Welcome to June: Phillies State of the Union heading into the official start of the 2026 MLB season

Welcome to June 1st, the official, unoffical start of the 2026 MLB season. The Philadelphia Phillies sit at 30-28 with the rubber game in Los Angeles this afternoon. They split the first two with the Dodgers, gave one back Friday 4-2 and then walked into their house and stole Saturday 4-3.

The Phillies sit second in the NL East, and right now, even with plenty of baseball to play, a third-straight division championship doesn’t appear to be happening. Atlanta is 40-19 which has turned Red October 2026 into a Wild Card fight. To understand where the Phillies actually are, you have to start with where they were, because the climb only makes sense next to the hole.

How the Phillies arrived to June 1st

The Phillies season opened as a full-blown disaster, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise to make anybody feel better. The Phillies started 9-19, tied for the worst record in baseball, with a 10-game losing streak buried in the middle of it like a knife.

On April 28 the Phillies fired Rob Thomson, a man with four straight postseason berths, a pennant, and the best winning percentage of any manager in franchise history, and turned the team over to bench coach Don Mattingly for the rest of the year. Dombrowski made that call himself, after Alex Cora looked at an aggressive offer and said no thanks.

Then the whole thing flipped.

Mattingly went 7-1 out of the gate and the Phillies won the first six series they played under him. Reality knocked back for a minute with two straight series losses to the Reds and Guardians, and then they went out west, swept the Padres, and rolled into LA standing up.

That’s the arc so so far for the Phillies. They are a team everybody left for dead and are now back over .500 and squarely in the conversation.

Cristopher Sanchez is the NL Cy Young

What this man is doing gets its own headline, its own paragraph, its own everything. I’m not stuffing it next to Luzardo.

Sánchez broke Grover Cleveland Alexander’s 115-year-old franchise record for consecutive scoreless innings, a mark of 41 that had stood since 1911, and shoved his streak all the way to 44 and two-thirds.

The franchise scoreless leaderboard now reads Sánchez at 44 2/3, then Alexander at 41 in 1911, Cliff Lee at 34 in 2011, and Larry Andersen and Turk Farrell tied at 32 and two-thirds. He doesn’t hold the record. He laps the modern field.

May was a fever dream. Five starts, 39 innings, 45 strikeouts, 3 walks, zero runs. He and Orel Hershiser are the only true starters in MLB history to throw an entire scoreless month with at least four starts. That is the whole list.

He threw a complete-game shutout with a career-high 13 punchouts against the Pirates on May 16. His 600th career strikeout came during the streak, because of course it did.

The full-season line is a Cy Young line, flat out. A 1.47 ERA, lowest in the National League. The MLB lead in innings at 72 and a third. The MLB lead among pitchers in bWAR at 3.7. The NL’s best fWAR at 2.8. This is the year after he finished NL Cy Young runner-up.

That 44 and two-thirds is the seventh-longest single-season streak of the Live Ball Era. The only number left worth chasing is Hershiser’s all-time 59 from 1988.

The Phillies got him from Tampa Bay in November 2019 for Curtis Mead. A skinny prospect with a command question who everybody filed as a back-end arm or a bullpen guy. He’s now the best pitcher in Major League Baseball. Go figure.

The Rest of the Phillies Rotation

Zack Wheeler: still the standard. Four wins, 40 strikeouts, and the 3-0 gem that snapped Cleveland’s seven-game win streak in half. The steady hand, like always.

Jesús Luzardo: doing the job. Four wins, a 4.38 ERA, 72 strikeouts. Honest mid-rotation innings, and on a contender that’s worth more than the lack of buzz suggests.

Aaron Nola: back any minute. Three wins, 56 strikeouts before he hit the paternity list ahead of the Dodgers series. Congrats to the family, now get back here.

Andrew Painter: the kid’s getting his lumps. Rough debut run, and there’s talk the club rushed him into the back of the rotation. The growing pains are real and so is the ceiling, and the ceiling is the part that matters.

The rotation as a unit has come a country mile from where it started. It was lugging around a 5.02 starter ERA early before it tightened up behind Sánchez and Wheeler.

The Bullpen

Jhoan Duran: best money we spent. The offseason headliner, and worth every cent. A 1.62 ERA, a 1.02 WHIP, a 26-to-5 strikeout-to-walk ratio through 16 and two-thirds, and 12 saves. The ninth is shut, and there’s nothing more to discuss about the ninth.

Orion Kerkering: full circle. He’s 3-0 and grabbed the win at Dodger Stadium on Saturday, the first time he’d pitched there since the Game 4 NLDS error that ended our season last October. That’s the kind of moment that hardens a young arm, and this one was always going to come out the other side.

José Alvarado: a little wobbly, still useful. Shaky of late, but he slammed the door on the finale in the Padres sweep.

Brad Keller and Jonathan Bowlan have eaten real middle innings. In the Padres sweep the bullpen tossed eight frames and surrendered one run, with Kerkering and Keller stacking two holds apiece.

Phillies Lineup – By The Numbers

Kyle Schwarber (DH): the engine. A major-league-leading 22 home runs and 39 RBI on a .238 average. Nobody on this roster carries more of the offense, and it isn’t close.

