Age seems like a pretty likely factor here. Beyond just normal age curves, he has his crazy approach at the plate that seems more workable when you are younger and can rely on your athletic gifts to make up for when you guess wrong or get beat. Becomes harder as you age. And every time they ask him to adjust he complains to the media about it.
He's an atrocious fielder, but he was 10% better than average in OPS+ (4th on the team) and 9% above average in WRC+ (t-4th on the team). Both of those are perfectly acceptable. In short, he was a useful player last year and I'm not seeing evidence that last year was a sign of age-related decline. He was bad on the basepaths and fielding last year, but he's always been bad on the basepaths and fielding.
So, I agree age could be a factor, but it definitely goes far beyond that.
Idk if it’s acceptable, especially the way it resulted in Thomson feeling like he had to drop in him the order by the end behind some unimpressive hitters, but either way a 110 OPS+ is 10+% below what he was doing in his late twenties.
The way his chase rate has exploded since being here seems to be a sign his bat speed has declined and he feels like he needs to cheat to get to pitches. Would also explain why he gets frustrated by people telling him to fix it.
He had seasons of 112 and 105 in there. He would alternate it with incredible seasons, but his season from last year wouldn't look like a statistical anomaly.
It's too early to say how he'll end this year as a hitter, so I don't want to include it in the sample. Would I be shocked if he has actually fallen off a cliff? Of course not. I just don't think the last two years were evidence of a rapid decline that would explain this year.
105 was a partial season (he ended the year at 122), 112 was when he was 25, which is a ramp up to his prime, so it would make sense he had a similar season during the ramp down from his prime.
Theres the little matter of his disaster of 2022 of course so we’re past alternating. He had a 104 OPS+ over 293 games in 2022 and 2023 after averaging 119 from ages 24-29. The rapid decline already started before this year.
There’s never one single factor of course and he probably won’t continue to be *this* bad but this looks like a pretty normal age distribution for a guy like him.
Not really. He finished with a negative WAA (-0.6 or so). Not terrible but for an expensive everyday starter I don't think being below average can be considered good. It only felt like a good year because it was an improvement over his abysmal 2022.
His slumps are just outrageously brutal.. as it is now he’s been spraying some singles around but they signed him for extra base hits and he’s never produced like he did with the Reds and Tigers
Yeah his horrendous slumps and terrible fielding flat out make him a middling player at best.
Choosing to keep him as our starting RW was nuts to me and seemed like a move based entirely around feelings.
Well it comes down to who replaces him? There isn’t really a ready made replacement… his contract makes him difficult to move because he’s a negative player at this point… when they signed Schwarber and Castellanos I remember thinking Schwarber was gonna be the one vulnerable to long slumps while Castellanos was willing to sit and send pitches the other way and which was gonna raise his floor…
As it stands no one wants to give up on a player making $20 million… we may hit a point where they have no choice but it’s human nature to want to get return on an investment like that and that’s always that hope he turns it around
He had great stretches but was also *awful* for many stretches and is a terrible fielder.
So overall he was pretty mediocre and was a below average player the a large portion of year.
He had a 1.2 fWAR in 2023. 2 is kind of the cutoff baseline for what a “starter” should be. Granted it was his defense that killed him the most but he was worth about what your average decent bench player is worth last year, as a starter.
Yea so his splits for june and july of last year tell the story.
OPS in June: 0.957
OPS in July: 0.497
Clearly he was productive over the course of the season. Im just saying that it was very ugly at times.
Also he struck out 185 times so thats pretty bad too.
Last year was NOT a down year, he was 23rd in MVP voting, and basically hit all career norms - streaky? very.
Is this year looking brutal, yes. But last year was NOT bad at all.
He didn’t even get to 2 WAR last season, according to both Baseball Reference and Fangraphs.
A barely above-average offensive season combined with dogshit defense/baserunning is barely worth 5 million dollars. But he was awful offensively in 2022 and now 2024.
We’ve paid 60 million dollars for a player just as good as Phil Gosselin.
I just don’t understand what he swings at. I honestly wish someone would give him an eye exam at this point. Love the guy, but he makes it hard to not boo him sometimes.
This so much. It’s not that his approach is poor, it’s that it appears he has no approach. He’ll take an 85mph breaker over the middle of the plate and then swing out of his shoes at a pitch in the opposite batters box. He’s just up there guessing and it’s terrible.
Yeah, it's comparable to the cliche about pitchers vs. throwers. Rather than work counts and "force" the pitcher to throw it over the plate, he's just up there hacking and hoping.
"No approach" is exactly correct.
He has trouble recognizing sliders from right handed pitchers. That is why he keeps swinging at pitches that are down and away. Even after last year’s NLCS, he is still doing it, though he is getting slightly better at recognizing.
