Tyler Phillips Is Here Again

One night, I was lying looking at my phone, trying to fry as many neurons as possible without using strong drugs or listening to Angine de Poitrine, and I saw something that disturbed me a little. It was the highlight of a series of interviews with Padres closers Mason Miller and Kait Maniscalco, which began as follows:

Maniscalco: Do ​​you think closers should be let off the hook a few screws to want to focus on the highest pressure situation in the game?

Miller: Quietly, yes. Besides, I think you can keep us together and be a normal person… I can’t say anyone can tell I have screws yet.

There are two ways to read this question. First: Does it take an unusual type of person to succeed in a high-pressure environment like closing a big baseball game? Maybe, to some extent. The ability to not only fail under pressure but also to shake off failure when it comes is a special thing, one that baseball people have tried hard to pinpoint since the closer’s role was invented.

However, I would not go so far as to say that those close to them need a certain type of person. No one would blame the top three pitchers on the career saves list — Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, and Kenley Jansen — for having one fastener between them. At the same time, you don’t have to go too far down that list (Jonathan Papelbon, Rollie Fingers, Fernando Rodney) before you hit some tough oddballs.

That’s where we come to the second interpretation of Maniscalco’s question, which trades on one of baseball’s leading theories: Relief pitchers are nuts.

I grew up in the 1990s, which was the golden age of weird relief pitchers. Turk Wendell was great at these, but feel free to recall your favorites in the comments. Even children’s media was full of such characters; I really liked the Little Big League Blackout Gatling Team with Jim Bowers. (Jonathan Silverman’s portrayal of Bowers is also memorable for being one of the very few instances of an actor with no professional baseball experience producing even remotely believable mechanics.)

I think Miller is right when he says that relief can “loosen” a few screws. It is important to remember that a person’s mental health is often invisible to others; we each fight our own private battles, and so on. But it kills me to see the best entertainer in the world take a question about how crazy the free stuff is, while he looks and sounds like a junior partner at a casting company talking to his boss at the company golf course.

He should have asked Tyler Phillips.

The Marlins right-hander stood out last year for what can only be described as bullpen antics.

Everything about Phillips’ work is strange. He was a 16th round pick in 2015 out of Bishop Eustace Prep in Pennsauken, New Jersey, a school best known for producing Billy Rowell, one of the most famous draft picks of the 21st century. (Part of the Mike Trout legend is that Rowell came out so bad that he convinced other scouts that the level of play in South Jersey was such that Trout couldn’t be that good – he was just hitting against weak competition.)

In its 76-year history, Bishop Eustace has produced six major league players, four of whom – Phillips, Zac Gallen, Justin Hagenman, and Devin Smeltzer – were all at the school at the same time. Phillips floated around the Rangers and Phillies systems without much fanfare for nine years, until July 2024, when the Phillies had an unexpected hole in their rotation. Phillips threw six scoreless innings in his third career start, and pitched a complete game against the Guardians in his fourth. (Weird trivia: Only 16 pitchers threw a complete game in the majors in 2024. Four of them were Phillies, but Cy Young runner-up Zack Wheeler was not among those four.)

It was a big local headline — Phillips grew up across the river and was a Phillies fan as a kid — but any long-term hopes of a local boy’s status were dashed when Phillips allowed eight runs in 1 2/3 innings in his next start. He was out of the swing shortly thereafter, and on his way to Miami as a dead man the night before last season.

That’s where Phillips turned into a high-volume lock in 2025: He had a 2.78 ERA in 77 2/3 innings over 54 appearances, which is how he found himself the subject of a postgame interview where he gave one-sentence answers about how much he hates hitters.

Phillips throws hard — his sinker, his most used pitch, averaged 95.4 mph last year — and the five-pitch repertoire he carries from the start has given him the ability to show hitters different looks depending on which side of the plate they line up on. He was probably a sinker-sweeper against righties, from the lower arm position, and a sinker-four-seamer-splitter-curveball against lefties.

Everything had a kind of off-kilter movement profile; Phillips’ sinker dipped, but so did his four-seamer, and his sweeper and curveball were closer than average. The result: a 97 percent rushing rate and poor ball handling and poor communication. But even with all that speed and guile, Phillips couldn’t beat many. His strikeout rate, 16.6%, was 177 of 199 pitchers with at least 70 innings pitched. The two guys behind him on that leaderboard were Cal Quantrill and Kyle Hendricks.

This year, Phillips has raised his pitches a few degrees, giving all of his pitches a more normal motion profile. That spread the swing on his five pitches over a wide area. He’s also using his splitter more (23% usage rate in 2026, up from 14% last year).

Phillips’ ground ball rate (admittedly in a small sample) is close to average, and he gives up a lot of hard contact when hitters get wood in the bullpen. But that happens less than before. Through six appearances, he has a 96th-percentile whiff rate and an 80th-percentile strikeout rate.

I’m a child of the sabermetrics movement of the late 2000s and early 2010s, so I tend to be innately distrustful of pitchers with strikeout rates below 20%. A million things can happen when a batter puts the ball in play, and most of them are bad.

But I’m not sure that this new version of Phillips – if it really is a new version, and not a small sample brought by many scoops of exercise – is better than last year. Not only was he able to generate weak contact and grounders, I liked that the guy who slapped himself in the bullpen and talked like Hanson’s brother had a weird game.

Luckily for us, the Marlins are still using Phillips in a weird way. Last year, he started as a lowly boy and a mopup and gradually worked his way to notable appearances. From July 1 through the end of 2025, Phillips has allowed just five runs in 37 1/3 innings, and has gotten more than 6 outs just three times in 25 outings.

This year, he is yet to make his first inning appearance. His lone save was a three-inning shutout stint in an 8-1 win over the Reds on April 9. Going into the weekend, Phillips was tied for seventh among pitchers with five or more appearances by batters faced in each game, just shy of nine. He is averaging 35.5 pitches per appearance, which is sixth in the league.

And yet I wouldn’t call him a great shortcut. Most of the leaders in the workload per appearance (Sean Manaea, Antonio Senzatela, José Urquidy) are guys who would like to start, but their performance does not require a place to exchange. You could say the same about former Rockies first-round pick Chase Dollander, the latest struggling Colorado prospect to struggle in his first encounter with the majors.

But Dollander leads all shortstops with an average of 16 batters faced and 64.4 pitches per outing. Phillips still plays an active supporting role, albeit from the 1940s, but Dollander does something else. To be clear, he has been awful this season after last year’s woes, with a 55.1% slugging percentage and a 28.7% strikeout rate, along with a .205 batting average and 3.32 ERA. (He has three home runs in 19 innings, which is dangerous for a career where he plays.)

Dollander entered the game in the third inning or earlier in four of his five games, and pitched at least four innings in four of the five games. Under normal circumstances, we would call that a stack lock behind the opener, but that’s not how it’s used. Dollander has followed the right-handed reliever in every game he has played this year; three times he followed Jimmy Herget, a young man with low arms, although he throws slowly.

I’ve been beating this drum for as long as I’ve had a platform to drum on: The one-inning fastball-slider guy isn’t the only way to build a relief pitcher. Pitchers like Phillips and Dollarder — legitimate power arms — can be deployed in many ways. In Dollander’s case, that’s earned the Rockies closer a performance with a short turnaround and some ability to pick matchups. In Phillips’ case, it’s given the Marlins two or three expensive pitches for the price of one set of warmup slaps.

Relievers should be odd. Teams should use them in weird ways.