2026 Team Previews: Philadelphia Phillies
A detailed fantasy baseball oriented team preview of the 2026 Philadelphia Phillies
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Intro
Two teams to go! The Phillies and the Brewers, and then we’re done with this series for a fourth year.
The Phillies are bringing the boys back for another try at a World Series. It’s a solid core, and they’ve been a great team for a few years now, but you look at the roster now, and it’s pretty old. That, plus the Wheeler injury, makes you a bit less confident in this team as a whole, but I’m thinking this is a playoff team once again. If Wheeler gets back and is looking good, it would make a ton of sense for them to be huge buyers at the deadline. There aren’t many years left with the core, so it will be a fun year for the Phillies.
Hitters
Kyle Schwarber
Age: 33
Pos: DH
We’re all very familiar with Schwarber. He had a bit of a slow start to his career and played with three other teams (CHC, WSH, BOS) before ending up on the Phillies, where he truly broke out as one of the league’s biggest bats. This offseason, it was confirmed that he’ll finish his career here, and that wasn’t hard to see coming.
He had the best year of his career in 2025, hitting 56 nukes with a .242 batting average and adding ten steals. Conveniently, that production came in the contract year, and the Phillies couldn’t pass up on bringing him back for five more years and a hefty salary.
He’s on the wrong side of the aging curve, but at the same time, it’s hard to imagine this dude not mashing 35+ bombs again and being a counting stat stud for fantasy leagues.
But he’ll be doing it at DH-only, unless you play on Yahoo. He made eight appearances in the outfield last year, which isn’t enough to qualify for that position on most sites. That hurts his value a touch.
I don’t find it useful to say things everybody knows already. Schwarber hits a ton of home runs. He’s extremely good at getting the ball in the air and out of the ball yard. It’s 20.8% Brl%, the third-best in the league. He entered the Judge and Ohtani tier.
You’re almost always getting a higher K% with that kind of barrel rate. And a 27% K% is nothing new for Schwarber. The batting average has been fine the last two years. A .240 is a negative on a fantasy team, but in this day and age, it’s not a huge problem. The worry is about what we saw in the years before that. He hit .207 in the two years prior to that.
At best, you’re getting Schwarber in the third round. And what you’re doing there is drafting a 33-year-old guy DH-only player with a potential .220 batting average and single-digit steals. If he comes close to repeating last year, you’ll like that just fine. But if he comes back to his 2022-2023 form, you’re losing with that pick.
So I think I’d be off that idea. The price doesn’t seem to match the downside, even though that seems a little crazy to say about a dude who has hit 94 homers in the last two years with 221 runs and 236 RBI.
Projection
Ranking
Trea Turner
Age: 32
Pos: SS
As I’ve gotten well into my thirties, I’ve noticed that I’ve just become more of the guy that I already was. I’m not changing or trying new things or opening my mind to new things. And that might sound bad, but it’s really not, as long as you don’t start from some awful spot.
Similarly, this is what we see with baseball players. Schwarber and Turner are great examples. Schwarber has always been up there to mash bombs. And as he’s gotten older, he’s focused more and more on mashing bombs. And he’s gotten very good at that. Trea Turner has been up there since he was a young pup just trying to rack up base hits, steal bases, and be a versatile player.
So it’s not a surprise at all that the power has been declining. Some things in life are predictable, and a guy like Turner hitting fewer and fewer homers as he gets into his thirties was one of them.
The good news is that he’s still a .300 hitter with a bunch of steals and enough power to keep you competitive. And he gets to hit right around Schwarber and Harper, which doesn’t hurt!
I really like seeing the SB attempt rate pop up to 25% last year. He had gone three years in the teens, and that had us thinking that the steals might go away at some point, which would be a disaster for his fantasy value. So, good news from last year.
My boy won himself another batting title! He was lucky to do that, since he would’ve finished sixth in the AL. It usually takes .320 to win a batting title, but not last year, baby!
