The Phillies’ Rotation Can Still Be Great if Everyone Does Their Part

The Philadelphia Phillies’ two biggest stars are mashers. There’s no image more quintessentially Phillies (at least, this era’s Phillies) than Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber celebrating a home run.

Yet, the Phillies are really a pitching team. It’s pitching that has carried them to four straight playoff appearances and two consecutive NL East titles. From 2022-25, their pitchers racked up 92.8 wins above replacement, according to FanGraphs. That’s 13 more wins than the next-best staff.

The starters were responsible for most of that. Philadelphia’s rotation threw a league-leading 63.1% of the team’s innings in that span. Their 72.4 starting pitching fWAR was about 16 wins better than that of any other team. That’s an average of four more wins per season. We aren’t just talking about a strength. We’re talking about an advantage of Herculean proportions.

Six weeks into the 2026 season, the Phillies’ rotation owns a 4.98 ERA. They’ve lost just under 60% of their decisions and 40% of their starts. It feels like a serious problem. And yet…

Phillies starters have a 4.00 xERA. No team’s starters have a bigger gap between their ERA and xERA than the Phillies.

Phillies starters have a 3.76 FIP. No team’s starters have a bigger gap between their ERA and FIP than the Phillies.

Phillies starters have a 3.37 xFIP – the best in baseball. No team’s starters have a bigger gap between their ERA and xFIP than the Phillies.

The Phillies’ starters also lead the majors in SIERA. They rank top three in strikeout, walk, groundball, and hard-hit rates. And that’s with about 10% of their starters’ innings having come from the now-released Taijuan Walker.

Entering the season, FanGraphs Depth Charts projected the Phillies to have the best rotation in the National League. So far, all five members of the starting staff – Cristopher Sánchez, Zack Wheeler, Jesús Luzardo, Aaron Nola, and Andrew Painter – are on track to meet or surpass their preseason fWAR projections.

Sánchez owns a 2.42 ERA. He’s averaging just over six innings per start. His 1.6 fWAR leads the National League. The Phillies’ ace is right in the thick of the NL Cy Young race.

Wheeler is pitching like he wants me to apologize for calling Sánchez the staff ace. He has a 3.12 ERA, a 50% groundball rate, and the second-lowest hard-hit rate among NL starting pitchers.

Then we get to the reasons why Philadelphia’s starters have an ERA approaching 5.00. Luzardo, Nola, and Painter.

Luzardo is right behind Wheeler on that hard-hit leaderboard. He’s one of only two qualified NL pitchers with a hard-hit rate below 30%. He also ranks second in the NL in strikeout-to-walk ratio, sandwiched between Paul Skenes and Shohei Ohtani.

Indeed, the southpaw ranks among MLB’s top 20 qualified arms in xERA, the top 10 in FIP, and the top three in SIERA. His 2.42 xFIP leads the majors. So, why does his ERA put him among the bottom 10?

Luzardo has made three quality starts this year: a pair of double-digit-strikeout, no-walk outings in Miami and Colorado, and a seven-inning scoreless gem against the Giants. In his other four starts, he’s given up 28 hits and 20 runs in 20.2 innings.

A big part of the problem is that his opponents are slashing .317/.358/.540 with runners on base, compared to .235/.286/.296 with the bases empty. Once things start to go bad for Luzardo, they can spiral out of control quickly.

This isn’t a new issue for him. His career OPS with the bases empty is .664; with runners on, it jumps to .776. Most pitchers are a little worse with runners on the bases, but not to that extent.

Unfortunately, that makes me think this is more than just a small-sample-size fluke. It seems like Luzardo’s arsenal might not work quite as well coming out of the stretch. Even so, the stuff is far too tantalizing for me to worry about his ERA staying over 5.00 much longer.

It just isn’t realistic for a pitcher with this degree of power and finesse – a pitcher who is equally skilled at missing bats and generating weak contact – to give up so many runs.

Luzardo needs to solve his issues with runners on base if he’s ever going to become the ace he looks like with the bases empty. But even if he’s only ever the mid-3.00s ERA kind of pitcher he has been since 2022, the Phillies have no reason to complain.

Nola is also pitching better than his surface-level stats suggest. The gap between his ERA and his ERA estimators isn’t quite as dramatic as it is for Luzardo, but it’s still significant:

Nola is almost 33, and since his debut, only one starter (Kevin Gausman) has thrown more innings. He isn’t the pitcher he was at his peak. At the same time, he’s only two years removed from a three-win 2024 season. He made 33 starts that year with a 3.57 ERA. His 2025 was poor, but he can blame a lot of that on injury.

Right now, his BABIP is a career-high .343. That, along with his solid peripheral numbers, suggests regression in the right direction is coming. And ultimately, Nola doesn’t have to be more than a number four starter for this to be the best rotation in the league.

Finally, there’s Painter. He, too, has a bloated ERA, and his struggles are more concerning than anyone else’s. The glass-half-full way to see the situation is that he has nowhere to go but up.

Painter is unbelievably talented. There’s a reason he was Just Baseball’s No. 23 prospect entering the season (fourth among right-handed pitchers). His ceiling is so much higher than what the Phillies need him to be this season. Obviously, he has to be better than his near-7.00 ERA, but he doesn’t have to be anything close to the ace he could someday become.

The FanGraphs Depth Charts projections – the ones that saw the Phillies’ rotation as the NL’s best – gave Painter a 4.72 ERA for 2026. If that’s all he has to do for this starting staff to be elite, you can see why I’m still so optimistic.

With that said, Painter is also emblematic of this rotation’s biggest issue: There’s no depth.

This team doesn’t need a lot from Painter, but they do need him. They need the 23-year-old rookie to start every five games, at least until trade season. They don’t have anyone else to turn to if he falters.

The Phillies aren’t asking for the moon from any of their starters. Sánchez can just keep being Sánchez. Wheeler only has to stay healthy. Luzardo and Nola are just looking for the happy medium between their top-of-the-rotation upside and bottom-of-the-leaderboard ERAs. Painter simply has to keep going. That’s enough for this rotation to be great.

None of that is guaranteed. But none of it is unreasonable to ask for either. The Phillies’ rotation hasn’t been winning them games so far in 2026, but it should still be their greatest strength as long as everyone does their part.