It’s kind of been an issue for them in the past
Over the past two seasons, there has been one overarching theme to what the Phillies’ offense does while at the plate. It’s not limited to one player, but rather a perceived epidemic that has permeated all nooks and crannies of the roster: chasing. One of the biggest things that the Phillies have been accused of has been chasing too much, too many pitches that are not in the strikezone. The issue has showed up at the exact wrong times for the team, the times when the team needed to chase the least. The 2023 National League Championship Series was one of the first, or at least most broadly televised, instances where the opposition took advantage of the team expanding their own strike zone to limits that defy what a hitter is able to get to with a bat, followed by more of the same in the 2024 NLDS against the Mets.
It’s not just that they were chasing outside of the zone that was causing some issues. The team had players that were not exactly aggressive with pitches within the zone either. There were times early in 2024 when the team looked like they were taking the new approach given them by being a bit too passive. Nick Castellanos was the prime example of this, talking about how the passivity took away from his game.
The ideal for a hitter is simple: don’t chase pitches that aren’t strikes, but do damage with those that are. It’s what all hitters strive for. It’s probably the best way to find success, and for some, a way to determine how a hitter is doing in a season. We’ve moved passed the old way of player evaluation (“He’s a .300 hitter! Give him $80 million!”) and into deeper level thinking. How hard is a player hitting a ball? Is he making good swing decisions? We want to know this, but how can it quantified, how can we put a number on it?
A while ago, there was some work done to try and measure how well a hitter does with pitches that are in the zone. We tend to focus only on making sure that a hitter doesn’t chase pitches that do not end up in the strike zone rather that focus on what they should be doing: swinging at pitches in the zone and doing damage with them. It’s what we should be looking for most often when trying to see if the approach within the box is changing. It’s great to have a hitter that doesn’t chase, but if he’s so passive that he’s also letting hittable pitches go right on by with nary a bat lifted off the shoulder, that’s also an issue.
With that in mind, much smarter people were able to quantify that approach. The SEAGER (SElective AGgression Engagement Rate) approach is a statistic developed by Robert Orr at Baseball Prospectus that tries to measure how often hitters swing at hittable pitches and do damage with them, exactly what we just talked about it. It is well worth reading the entirety of the article, but the basic idea is this, in Orr’s own words:
The important thing about the pitches that [Corey] Seager swings at isn’t that they’re strikes. It’s that they’re hittable, regardless of balls and strikes, because of their location. Letting a hittable pitch land in the zone often leads to worse outcomes down the road for a hitter. The key part of making any decision is weighing up the benefits of an action vs. the cost of inaction. For Seager, that equation is straightforward: if he’s able to drive it then he hits it, and if he can’t then he doesn’t. He’s not waiting for a specific pitch that may never come, but just the first one that he can damage. In that way he never cedes control of his at-bats to the pitcher. Pitchers can hide their fastballs from hitters who hunt them, but they can’t stay out of the zone altogether if they want to stay in the game very long.
Think about it long enough and it makes total sense. One would hope that if a team like the Phillies have had issues in the past with chasing outside of the zone, that they would at least somewhat counterbalance that by doing damage on pitches in the zone.
Luckily for us, Baseball Prospectus has the data that we need in order to check on the SEAGER scores. It allows us to see who is improving in this area and who is lacking. What I did was put in the team’s SEAGER scores from 2024 and 2025 (to this point) to see who has had the best and worst year to year changes.
Now, there needs to be some context of course, specifically how does it rate against other players in the league. The first is that for 2025, the top SEAGER number for qualified hitters is 29.3, being produced by Joey Bart. That, for some, might invalidate the statistic, but a closer look says that it passes the sniff test since Bart is currently hitting .293/.411/.400, good for a 132 wRC+. Further down the list, you get names that look a little more familiar, names like Judge (25.1), Tatis (23.7) and Witt, Jr. (22.9). The elite hitters in the game have high SEAGER scores, which makes sense because they’re the elite hitters in the game. There are others where you scratch your head a bit (Shea Langeliers has a score of 24.2?), but again, Langeliers has cut his strikeout rate almost in half and has seen his OBP crest .300 for the first time in his career.
As it pertains to the Phillies, seeing Harper, Schwarber and Castellanos towards the top makes sense. They’ve had good seasons thus far. The surprise is the improvement that Johan Rojas has made in his swing decisions. Offensively, the numbers from last year look better, the batting average, on base percentage, and slugging percentage all going up. That could be a result of his swinging and doing more damage with pitches in the zone. His chase rate is basically the same as last year, so we’ll have to see.
Again, these are just observations. Orr did great work in identifying this as a skill players have and being able to see it put into numbers is helpful. There are other issues that the team has still (hitting better with runners in scoring position, hitting for power), but at least there are strides being made in the right direction for one of the issues the team has had.
If you’re interested in Robert’s work, he has an app that he updates that you can use for your own work.