It's Not An Upset: How The Phillies Are Just Better Than The Braves

PHILADELPHIA, PA — It's Red October once more, and it's perhaps an even more miraculous season than last fall.

The Phillies are battling the Atlanta Braves in the National League Division Series once again, and it's doubtlessly a better and more experienced Phillies squad this time around. But the Braves were not only owners of the best record in baseball during the regular season. They boasted perhaps the greatest offensive attack in the history of the sport.

The Phillies are one game away from shocking the world and defeating the Braves. But it shouldn't be a shock. The Braves, as great as they are, were built primarily to collect wins across an entire season. The Phillies, who struggled at times during the season, are built to win in Red October.

All 30 teams enter the offseason knowing the rules. The goal is always to win a championship that is played in October, not in May or June. So while it's impressive that the Braves, Dodgers, and Orioles (the latter two were eliminated this week) stockpiled those wins when they did, they may have come at the cost of wins when they really counted.

Here's a glance at a handful of exhibits demonstrating why the Phillies are the better championship team, some historical context, and a reminder about why that's all that matters.

The Basic Baseball History Exhibit

The baseball playoff structure has constantly undergone tiny shifts, but one thing has remained the same: the winner of the regular season and the postseason are usually not the same team.

In fact, only 12 times in the last 54 years has the team with the best regular season record gone on to win the World Series. So the Dodgers and Braves being beaten by superior teams in the postseason is not the upset, or miscarriage of justice, that oddsmakers would have you believe.

The Roster Building Exhibit

The winner of the World Series is, each year, the team that is hot at the right time, that is rested at the right time, that has the right momentum at the right time, that is managed perfectly from the field to the clubhouse to the front office.

Look at how Dave Dombrowski and Rob Thomson have expertly crafted this postseason Phillies roster. They nurtured high-ceiling relief pitcher Orion Kerkering in the minor leagues all year long before calling him up just before the end of the season. Days later, this fresh arm is retiring Marlins and Braves in order in high leverage playoff innings.

Meanwhile, the Braves are turning to pitchers like a declining, once-great Brad Hand, who sported an ugly 5.53 ERA during the regular season, to get key outs.

Or look at Braves starting rotation as a whole, riddled with injuries. A sustainable pitching staff is part of what earns a team a championship. And while you could argue that Brian Snitker's use of Charlie Morton, Max Fried, Mike Soroka, and Kyle Wright during a 104-win season may or may not have caused their injuries, the facts are clear: 3 of those 4 pitchers are unavailable, and Fried clearly isn't his best self at the most important time of the year.

Meanwhile the Phillies ran with a 6-man rotation during the stretch run and gave Ranger Suarez extra weeks to build back up from a minor injury in August and September.

The Bryce Elder-Michael Lorenzen Exhibit

The Phillies lit up Braves Game 3 starter Bryce Elder on Wednesday night. Elder was a very good pitcher during the regular season, loosely on par with Suarez. But he threw 174 innings during the regular season as Atlanta piled up their regular season wins, which is not only a career high, but it was more than three times as many innings as he pitched in 2022 (54).

The only Phillies starter who reached a career high in innings thrown was Michael Lorenzen. While Lorenzen's addition at the trade deadline allowed the Phillies to use a six-man rotation, helping their aces preserve their best stuff for October, Lorenzen began to falter later in the year. The Braves relying on Elder to start an NLDS game this year is like if Phillies were forced to start Lorezen over Nola or Suarez because they went too hard during the regular season.

The March Madness Exhibit

While the Braves fanbase, as well as national media (did you catch the malignant tone of famous broadcaster Bob Costas during the Dodgers losses to the Diamondbacks?) may easily forget that the chaos of the postseason in any sport is what becoming a champion is all about, common sense has not. Excusing the losses of highly ranked teams so vociferously is not something that's really ever been done before, so it's unusual that its seeing so much attention here. March Madness, after all, gives 64 (now 66) teams a chance to win it all.

But when 16 seeds beat 1 seeds last spring, there was raucous celebration, not endless scrambling to find a way to reconstitute the sport to favor teams that won when it didn't matter.

The 2011 Phillies Exhibit

The 2022 Phillies kickstarted their playoff run by defeating the St. Louis Cardinals at home. It was dubbed the "Ryan Howard revenge tour" because the legendary Phillies slugger tore his achilles to make the final out of the 2011 National League Division Series, effectively ending the most dominant part of Howard's career and a golden era of Philadelphia baseball. The 90-win Cards went on to win the World Series that year, while the 102-win Phillies went home. Few Phillies fans recall anyone watching the historic pitching duel between Roy Halladay and Chris Carpenter in Game 5 and coming away with a freezing cold take bemoaning the playoff structure.

The 2021 Braves Exhibit

How abbreviated the memory of that fanbase seems to be. As if it were chopped from reality.

The 2021 Braves won just 88 games during the regular season. They beat the 106-win Dodgers (who had just beaten the 107-win Giants) before toppling the 95-win Astros to win the World Series.

The LeBron Exhibit

The greatest basketball player alive has accrued four NBA championships in his career. While some of these were with the superteam Miami Heat, others were against superteams like the Golden State Warriors. In 2016, for example, Golden State went 73-6 during the regular season (LeBron's Cleveland Cavaliers went 57-25). And when the two met in the Finals and the Cavs won, there was no hedging about how unfair the playoff process had been to the superteam Warriors.

A true champion shows up when the lights are the brightest.