Phillies relievers past and present aiming to not be defined by the last month

For all the questions about the Phillies’ near future, one they answered months before the offseason was the ninth inning. They know they’ll enter 2026 with an elite, trustworthy, bat-missing closer in Jhoan Duran.

What they don’t know, what no team ever knows, is how its highest-leverage relievers will perform in the competition and intensity of October baseball, when singular pitches and at-bats are scrutinized to an outsized but rational degree given the stakes.

A couple of relievers who have felt like part of the family to many Phillies fans had experiences over the past month that may unfortunately color the rest of their careers: Orion Kerkering’s errant and unnecessary throw to the plate that ended the NLDS, Jeff Hoffman’s pitch to Miguel Rojas that tied Game 7 of the World Series with two outs to go.

It’s difficult for an athlete to overcome their worst moment when it’s so magnified. You think about Bill Buckner, Mitch Williams, Scott Norwood.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that it defines a career every time. There are few home runs this century of a higher profile than Albert Pujols’ towering blast off of Brad Lidge in the ninth inning of Game 5 of the 2005 NLCS. And Lidge did struggle the next season with a career-worst ERA to that point. But three years after the moment that some thought broke him, Lidge went 48-for-48 (including playoffs) as one of the most important figures on the Phillies’ World Series-winning team.

“People still talk about it [13] years later,” Pujols told MLB.com in 2018. “Every time I run into Houston fans, they bring it up. ‘Man, do you remember that home run? You ruined Brad’s career.’

“Ruined his career? I remind them he went to Philly and had 41 saves and won a World Series.”

Sometimes the bounce-back occurs more quickly. In 2015, Rangers shortstop Elvis Andrus made two errors in the seventh inning of a winner-take-all playoff game against the Blue Jays, who used the miscues to come back and win.

Andrus was the goat that night, hanging his head the same way Kerkering did last month, then had the two best years of his career, including one in which he graded out as the best defensive shortstop in baseball.

In 2020, Braves relievers A.J. Minter and Chris Martin allowed the game-tying and game-winning home runs late in Game 7 of the NLCS against the Dodgers. A year later, they combined for a 2.76 ERA in 13 playoff appearances as the Braves won it all.

Throughout baseball history, there have been plenty of examples on both sides — of a player overcoming his worst moment and of a player being defined by it. Kerkering is still just 24 years old and one of the better right-handed setup men in the National League. Hoffman has two more years under contract to close games for Toronto. Both the Phillies and Blue Jays expect to contend in 2026, which could give both pitchers the chance to exorcise some demons.

This is the lifestyle relievers know they’ve chosen. The job often comes with more blame than praise. Reporters will almost always be around the postgame locker of the pitcher who blew the save and rarely will spend as much time talking to the guy who did his job 1-2-3 in the seventh inning.

Dating back to Game 3 of the 2023 NLCS in Arizona, the Phillies’ best regular-season relievers have not delivered the same sort of reliability in the playoffs, from Matt Strahm to Kerkering to Hoffman to Carlos Estevez and Craig Kimbrel.

Playoff performance is difficult to predict, particularly for relievers more reliant on location than velocity like Strahm. We saw during the Dodgers’ run in October that they trusted few of their true relievers, often opting instead for the pitcher with the best overall stuff, even if that pitcher was a starter. Of the Dodgers’ 165 playoff innings, 75% were pitched by Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Shohei Ohtani and Roki Sasaki. For reference, 62% of the Phillies’ innings came from traditional starters during their most recent deep playoff run.

You’ve got to have the horses to do it, but perhaps teams lean even more heavily into such an approach in future postseasons. Either way, you still need at least three relievers to count on come playoff time and the Phillies will likely need two of theirs to change their personal October narrative in 2026.