Trea Turner pulled his hands in, turned on the hanging sweeper from Paul Skenes, and lifted it into the left-field seats. It was July 1, the third game in a row that he got two hits and homered.
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His numbers at day’s end: .239/.287/.368.
“They’re not going to look good,” Turner said then of his batting average and on-base and slugging percentages, “probably no matter what I do, for a while.”
Ten weeks later, it’s evident the Phillies’ $300 million shortstop’s stat line will never look good.
At least not this season.
In baseball, nothing brings more comfort to struggling superstars than their track record. The season is so long, and failure is so common, that sometimes it’s all they have. Maybe that’s why the numbers are printed on the back of bubble-gum cards, as a reminder.
And even if the path is filled with potholes, the best players usually reach their standards. In Turner’s case, a .291 average and .812 OPS since he got to the majors 11 years ago with the Nationals. He’s a three-time All-Star, a two-time batting champion, and twice a fifth-place MVP finisher, including last year. Only Freddie Freeman has more hits in the 2020s.
Occasionally, though, the slumps get too deep and last too long and a season is unsalvageable. For Turner, a .241 average and .681 OPS through Thursday qualify as career worsts. Factor in defense — he led all players with 20 errors — and he was valued at only 1.1 wins above replacement, tied for 113th among 143 players with a minimum of 450 plate appearances.
Turner, 33, knows all this. Maybe too well. Intelligent and self-aware, he’s prone to overthinking. And while he believed earlier in the season that he could boost his production to its typical level, he also realized weeks ago that he was running out of time.
Yet that doesn’t mean that his season is lost, because the Phillies are closing in on the postseason for the fifth consecutive year. Entering the weekend, they were one game ahead of the Cubs for the top NL wild card and still within sight of the Braves for the NL East crown.
And for Turner, the playoffs represent an opportunity to redeem a substandard regular season.
“Nobody’s going to remember if he had a bad April, a good May, a bad June if we play well down the stretch,” said interim manager Don Mattingly, who has stuck with Turner in the No. 2 spot in the order. “Nobody ever remembers anything besides that. I think you see guys like [Turner] who have been around long enough, they know they don’t stop trying to get better and feel right.”
So, Turner buries his head in an iPad to analyze video from each at-bat. He swings in the cage with hitting coach Kevin Long before and after batting practice, with grounders from infield coach Bobby Dickerson in between.
“If you get to know Trea a little bit, he does think a lot and he puts a lot of pressure on himself,” Dickerson said. “He wants answers scientifically a lot of times, and he starts to search for that more than actually playing the game, which is what he does well. When he lets his skills show up on the field, plays aggressively, we get a better version of him. And we’ve seen it.”
Turner’s hard-hit rate, defined as pitches that exit his bat at 95 mph or more, was 39.7% entering the weekend, down from 42.1% last season. He also swung at a higher rate of pitches out of the strike zone (34.8%, up from 31.2% last year) and was more susceptible to curveballs and sliders (.207 average, down from .250).
But Turner also had hit into some rotten luck, including a .281 average on balls in play (compared to .350 last season). He was hitting .427 on balls that had an exit velocity of 95 mph or more; league average was .488.
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Turner’s search for answers led to a meeting with Ichiro Suzuki when the Phillies played in Seattle in late August. And he peppered the Hall of Famer with questions. How do you hit the ball the other way? What’s your approach in certain situations? If you’re doing this wrong, what would you do?
“I didn’t realize but kind of now looking at it, we’re pretty similar in our games in the sense that he didn’t walk a lot, he wanted to hit, hit the ball all over the field, could hit it out of the park sometimes,” Turner said. “Talking with him and his mindset and what he physically does, a lot of it kind of applied to me in my game. So, it was kind of nice.”
Maybe it helped. Because entering the weekend, Turner had 14 hits, including five doubles and two homers, in 13 games since the series in Seattle. He went deep in back-to-back games this week against the Astros and drove the ball the other way to right field for two hits Wednesday night.
It’s too late to rescue Turner’s season statistically. But after months of wondering whether any trace of a hot streak represented a return to normalcy, maybe it’s a building block for October.
“He’s handled it very well for the caliber of the player he is,” Kyle Schwarber said. “You see a guy that has had so much success in the big leagues, and he might not be getting the results. But it’s really refreshing to see a guy at his age, how much he’s been through in this game, you see him keep grinding. You can’t say enough about him.”
It’s not like Turner is alone. Across the sport, other underachievers may get a chance for an October rewrite. Call them the Second Chance All-Stars, players who can erase six frustrating months with a few strong weeks.
1. Kyle Tucker, Dodgers: Even after coming within a triple of hitting for the cycle Wednesday, he entered the weekend batting .225 with a .684 OPS, full-season career worsts in his first year in Los Angeles — all for the low, low average annual salary of $60 million. The four-time All-Star outfielder has been especially putrid at home: .187, four homers, .572 OPS. “You’ve just got to keep going,” he told reporters. “Try and at least pick out the positives and just try to ride with that.” Something tells us Dodgers fans would forgive if Tucker repeats his two-homer Game 1 of the 2022 World Series for the Astros.
2. Austin Riley, Braves: The two-time All-Star third baseman dragged a .223 average and .658 OPS into the weekend against the Phillies, the nadir in a three-year decline since Atlanta locked him up to a 10-year, $212 million extension, the largest contract in franchise history. He would be wise, then, to take the advice of infield coach Ron Washington. “[He’s] always saying, ‘Say, hey, no one cares what you did yesterday. It’s about today. Close the yearbook,’” Riley told The Athletic in June. A few big October hits would make it easier. A potential start: Riley beat the Phillies last Sunday with a go-ahead triple in the ninth inning off Jhoan Duran.
3. Christian Yelich, Brewers: The former MVP stands out on a roster that lacks star power. But he has been barely above replacement level, with a .241 average, .712 OPS, and 0.4 WAR entering the weekend. It’s little wonder that manager Pat Murphy told reporters that he walked in on Yelich taking swings in the batting cage at 1 a.m. after a recent game. “You can say, ‘That’s not enough. He’s getting old.’ No, he’s not,” Murphy said of the 34-year-old face of the franchise. “He’s got another gear.” Maybe it will resurface in the postseason.
4. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Blue Jays: It’s up there with any of baseball’s 2026 unsolved mysteries. How can it be possible midway through September, after 132 games, that the $500 million masher still hasn’t hit a homer at home this season? Woe, Canada. Guerrero went into the weekend slugging .352, 128th among 139 hitters who qualified for the batting title. He had only eight homers after averaging 31 over the previous five seasons. But the Jays were only one game out of a wild card in the mediocrity-riddled American League. Imagine if they get in and he finds the power switch.
And then there’s Turner, who can be the Phillies’ biggest difference-maker in October.
“The games that Trea gets going, it’s like a different dynamic with our offense,” Mattingly said. “We’re seeing him hopefully find a groove of hitting the ball hard for a number of games here in a row. It’d be huge for us.”