What the Phillies Can Expect From Cristopher Sánchez in 2025

Cristopher Sánchez exceeded all expectations in 2024. He came into the season as the Philadelphia Phillies’ no. 5 starter. Fourteen starts later, he had a sub-3.00 ERA and a four-year contract extension.

By the midpoint of the season, Sánchez was pitching in the All-Star Game. And after a similarly strong second half, he made his final start in Game 2 of the NLDS.

The southpaw finished his first full season with a 3.32 ERA in 31 starts. Thanks to excellent control and a keen ability to induce groundballs, he ranked among the top five qualified NL pitchers in FIP, xFIP, xERA, and FanGraphs WAR.

For his efforts, Sánchez earned a pair of fifth-place votes for NL Cy Young. I named him one of the top 10 starting pitchers of the 2024 season.

But that’s yesterday’s news. What matters now is if Sánchez will continue to pitch so well moving forward.

Was his 2024 season a flash in the pan? Or do the Phillies have a reliable, postseason-caliber no. 2 starter for 2025 and beyond? Let’s see what the data can tell us.

The Underlying Data

I won’t bury the lede here: There are no glaring warning signs in Sánchez’s profile. His future looks bright.

Sánchez didn’t take advantage of an unsustainably low BABIP or high strand rate in 2024. In fact, he was actually slightly less fortunate than the average starting pitcher in both metrics.

His 9.3% home run-to-fly ball rate was low, but not ridiculously so. With a league-average HR/FB, he would have only given up three additional home runs. Spread out over 31 starts, three more dingers wouldn’t have made much of a difference.

Finally, it’s not as if Sánchez was the beneficiary of an excellent defense behind him. Phillies defenders produced a dreadful -7 Outs Above Average with Sánchez on the mound.

Thus, Sánchez’s 3.32 ERA was in the same ballpark as his 3.00 FIP, 3.19 xFIP, 3.52 xERA, and 3.58 SIERA.

All of those numbers suggest his success was no fluke.

Deserved Run Average

Baseball Prospectus’s Deserved Run Average (DRA) is another great metric for evaluating pitchers and predicting their performance in the future. It’s designed to be descriptive, not predictive, but it’s closely correlated with a pitcher’s future success.

According to this metric, Sánchez was 18% better than the league-average pitcher in 2024.

For more context, here is a list of every starter (min. 100 IP) who had a better DRA than Sánchez this past season: Garrett Crochet, Tyler Glasnow, Paul Skenes, Chris Sale, Tarik Skubal, Logan Gilbert, Yusei Kikuchi, Pablo López, Max Fried, Jack Flaherty, Framber Valdez, Zack Wheeler, Justin Steele, and Sonny Gray.

That’s excellent company for Sánchez. Not only did all of those pitchers have excellent 2024 seasons, but they’re all guys you would expect to continue to excel going forward.

Pitch Models

Pitch models are another category of metric that correlate closely with future performance.

These models, such as Stuff+ and PitchingBot, don’t tell us anything about a pitcher’s results. Rather, they offer insight into the quality of a pitcher’s arsenal.

Sánchez ranked among the top 15 MLB starters (min. 100 IP) in both of the comprehensive pitch model metrics at FanGraphs: Pitching+ and botERA. That’s strong evidence that there is real skill beneath his surface-level success.

Finally, to put all that in a bit more context, here is a list of all the pitchers (min. 100 IP) who finished ahead of Sánchez in DRA, Pitching+, and botERA in 2024: Zack Wheeler. End of list.

That should give you a sense of how special it is to grade out so well according to all three metrics.

The Projections

Projection systems are conservative by nature. They consider all the data from throughout a pitcher’s career and use that to estimate his future performance. That means that sometimes, projection systems undervalue recent changes.

With that said, Sánchez’s projections are pretty darn impressive. He has already done enough to convince them his success was no fluke.

The Steamer system has him pitching to a 3.48 ERA over 29 starts next year, good for 3.2 fWAR.

The ZiPS model isn’t quite as optimistic, forecasting a 3.87 ERA and 2.5 fWAR in 28 outings. The biggest difference between the two is that ZiPS isn’t quite as convinced that he can maintain a well-below-average home run rate.

Still, both projection systems paint a picture of a talented mid-rotation starter. If Sánchez can give the Phillies 28-30 starts with a mid-3.00s ERA, they should be very happy. Anything more he can offer is gravy.

Small Sample Size Warning?

Truthfully, there’s only real reason to worry that Sánchez won’t repeat his 2024 performance: small sample size.

As baseball fans, we should always be aware of small sample sizes. One season of data isn’t always enough to tell us everything we need to know about a player. For years, Sánchez didn’t seem like anything more than a back-end rotation depth piece. Can one strong season completely change that?

Maybe not. But it doesn’t have to.

Sánchez’s 2024 season didn’t come out of nowhere. He was just as good throughout the second half of the 2023 campaign. At the time, he didn’t get enough attention for his performance because it seemed so fluky. But it doesn’t seem so fluky anymore.

Since Sánchez joined the Phillies rotation in a full-time role on June 17, 2023, he has pitched 276 2/3 innings with a 3.32 ERA, 3.36 FIP, 3.15 xFIP, 3.48 SIERA, and 6.3 fWAR.

That’s a much more trustworthy sample.

Going Forward

Baseball is unpredictable. The human body is unpredictable. Nothing Sánchez has done in the past is indisputable proof of what he’ll do in the future.

Opposing hitters will adjust to Sánchez in 2025, and he’ll have to adjust back. Only time will tell if he can do so successfully.

Potential injuries are always a concern. So is rotten luck. So is the possibility that Sánchez just stops pitching well and no one can figure out why. It all happens.

Yet, aside from the inevitable chaos of the universe, there’s no good reason to worry about Cristopher Sánchez. All the data at our disposal tells us he has blossomed into an excellent pitcher, and I’m expecting another strong season in 2025.