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You Know Things are Good when the Phillies are Properly Executing (or Even Attempting) a Safety Squeeze
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When talking about things that are rare, you think about the northern white rhinoceros, SEPTA actually running on time, and the Philadelphia Phillies playing a brilliant bit of small ball:
A safety squeeze! You don’t see that very often. Nicely done, too. The Phillies can do no wrong at this particular point in time. You’ve got Taijuan Walker out here looking like the second coming of Sandy Koufax while Johan Rojas is laying down bunts and hitting .303 to boot.
We don’t actually have any Sportradar stats for squeeze attempts, be it safety or suicide. Our data does have bunt hits, four for the Phillies this season (tied for 10th most), and sacrifice bunts, three, which is tied for 16th. The Phillies do have eight sac flies, which is bottom 10 in MLB. Interestingly enough, sac bunts and sac flies used to be counted as one stat, then they were separated into two different categories back in 1955. That’s according to the footnote in our data engine.
Recently, there was an April squeeze attempt with Rojas and J.T. Realmuto, though Realmuto was thrown out at home. There’s a Jim Salisbury tweet logging a successful safety squeeze from June 1st, 2022. That was during a 6-5 win over the Giants in which Nick Maton (!) scored Odubel Herrera (!) and moved Johan Camargo (!) to second:
Luke went back and found a squeeze from August of 2023 in which Rojas scored Realmuto:
Looking through social media searches and game logs, Garrett Stubbs had a couple of squeezes in the summer of 2023. Aaron Nola had one in a 2021 loss to the Braves. I’ll keep looking and see what I can find. If there are any other squeeze attempts drop me a line and we’ll add it to the story.
The big takeaway, certainly, is that the Phillies are even attempting small ball, let alone executing. That was the gripe for years, that they just sent sluggers up to the plate to swing for the fences. Now the Phils are slugging AND playing small ball. If they keep this up, they’re going to straight to the moon with Alice Kramden, Katy Perry, and Gayle King.
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