It’s early, but the results are worrying.
Before this season began, Rob Thomson and the Phillies announced that Brandon Marsh would start the year as the everyday center fielder. It was a rather significant development, as the team had mostly shielded him from left-handed pitching since acquiring the lefty hitting Marsh at the 2022 trade deadline. It was a strong vote of confidence that the Phillies believed in Marsh’s ability to hit well enough to play against any pitcher.
Through the first two plus weeks of the season, Marsh has not rewarded that confidence. He finished Sunday’s game hitting .108 on the season. His last base hit came on March 30th in Washington on the Sunday of opening weekend, a full two weeks ago. In the 11 games Marsh has played in since that day, he is 0-26 with 9 strikeouts and 5 walks. He looks utterly lost at the plate, flailing away at pitches or going down quickly with weak contact.
Yes, Marsh is not the only one currently struggling in the Phillies lineup. Alec Bohm’s struggles have received most of the headlines, but there’s some evidence that Bohm has been hitting into some bad luck. Bohm’s batting average on balls in play is .205. His expected batting average based off of exit velocity and launch angle is .262, a full 100 points better than his actual batting average of .150. His small sample hard hit percentage of 54.5% is by far the highest of his career. None of this excuses Bohm’s poor performance and he has his own problems that he must figure out, but it at least shows that he is due some positive regression and there is some hope that he can turn it around.
Marsh on the other hand does not have these things to point to as part of his struggles. While his BABIP is a low .143, Marsh’s XBA of .165 is among the worst in MLB. That means he hasn’t been hitting the ball hard much at all, as his 89.4 MPH average exit velocity indicates. His 47.8% hard hit rate in a small sample isn’t too far off from his usual career rate of 45.9%, but he has collected just one barrel on the season. That means he has only really squared up one pitch in 23 batted balls entering Sunday, or a rate of 4.3%. The MLB average through the early part of this season is 7%.
Perhaps the most concerning thing with Marsh is that he’s been utterly dominated by fastballs. He’s hitting .100 off of the heater (2-20) with a whiff rate of 20% despite seeing a fastball 57.1% of the time. Eight of Marsh’s 14 strikeouts on the season have come on fastballs. Here is one where he was completely blown away by a 95 MPH fastball over the heart of the plate in a full count from April 9th in Atlanta.
Last season, Marsh saw a similar number of fastballs, but he hit .271 off of them. Marsh has always struggled against breaking pitches, so he usually does his damage against fastballs. But in the early going of 2025, he’s been getting eaten alive by the heater.
It is still early, and Marsh has shown he can pull himself out of bad spells like he did after a particularly brutal July last season. He hit just .182 with a .645 OPS in the month of July but rebounded to hit .250 with a .749 OPS through the final two months of the season. Marsh will get plenty of opportunities to figure it out, as there’s no one really pushing him for playing time as Johan Rojas and Max Kepler are both struggling to various degrees. The Phillies tried Edmundo Sosa in the outfield once, but the results were not very promising overall. Marsh will likely continue to get the majority of playing time until at least Weston Wilson returns from his oblique injury.
But hope that Marsh will eventually blossom into the full-time starting center fielder that many believed he could be is running dry. The Phillies wanted him to recover from his step back last season, but so far it looks like he has regressed even further.