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Plate Discipline: The Phillies Have Major League Baseball’s Lowest Chase Rate
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Great shout here from Jeff at CBS:
The #Phillies have the lowest chase rate in MLB at 25.0%
— Jeff Kerr (@JeffKerrCBS) April 6, 2025
If you can boil down the Diamondbacks and Mets playoff losses to one key stat, it’s probably chase rate. They swung at too much garbage out of the zone, over and over again en route to a couple of disappointing exits. Now, nine games into the 2025 season, it’s the lowest number in baseball.
Our Sportradar data reveals the percentage dropped even lower after Sunday’s win, and remains better than every other team. Here’s the top 15 for you:
Notable is that the Phillies’ chase rate in the 2024 regular season was terrible, 25th overall at 30.3%. It was even worse in 2023, 27th at 31.3%. Those numbers carried into the postseason with a 30% chase rate in 2023 and a 31.8% chase rate in 2024. Even when the Phils went to the World Series in 2022, they were sitting higher than 30% all year long, both regular season and playoffs. It’s been an issue for years now, as anyone with a set of eyeballs can attest to.
To take it a step further, I went through our data to put 2024 and 2025 numbers next to each other.
Highlighted in the yellow boxes here are most of the key players, everyday starters and important bench pieces, and you can see their chase rates year-to-year stacked up for comparison:
Individually, Trea Turner, Nick Castellanos, Kyle Schwarber, J.T. Realmuto, Edmundo Sosa, Bryson Stott, and Bryce Harper are down in chase rate. Brandon Marsh is up and Alec Bohm is flat. You can also see in there that Johan Rojas is a perpetual offender and his numbers combined with some of the peripheral guys (Austin Hays, David Dahl), played a role in pulling back the overall 2024 number.
The largest drop in chase rate individually goes to Stott, Sosa, and Castellanos, who are all down more than 10% year-over-year. Turner is down 7% and Schwarber, who already had an excellent eye at the plate, got his rate into the teens. Leaguewide, Schwarber, Stott, and Max Kepler are all in the top 25 when it comes to laying off slop outside of the zone and showing good discipline.
Small sample size so far, but great trends here in the early going. This has been the Phillies’ Achilles heel and they’ve shown significant improvement thus far.
EDIT – Some people were asking about the Phillies’ chase rate in the early window of 2024. Good question. I went back and filtered the data through April 7th of 2024, and their chase rate was 27.8% at that point. So, in the same time frame year-to-year, they are down 3.8%. Good trend.
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