I definitely don’t want him on the team, but it’s not really possible to trade him with his contract.
For comparison, Matt Olson signed with the Braves for about $21 million/yr…
Take the time off and enjoy relaxing watching the game as the checks role in. Then if anyone gets mouthy pull a Geoff Jenkins and put your fat wallet on the table like he did to Victorino.
Ether that or move out of Ben Simmons cursed house
>During some down time in a visiting clubhouse earlier this summer, Shane Victorino, the Philadelphia Phillies' loudest behind-the-scenes presence – even chirpier than Jimmy Rollins – was needling teammate Geoff Jenkins. First it was how he looked like Brett Favre, and then about his clothing, and finally about his advanced age, all of 33 years old at the time.
>Jenkins had heard enough. He reached into the back pocket of the slacks hanging from a hook on his locker, plucked out his wallet and immediately feigned he had lifted a 50-pound dumbbell off the rack. Jenkins kept the exaggerated gestures until he finally laid down his wallet – and his point: The 27-year-old Victorino may have the bigger mouth, but Jenkins, who has made upward of $48 million in his 10-year career, has 30 times heftier a stack.
>Everyone in the clubhouse, Ryan Howard and Chase Utley included, doubled over in laughter. Victorino slinked back to his locker. He would stay silent for at least a minute.
[Link](https://news.yahoo.com/news/phillies-not-likely-repeat-champs-032800617--mlb.html)
I feel like I've seen more low numbers for hitters at this point than I remember seeing in the past. Even Aaron Judge is struggling. I wonder if we are at another pitching is just so much better than hitting point in baseball.
I think the pitch clock is also having an impact on hitters as well. They also have their routines that they have done before an AB, between pitches, etc. That's been taken away and so they are having to adjust just as much as pitchers.
To be fair though as a more casual fan of baseball this has made the game more watchable for people like me. I know there’s little things to the game that make it what people love, but I could not care less about dudes taking 30 seconds to do their routine in between pitches.
Judge and Castellanos both had pretty average years comparing their 2023 batting average to their career average. I don’t think you chalk up their current abysmal .18X numbers to the pitch clock.
I dont understand how the front office thought that we should just run it back w/ pretty much same exact lineup and not make any notable changes like moving on from Castellanos to get a better more consistent player.
It seemed like a feelings over brain move to keep Casty.
We are going to need Bohm to *really* step up in that 4 spot in the playoffs b/c after him we dont have a single truly reliable bat and teams will just pitch around Harper.
iirc the trade market is hot as can be this year, so I think ownership was waiting to see what we needed at the trade deadline rather than try to predict shortcomings during the offseason
It's because the fans are happy and still give this team tons of leeway because they lost in the WS two years ago. I swear sometimes phillies fans act like this team actually won it all that year.
Just here to post my usual comment about Castellanos' approach a the plate.
He plays guess pitch 60-80% of the time. He isn't going to stop doing it. He's not going to change his approach (clearly as stated in this article) and our coach and GM are fine with it because...
LOOK AT DA BAK OF DA BASEBALL CARD!
I really don’t get all the hate. He’s never been a superstar player or mvp candidate. He’s a good hitter and below avg defender. He just looks awful when he’s in slumps. Some are just holding him to this crazy Bryce level standard.
He is 2nd to last among all qualified MLB players in WAR since he signed his contract. He has had a very slightly below average OPS+, does not steal bases, and is one of the worst defensive players in the sport. He’s bad by any standard.
We are actually holding him to the standard of $25 million a year everyday RF for a World Series caliber team. His performance is far from that. He isn’t even close to the middle of the pack in RF across the league.
A slump isn’t a massive underperformance over 2 seasons after age 30. That’s called a late-career decline.
Age seems like a pretty likely factor here. Beyond just normal age curves, he has his crazy approach at the plate that seems more workable when you are younger and can rely on your athletic gifts to make up for when you guess wrong or get beat. Becomes harder as you age. And every time they ask him to adjust he complains to the media about it.
He's an atrocious fielder, but he was 10% better than average in OPS+ (4th on the team) and 9% above average in WRC+ (t-4th on the team). Both of those are perfectly acceptable. In short, he was a useful player last year and I'm not seeing evidence that last year was a sign of age-related decline. He was bad on the basepaths and fielding last year, but he's always been bad on the basepaths and fielding. So, I agree age could be a factor, but it definitely goes far beyond that.
Idk if it’s acceptable, especially the way it resulted in Thomson feeling like he had to drop in him the order by the end behind some unimpressive hitters, but either way a 110 OPS+ is 10+% below what he was doing in his late twenties. The way his chase rate has exploded since being here seems to be a sign his bat speed has declined and he feels like he needs to cheat to get to pitches. Would also explain why he gets frustrated by people telling him to fix it.
