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Philadelphia Phillies Chase Rate Update: Still Moving in the Wrong Direction
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This is your obligatory Philadelphia Phillies chase rate update for June 16th, 2025:
This number has been sliding backwards since the Phillies led Major League Baseball with the lowest chase rate through the early part of April. Back on June 2nd, it dipped to 28.6%, and now it’s down to 29%, so hovering just outside of the bottom ten. They finished last season with a 30.3% mark and that fell even further, to 31.8%, in the Mets NLDS series.
Again, the partner statistic that really completes the picture is “out of zone contact percentage,” which is currently 53.3% for the Phillies. That’s 5th-worst in the league. It’s one thing to swing at pitches that aren’t strikes, but if you put the ball in play it changes the scope of the discussion entirely. The Padres, for instance, chase at the 28th-worst rate in MLB but hit the second-most pitches thrown outside of the zone, at 59.7%. So while their walk numbers aren’t amazing, their strikeout percentage is incredibly low and they slash at a middle-of-the-pack number across all 30 teams.
The reason we keep coming back to this is because it’s the main reason why the Phillies lost to the D Backs in the 2023 NLCS and Mets in the 2024 NLDS. The Phillies who chase above 30% are Edmundo Sosa, Johan Rojas, Nick Castellanos, Bryce Harper, and J.T. Realmuto, while the main players below 30% are Trea Turner (just barely), Alec Bohm, Brandon Marsh, Max Kepler, Brystan Stott, and Kyle Schwarber. Guys like Otto Kemp and Weston Wilson and Rafael Marchan don’t have enough ABs to significantly move the team needle in one direction or the other.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com