The newer readers probably don’t even know about my infatuation with this guy. I had him for years in my home league after I traded for him following his first stint in the bigs. I’ve always thought one-syllable names sounded sweet, and I particularly liked the name “Trea”, so I had my third son named in Trea Turner’s honor.
Later that night:
It was rigged, though. I was always going to name that kid Trea. He’s three now, and I’m very excited to see him slide into third base someday.
Turner is an xBA beater. He does it every year. So we shouldn’t be too worried to see a .263 xBA last year.
Baseball Savant does some speed adjustments and came up with .270 for him last year, so that’s a bit higher than my own work.
You can also see a bit more EV than in 2024, last year, with a 104.2 EV90. But it’s not a swing that puts EV into the air:
Eventually, we’ll get to a point where Turner is hitting like 12 bombs. But 15, I think, is repeatable. And as long as he keeps hitting .290 and stealing 25+ bags, he’s a very valuable fantasy player.
That said, I don’t think he’ll be super valuable in two years' time when the legs start slowing down, and he gets to fewer of these line drives because the bat speed reduces. You also have the issue of the Phillies being a super old lineup. Any decline to Schwarber and Harper hurts Turner’s run-scoring, which is a big part of his game.
So we’re on the cliff, maybe. Same with Schwarber, I see more downside than upside at this price. But chances are the Phillies big three put together another very nice season, and these guys turn out to be near elite fantasy players once again.
Projection
Ranking
Bryce Harper
Age: 33
Pos: 1B
It was legit half this dude’s life ago when he got on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a teenager. And now, nobody even knows what magazines are. It doesn’t look to me like Harper has turned into a first ballot Hall of Famer, but he’s mostly met expectations and keeps putting up numbers into his mid-thirties.
But 27 bombs and 30 missed games with an .844 OPS isn’t really what you think you’re getting when you draft Harper. In a lot of ways, it was the worst season of his career.
He missed a couple of weeks in June with a wrist issue. So maybe the power was zapped a bit from that, but it doesn’t really look like it with a 4.7% HR% that matched what he did in 2024. His home run rate has been really good in these last two years. So that’s great.
We like all of this stuff besides the lower contact rate, and I guess the non-elite barrel rate. You’re kinda hoping for like 15% from a guy like Harper.
But, to his credit, he keeps the batting average up a bit with a higher line drive rate. And he hits the ball very hard no matter where it’s going:
Less power than Schwarber, but more batting average and steals. The K% has been steady. So we don’t worry much about the lower 80% Z Contact%. He makes contact when he needs to.
A dozen steals in 132 games is nice. But it was a little strange to see a 9% attempt rate there. He went 12/14 on the bags, so that’s a good rate, and this has been a part of his game to this point, so I think we can bank another ten-steal season, which helps.
We’re getting the best healthy Harper price of the guy’s career, I think, this year:
He’s the #4 first baseman off the board:
That’s a pretty nice price for a dude who can still rip off 30+ bombs, 12+ steals, a .270 batting average with a boatload of R+RBI. Sign me up!
Projection
Ranking
Bryson Stott
Age: 28
Pos: 2B
Stott, Castellanos, and Bohm, man. We’re not done with these guys yet! Stott did have one of his good seasons last year. A .719 OPS with 13 bombs and 24 steals.
But we know who he is now with certainty. The prospect allure has long washed off, and we’re stuck with a career .700 OPS guy with a max of 15 homers. But the steals are nice, and he has some ability to hit for a higher batting average.
The issue we have is that the upside isn’t there. And there’s newfound downside this year with a guy named Aidan Miller coming up through the minors, and he’s going to take somebody’s spot. Miller is a shortstop by trade, so he’s either going push Trea Turner to second, or he’ll play second or third himself. That puts pressure on Stott.
The best-case scenario is that you get another 140 games from Stott with a .275 batting average, a dozen homers, and 30 steals. That would be well worth a pick in most leagues, but it feels like another situation with a lot more downside (playing time related) than upside.
Projection
Ranking
I’m down on him. And that’s fine. If he plays, he will rank a lot higher than I have him here, but I’m pricing in the lack of ceiling and the playing time risk.
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