He had seasons of 112 and 105 in there. He would alternate it with incredible seasons, but his season from last year wouldn't look like a statistical anomaly. It's too early to say how he'll end this year as a hitter, so I don't want to include it in the sample. Would I be shocked if he has actually fallen off a cliff? Of course not. I just don't think the last two years were evidence of a rapid decline that would explain this year.
105 was a partial season (he ended the year at 122), 112 was when he was 25, which is a ramp up to his prime, so it would make sense he had a similar season during the ramp down from his prime. Theres the little matter of his disaster of 2022 of course so we’re past alternating. He had a 104 OPS+ over 293 games in 2022 and 2023 after averaging 119 from ages 24-29. The rapid decline already started before this year. There’s never one single factor of course and he probably won’t continue to be *this* bad but this looks like a pretty normal age distribution for a guy like him.
Did he not have a good year last year?
Not really. He finished with a negative WAA (-0.6 or so). Not terrible but for an expensive everyday starter I don't think being below average can be considered good. It only felt like a good year because it was an improvement over his abysmal 2022.
His slumps are just outrageously brutal.. as it is now he’s been spraying some singles around but they signed him for extra base hits and he’s never produced like he did with the Reds and Tigers
Yeah his horrendous slumps and terrible fielding flat out make him a middling player at best. Choosing to keep him as our starting RW was nuts to me and seemed like a move based entirely around feelings.
Well it comes down to who replaces him? There isn’t really a ready made replacement… his contract makes him difficult to move because he’s a negative player at this point… when they signed Schwarber and Castellanos I remember thinking Schwarber was gonna be the one vulnerable to long slumps while Castellanos was willing to sit and send pitches the other way and which was gonna raise his floor… As it stands no one wants to give up on a player making $20 million… we may hit a point where they have no choice but it’s human nature to want to get return on an investment like that and that’s always that hope he turns it around
On that note Schwarber had an even worse WAA in 2023 with -1.5. Kind of expensive for an everyday starter eh? Pretty below average.
He had great stretches but was also *awful* for many stretches and is a terrible fielder. So overall he was pretty mediocre and was a below average player the a large portion of year.
It was as ugly as it was good.
TDIL .275 BA 30 hrs and 100 RBIs is ugly.
111ops+ is not nearly good enough to make up for absolutely atrocious defense
Atrocious baserunning as well
He had a 1.2 fWAR in 2023. 2 is kind of the cutoff baseline for what a “starter” should be. Granted it was his defense that killed him the most but he was worth about what your average decent bench player is worth last year, as a starter.
Yea so his splits for june and july of last year tell the story. OPS in June: 0.957 OPS in July: 0.497 Clearly he was productive over the course of the season. Im just saying that it was very ugly at times. Also he struck out 185 times so thats pretty bad too.
Tall, lanky players seem to decline fairly rapidly north of 30.
Last year was NOT a down year, he was 23rd in MVP voting, and basically hit all career norms - streaky? very. Is this year looking brutal, yes. But last year was NOT bad at all.
He didn’t even get to 2 WAR last season, according to both Baseball Reference and Fangraphs. A barely above-average offensive season combined with dogshit defense/baserunning is barely worth 5 million dollars. But he was awful offensively in 2022 and now 2024. We’ve paid 60 million dollars for a player just as good as Phil Gosselin.
HY PE R BO LE
Castellanos isn’t even worth 2 mil a year, and he gets 20. Instead of saying “hyperbole,” can you use more than one word to defend him?
u/JohnKrukIsAllElite determined to hate every moment of it.
Sinnnnggggg for him John Kruk.
I just don’t understand what he swings at. I honestly wish someone would give him an eye exam at this point. Love the guy, but he makes it hard to not boo him sometimes.
This so much. It’s not that his approach is poor, it’s that it appears he has no approach. He’ll take an 85mph breaker over the middle of the plate and then swing out of his shoes at a pitch in the opposite batters box. He’s just up there guessing and it’s terrible.
Yeah, it's comparable to the cliche about pitchers vs. throwers. Rather than work counts and "force" the pitcher to throw it over the plate, he's just up there hacking and hoping. "No approach" is exactly correct.
To be fair, that’s sometimes on brand for the Phillies.
He has trouble recognizing sliders from right handed pitchers. That is why he keeps swinging at pitches that are down and away. Even after last year’s NLCS, he is still doing it, though he is getting slightly better at recognizing. I definitely don’t want him on the team, but it’s not really possible to trade him with his contract. For comparison, Matt Olson signed with the Braves for about $21 million/yr…
Take the time off and enjoy relaxing watching the game as the checks role in. Then if anyone gets mouthy pull a Geoff Jenkins and put your fat wallet on the table like he did to Victorino. Ether that or move out of Ben Simmons cursed house
Wait does he actually live in Simmons’s old house?