Bryce Harper (1B): the heartbeat. .266 with 13 homers and 33 RBI, and he had the tying knock in Saturday’s rally. The trade chatter that floats around this man every few months has never once made baseball sense, and it doesn’t now.

Trea Turner (SS): coming. A .222 average with 7 homers, which is not what the reigning NL batting champ is supposed to put up. The average is the noise, not the signal. He homered in back-to-back games in San Diego, and when he gets hot the entire lineup changes shape. The track record says it’s coming.

Brandon Marsh (CF): quietly one of our best bats. Team leader in hits with 59, plus 5 homers and 24 RBI, and he sat as high as .322, sixth in the NL, earlier in the spring. A monster against righties.

Bryson Stott (2B): trending straight up. Started slow at .207 through 25 games, then cracked three homers to open May and grabbed the everyday job under Mattingly. Earned it.

Alec Bohm (3B): the comeback inside the comeback. Bohm hit .161 through his first 34 games, the worst start by a Phillie through 34 games since Roy Sievers in 1962 and the fourth-lowest OPS through 34 games in franchise history since 1901. He’s climbing off that floor and went deep Saturday in LA. This isn’t a hunch. He did the exact same thing last year, hitting .221 in March and April and then .308 the rest of the way. The floor he digs out of is always deeper than people remember, and he always digs out.

J.T. Realmuto (C): still the best in the business. Re-signed on a three-year, 45 million dollar deal, still the most durable catcher alive, and he homered in the win over the Padres in late May.

Edmundo Sosa (UTIL): the platoon weapon and Saturday’s hero. His two-run shot in the eighth capped the rally that buried the Dodgers’ six-game win streak. Keep doing that.

Adolis García (RF): brought here to mash. The offseason pickup from Texas, and against lefties he’s the one right-handed bat actually keeping his end of the deal.

Justin Crawford (CF): the future. The team’s No. 3 prospect, Carl Crawford’s kid, getting every chance to lock down center field. Take it.

The Phillies, as a group, are feast or famine and the numbers spell it out. The Phillies hit .226 as a club, 28th in baseball, with a .294 OBP that’s also 28th, but the power ranks 9th with 69 homers. This lineup hits it out or it goes silent, and that profile is exactly why one cold weekend can look like the sky falling.

The Split That Can Still Sink The 2026 Phillies

Here’s the wound that never scabbed over, and it’s the part of this team nobody should lose sight of while the climb feels good. The right side of the plate against left-handed pitching.

Entering play on May 14, the Phillies’ right-handed hitters were tied with Texas for dead last in all of baseball against lefties at a .590 OPS. That’s a .203 average over 276 plate appearances with 7 homers and 21 RBI. This was sold to us as a strength. It has been an open sewer.

Look at the names on the invoice. The expectations were sky high for Adolis García, Trea Turner, Alec Bohm and J.T. Realmuto, and that quartet whiffing against southpaws is the single biggest reason this season has been a slog. García is the lone exception, propping the whole group up with a .262/.340/.476 line against lefties.

It gets worse the harder you stare. Only four Phillies sit above the league-average .708 OPS against left-handed pitching: Bryson Stott, Kyle Schwarber, Adolis García and Bryce Harper. Two of those four hit left-handed, which tells you exactly how barren the right-handed side has been.

The one actual answer has been Sosa, who over the prior two seasons hit .318/.362/.533 in 116 plate appearances against lefties, which is the entire reason he keeps spelling Stott when a southpaw takes the ball. Stott’s own track record against lefties is rough, a .224 average and .585 OPS over the two seasons entering 2026, which is one of the worst marks in the league for a left-handed hitter against lefties.

This bled straight into the standings, and the signs were sitting in plain sight. During Mattingly’s 7-1 start the team hadn’t even faced a left-handed starter yet, and they were 0-10 against non-opener lefty starters at that point. The hot run was partly the schedule handing us righties on a platter. The lefty problem didn’t vanish. It just sat in the corner and waited.

The Phillies Defense

The other thing that warrants real concern. A major-league-worst minus-20 defensive runs saved. Mattingly’s entire sermon has been about cleaning up the early errors that kept turning into runs and torpedoing games, and the recent stretch of cleaner baseball is mostly that: fewer self-inflicted wounds. Fewer, not none. That number has to keep dropping.

Phillies Injuries and Roster Moves

• Max Lazar moved to the 60-day IL with a left oblique strain.
• Aaron Nola on the paternity list, back any day now.
• Zach Pop came off the IL Saturday and got designated for assignment in the same breath. Brutal business.

Where The Phillies Stand and What’s Next

A team that opened 9-19 and fired its manager is back over .500 with the best pitcher in the National League, the home run king, a closer who locks the door, and a defense that’s finally tightening the screws.

The schedule sets up to keep building. After today’s rubber match in LA it’s the Padres back at the Bank, then the White Sox, then up to Toronto. Win the games you’re supposed to win and we’re a legitimate wild card team by the All-Star break. Simple.

None of it means a thing if the right-handed bats keep vanishing against lefties. Turner, Bohm, and Realmuto have to start making southpaws pay, because every contender we’d see in October runs out a stack of them.

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