Phillies' Slow 2026 Start Is Mostly Bad Luck, Not Bad Baseball

The Philadelphia Phillies rank worse than all but one MLB team in both runs scored and runs allowed through the first two weeks of the 2026 season, and that one team is the Chicago White Sox.

That’s the ugly framing. Here’s the less ugly one.

Bryce Harper is posting a 153 wRC+ and Kyle Schwarber is right behind him at 149 wRC+. Those two are doing their jobs. The problem is that Bryson Stott has cratered to a 39 wRC+ and Alec Bohm sits at 33 wRC+, and a lineup built top-heavy can absorb some dead weight at the bottom but not that much dead weight. The Phillies’ offense is the Harper-Schwarber-Trea Turner show, and Turner himself hasn’t arrived yet at 87 wRC+, which makes the drag from Stott and Bohm even harder to carry.

The good news, and there’s actually real good news here, is that almost nothing about this slow start reflects who this team actually is. FanGraphs’ BaseRuns metric, which estimates expected run totals using basic inputs like hits, home runs, and stolen bases run through a more sophisticated formula, says Philadelphia deserves to be scoring 4.23 runs per game instead of the 3.53 they’re actually putting up. That’s nearly three-quarters of a run a game left on the table through sheer bad luck. Spread those missing runs across the 15 games they’ve played, and as Just Baseball laid out, the Phillies could have four additional wins right now, which would put them alongside the Dodgers for the best record in baseball.

They’ve also run a .269 BABIP as a team. That number is historically low. Since Citizens Bank Park opened, Philadelphia has never finished a full season with a BABIP below .283. Their median over those 23 seasons sits at .293. Only four teams this century have even finished a full season under .270. The Phillies are well below that threshold right now, which means balls are finding gloves at a rate that simply won’t hold.

Then there’s Justin Crawford.

He’s batting .341 with a 151 wRC+ and he won’t keep doing that. Nobody expects him to. But the interesting thing is that Turner needs to pick up some of that production as Crawford regresses toward something more sustainable, and Turner is capable of doing exactly that once he gets going.

Stott and Bohm aren’t going to keep hitting like replacement-level filler. Both are established major leaguers who have produced before. When they start performing anywhere close to league average, the offense jumps. When the BABIP normalizes, the offense jumps again. When Turner turns it on, the offense jumps a third time. Those aren’t three independent long shots. They’re three likely corrections that happen to be pointing the same direction.

The Phillies dropped three one-run games early that a healthier offense might have stolen back. They’ve had extra-base hits pile up in empty-base situations that left crooked numbers off the board. None of that is structural, and none of it reflects a team that won back-to-back NL East titles and carries one of the five biggest payrolls in the sport.

Philadelphia looks broken on paper right now. The underlying numbers say they’re the most unlucky offense in the league and playing behind a defense that has also gotten off to a rough start. The calendar says it’s April 22 and the division hasn’t gone anywhere.