The Philadelphia Phillies head into their series with the San Francisco Giants at Citizens Bank Park on Tuesday and Wednesday at 3:40 p.m. PT carrying a 9-19 record, a lost season that has already cost Rob Thomson his job. Don Mattingly is now in charge, and his first tests come against the same Giants club that shut out Philadelphia in the final two games of a series in San Francisco three weeks ago.
That earlier trip began with the Phillies at 6-4 and ended with them 3-15 over their next 18 games, leaving them with their worst 9-19 start since 2002. They have lost 11 of 12 and already endured a 10-game losing streak. Since the Giants blanked them in those two games at Oracle Park, Philadelphia has averaged 3.75 runs per game and scored 60 runs in 16 games.
The numbers have been blunt. The Phillies have posted a.218/.284/.370 team line in that stretch, along with a 7.2 BB% and a 21.7 K%, and their run scoring on the nine-game homestand after the Giants series slid even lower to 3.66 per game. Thomson was dismissed the morning of the series, and Mattingly, who managed the Marlins for seven seasons from 2016 to 2022 and had his only winning record there in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, inherited a club that has gone from a 6-4 start to one of the worst in baseball in five months.
The Giants arrive at 13-15 after going 4-2 on a homestand that included the Dodgers, then rallying from a 3-0 deficit in the finale against the Marlins. They had 11 hits and four runs against Cristopher Sanchez in San Francisco during the earlier series, and Sanchez has been vulnerable lately, allowing 26 hits in 17.12 innings over his last three starts while striking out 20 and carrying a 4.11 FIP.
Philadelphia needs the series to look different because the season has already shown how quickly it can unravel. San Francisco has already taken two games from the Phillies in this matchup, and the next two meetings will tell whether that was a one-off across three weeks or the start of a pattern the Phillies still have not found a way to stop.