The Phillies enter deadline season as clear buyers, sitting atop the NL East with a 47-32 record — the third-best record of any club in the game. It’s a familiar refrain, but president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski made clear this week in interviews with Daniel Alvarez Montes of El Extrabase and Jayson Stark of The Athletic that his focus will be on adding to the bullpen.
“Our starting pitching’s so good,” Dombrowski told Alvarez Montes. “When [Bryce] Harper comes back, our lineup is in pretty good shape at that time. It’s probably bullpen is our biggest focus.”
Dombrowski offered similar sentiments in his chat with Stark and podcast co-host Doug Glanville, though he expanded a bit deeper. While the Phils clearly have a need for some relief help, The longtime baseball ops leader reminded that lefty José Alvarado will be back for the end of the regular season, which will be a boost to the team’s bullpen. Because Alvarado is serving an 80-game PED ban, he’s ineligible for this year’s postseason, but Dombrowski noted that his club will likely shift multiple members of its vaunted rotation into the ’pen for the postseason, just as one of his former teams — the 2018 Red Sox — did to great effect when plugging Nathan Eovaldi and David Price into the playoff bullpen.
That’s not to say the Phillies won’t go out and add a bullpen arm (or perhaps even two). Dombrowski is nothing if not aggressive and straightforward when his team has a need. He emphasized to Stark and Glanville that winning opportunities only come around so often and should not be taken for granted, even if it means “you may give up a little more than you would want to in other circumstances.”
[Related: Philadelphia Phillies Trade Deadline Outlook]
Dombrowski pointed back to his 2022 trade of righty Ben Brown to Chicago in exchange for David Robertson as one such example, noting that it was a painful decision that was made out of what he believed to be strong pitching depth in the system and a major league roster that was capable of making a deep postseason run. Brown, 22 at the time, was ranked as the Phillies’ No. 7 prospect at Baseball America and was ready for a bump from High-A to Double-A. Robertson was a pure rental but in the midst of a terrific rebound season for the Cubs. He went on to pitch well for the Phils down the stretch and into the postseason. Brown was in the majors less than two years after the trade. He’s struggled in 2025…
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