The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the Wild Card Series: Phillies vs. Braves NL Wild Card Preview

Brett Davis and Brad Mills-Imagn Images If you want a good example of how quickly fortunes change in baseball, just look at the Philadelphia Phillies and the Atlanta Braves. This year, the Phillies just barely avoided an embarrassing collapse that almost knocked them out of the playoffs completely, while the Braves had a hot April and never saw their season in any kind of real jeopardy. Just two years ago, you could perfectly flip-flop the two teams, with the Braves barely hanging on before getting quickly knocked out by the San Diego Padres in the Wild Card round, while the Phillies coasted to a fairly drama-free NL East crown. Now the two divisional rivals get three games to try and ruin the other team’s season. While the Braves have to be a bit disappointed that they missed out on a first-round bye thanks to the Brewers apparently solving baseball and the Dodgers winning 100 games, it still has to feel quite a bit better than last year, when they finished in fourth place in their division with a 76-86 record. Atlanta has some real high points, but the team also isn’t the juggernaut that won 101 games in 2022 and 104 games in 2023. Except for the general lack of a competent starter in left field, those Braves were stacked from top to bottom, and getting through the season was simply a matter of pointing the team in the right direction and watching it cook. The 2026 team, on the other hand, required quite a bit more work to shepherd itself through the 162-game campaign. The Braves basically lost an entire rotation’s worth of pitchers due to injury, and after Chris Sale and Grant Holmes, they mostly had to find their starters on the fly. Several of the name-brand players in the lineup struggled. Ozzie Albies started hot, but hit .216/.274/.354 after April, and might be a free agent in a month if not for a very gentle $7 million option for the 2027 season. Austin Riley saw his OPS drop for the fifth straight year, leading to numbers so anemic that he was more valuable defensively than offensively. Ha-Seong Kim, who was signed to a one-year, $20 million deal, damaged his middle finger slipping on ice over the winter, and with a second IL stint for the same digit, only needed 51 games to rack up -1.2 WAR this year. In 2022, the Braves got 16.0 WAR out of second base, third base, and shortstop. This season, it’s a different story:FanGraphs Playoff Coverage Is for MembersYou must be a Member in order to read our postseason coverage. You can read our announcement here, but it's not the only reason you should consider becoming a Member. Membership includes:✓Ad-free browsing✓Unlimited FanGraphs & RotoGraphs articles✓Historical & platoon projections✓Leaderboard & player-page stat heatmaps✓One-click data exports✓Customizable player-page dashboards✓Dark & Classic site modes✓Weekly Members-only mailbag✓FanGraphs Walk-Off, your year in review✓Optional homepage photo removal✓Gift articles to non-Members✓Full postseason coverage