months. After Aug. 1 last season, Taijuan Walker, Tyler Phillips and Seth Johnson combined to allow 58 earned runs in 38 innings over nine starts for a 13.74 ERA.
Those three and many other depth pieces will be at spring training, which begins for pitchers and catchers on Wednesday, but barring a rash of injuries they don’t figure prominently into the Phillies’ 2025 rotation plans. The team has its group of five plus Joe Ross, a veteran swingman with 86 career starts signed just before Christmas to a one-year, $4 million contract.
After adding Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos to kickstart this era of Phillies baseball, it was a team built around power. Now it’s a team built around the rotation. There are only a handful of teams in baseball, after all, that can claim to go more than three-deep in high-quality starters: the Phillies, Dodgers, Diamondbacks, Mariners and Yankees.
The Phillies have their aforementioned five.
The Dodgers have Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, Dustin May and Tony Gonsolin. You could argue this group has more upside than the Phillies, but no member of the Dodgers’ rotation has proven himself as a consistent, durable, year-over-year 30-start guy. Glasnow’s career innings is 139. Excluding the shortened 2020 schedule, Snell has averaged 138 innings per full season since 2018. Sasaki will be a 23-year-old rookie. Yamamoto missed two months during his rookie season and made just three starts longer than six innings. Gonsolin…