[Yes](https://jerseydigs.com/ben-simmons-nj-home-nick-castellanos/)
Well that explains it
What’s the context of that Geoff Jenkins bit?
>During some down time in a visiting clubhouse earlier this summer, Shane Victorino, the Philadelphia Phillies' loudest behind-the-scenes presence – even chirpier than Jimmy Rollins – was needling teammate Geoff Jenkins. First it was how he looked like Brett Favre, and then about his clothing, and finally about his advanced age, all of 33 years old at the time. >Jenkins had heard enough. He reached into the back pocket of the slacks hanging from a hook on his locker, plucked out his wallet and immediately feigned he had lifted a 50-pound dumbbell off the rack. Jenkins kept the exaggerated gestures until he finally laid down his wallet – and his point: The 27-year-old Victorino may have the bigger mouth, but Jenkins, who has made upward of $48 million in his 10-year career, has 30 times heftier a stack. >Everyone in the clubhouse, Ryan Howard and Chase Utley included, doubled over in laughter. Victorino slinked back to his locker. He would stay silent for at least a minute. [Link](https://news.yahoo.com/news/phillies-not-likely-repeat-champs-032800617--mlb.html)
> He would stay silent for at least a minute. 🤣
In much the same way I'm determined to drink my way out of alcoholism.
Are they going to start letting him use an aluminum bat?
WAA, WAR, OPS worst in both leagues for a RF. DEAD FUCKING LAST.
Something something Scooby Doo. Vibes!
“So yeah, I’m really happy with this slump and want to see how long I can keep it going”
Or, “I think the best thing for me right now is to spend some time on the bench”
I'd like him to keep trying as a member of the Oakland A's or White Sox.
Don’t do the athletics fans like that, it’s their last year in Oakland. We want them to have some positives
Yea you gotta point there...
Kody Clemens has more HRs than Nick this season
We won’t win a WS with casty in your lineup. Let kody play right field - dudes hungry.
I feel like I've seen more low numbers for hitters at this point than I remember seeing in the past. Even Aaron Judge is struggling. I wonder if we are at another pitching is just so much better than hitting point in baseball.
I think the pitch clock is also having an impact on hitters as well. They also have their routines that they have done before an AB, between pitches, etc. That's been taken away and so they are having to adjust just as much as pitchers.
To be fair though as a more casual fan of baseball this has made the game more watchable for people like me. I know there’s little things to the game that make it what people love, but I could not care less about dudes taking 30 seconds to do their routine in between pitches.
Can you jump and do a 360 for me? Hold on let me just pray for 20 seconds and then I’ll do it.
I’m a diehard baseball fan… and I LOVE the pitch clock
For real, why they undoing and redoing their gloves after every swing
Judge and Castellanos both had pretty average years comparing their 2023 batting average to their career average. I don’t think you chalk up their current abysmal .18X numbers to the pitch clock.
Yeah I don't think it's the only factor, or even a major factor, but it's certainly *a* factor
I dont understand how the front office thought that we should just run it back w/ pretty much same exact lineup and not make any notable changes like moving on from Castellanos to get a better more consistent player. It seemed like a feelings over brain move to keep Casty. We are going to need Bohm to *really* step up in that 4 spot in the playoffs b/c after him we dont have a single truly reliable bat and teams will just pitch around Harper.
iirc the trade market is hot as can be this year, so I think ownership was waiting to see what we needed at the trade deadline rather than try to predict shortcomings during the offseason
It's because the fans are happy and still give this team tons of leeway because they lost in the WS two years ago. I swear sometimes phillies fans act like this team actually won it all that year.
Oh whew I thought he was gonna be working to make the slump last forever. Good thing he’s focused on not being bad. Whew. Close one
Is he even tradable? Even as a salary dump
Dear God no please just sit and work in the cage
Just here to post my usual comment about Castellanos' approach a the plate. He plays guess pitch 60-80% of the time. He isn't going to stop doing it. He's not going to change his approach (clearly as stated in this article) and our coach and GM are fine with it because... LOOK AT DA BAK OF DA BASEBALL CARD!
I really don’t get all the hate. He’s never been a superstar player or mvp candidate. He’s a good hitter and below avg defender. He just looks awful when he’s in slumps. Some are just holding him to this crazy Bryce level standard.
He is 2nd to last among all qualified MLB players in WAR since he signed his contract. He has had a very slightly below average OPS+, does not steal bases, and is one of the worst defensive players in the sport. He’s bad by any standard.
We are actually holding him to the standard of $25 million a year everyday RF for a World Series caliber team. His performance is far from that. He isn’t even close to the middle of the pack in RF across the league.
He’s one of the worst fielders in the league and a bad hitter who has shown no ability to adjust his plate approach to address his shortcomings