2024 Season Preview: Outfield Predictions

The outfield generates the most question marks of any position group on the roster.

Can Johan Rojas hit enough to justify the Phillies’ plan?

What version of Nick Castellanos are we getting in 2024?

Is Brandon Marsh strictly a platoon option or is he more?

I will best attempt to answer all of these questions and more. I’ll predict every outfielder’s OPS+ for 2024 and add an extra nugget to emphasize how I think their season is going to go.

Johan Rojas

The Phillies put most of their eggs into the basket of Johan Rojas this off-season. The Phillies liked how athletic their outfield looked with Rojas in center and Brandon Marsh in left. Given what the outfield looked like the year before, it’s easy to see their newfound perspective.

They feel so good about Rojas that they didn’t promise any free agent a starting spot out of camp. Whit Merrifield signed a one-year contract as a bench option and potential insurance policy.

There’s no possible way to overstate how good of a defensive player Rojas is, it’s truly game-changing stuff. He ranked in the top ten for Outs Above Average in center field before cracking 400 innings out there.

With that said, he still has to contribute at the plate. He can’t be a massive liability that changes the way opposing pitchers attack the lineup.

In game seven of the NLCS, Brandon Marsh was intentionally walked to load the bases because the Diamondbacks had zero fear of Rojas.

Schwarber, Trea Turner, Bryce Harper, or whoever can only get one more plate appearance a game than Rojas (assuming they all play the full game). This makes offense inherently more important than defense.

For Rojas to work as an everyday center-fielder, he must have at least an 85 OPS+. Anything below that makes him too much of a liability offensively, especially in the playoffs when opposing pitching gets even harder.

Can he get there? I’m not so sure.

His biggest weakness as a hitter is pitch recognition. His O-Swing rate was over 38%, third highest on the team, only slightly behind Nick Castellanos.

His Zone-Swing rate was only 64.4%, closer to Jake Cave and Kody Clemens. It’s not Bryson Stott or Kyle Schwarber bad but it’s not great. Schwarber also walks at a very high clip and Stott has amazing bat-to-ball skills.

He probably doesn’t profile as someone who will walk a lot. He also never supported a particularly high rate in the minors. His whiff rate in his short stint in the Majors was fine but not enough to build an offensive skillset around.

It wouldn’t be the worst situation in the world if he had the physical upside and talent to make up for it. Michael Harris has similar swing rate numbers to Rojas but displays future superstar physical talent.

Rojas on the other hand didn’t hit the ball very hard in his short stint in the majors. He had an average exit velocity of just 86.1 miles per hour. His hard-hit rate would’ve ranked towards the bottom in baseball and he recorded just one barrel in 113 batted balls.

Hitting in the big leagues is hard and even guys who barely get by have real skillsets to build some type of offensive game around.

Take Andrew Benintendi of the Chicago White Sox, who had just an 87 OPS+ last year. He put up comparable hard-hit numbers to Rojas but makes a lot of contact and has a good feel for the strike zone.

I’m not sure there’s enough for Rojas to build even a below-average offensive skillset.

His minor league numbers didn’t look super inspiring until 2023. His OPS across three levels in 2021 sat at just .747 and got worse in 2022 (in a higher competition and a tough ballpark) at just .663.

He broke out in 2023 with a .845 OPS in AA but with a .349 BABIP, his highest in any real sample size of minor league ball.

If Rojas is going to do enough hitting at the highest level of competition, he has to make changes to his game I cannot predict. Everything we know about his on-field performance indicates his chances are doubtful.

They’re making changes to Rojas’s stance and approach. He’s opened his stance to try and generate more power. He will probably take more hacks to pull the baseball early in counts.

Given his pitch recognition issues, these are inspired changes because it could mean he makes harder contact. It could mean more pull-side power. It’s probably his best chance of getting there.

It’s still early but his spring training hasn’t looked inspiring enough for me to feel different. He has just two solid hits to the outfield all of camp with the same approach issues.

What stinks is that he seems like a great dude. The team seems to love his presence in the clubhouse, he has merchandise (which is always cool) and rocks a gold X-chain necklace.

I’m not sure what X means but he pulls it off with more swag than I’ll ever have.

Final Prediction: 60-65 OPS+ and likely sent down to AAA before July

Brandon Marsh

Marsh faces questions but I think there are reasons he can give the Phillies positive answers.

First will be his ability to hit left-handed pitching. He more than doubled his walk rate last year which is a good sign and his OPS against left-handed pitching took a jump at .717.

He only got 110 plate appearances against lefties and mostly sat against the tougher ones. However, he did get a big spot in the NLCS against Andrew Saalfrank and delivered but the organization generally hasn't trusted him.

Given that his strikeout rate has gone down since becoming a Phillie and his walk rate has skyrocketed, I think they should at least give him some chances at the beginning of the year.

The other question he will face is whether his BABIP luck is sustainable.

Marsh sat with a .397 BABIP in 2023 and all of his projections have that number going down. His projected batting average (xBA) from 2023 sat at just .234.

However, I think there are plenty of reasons to buy that he can sustain a very high BABIP, maybe not .397 but still high.

Diving deeper into his profile as a hitter, he looks more and more like an outlier candidate.

First, hits the ball hard at a decent launch angle that’s been improving since he joined Philadelphia. It’s always going to be harder on a defense when you make solid contact and he does that more than most.

Marsh rarely hits popups. Among hitters with at least 400 plate appearances, Marsh ranked fifth best in in-field flyball rate at just 2.2%.

He also didn’t hit a lot of fly balls, ranking 150th in that rate. He had the best soft contact rate among any hitter in that sample.

His BABIP has also always been high and some of this is why. He carried a .403 BABIP in 2021 and a .360 one in 2022.

There’s still technically not enough data to feel insanely confident in him maintaining a high BABIP but there’s still a lot going in his favor.

It still may go down to about .370 or .380 but when you add an ascending walk rate, you have a promising player.

I don’t expect the same 127 OPS+ but I still think he will be good. He should also contend for a gold glove in left field but could go right back to center if needed.

It’s easy to forget he graded out very well in center with 4 OAA in 2023.

He’s probably going to put up a worse slash line if he’s facing more lefties but he will look like a better player, if that makes any sense. I’m hoping they put the platoon to bed.

Final Prediction: 110-115 OPS+ and finishes sixth on the team in fWAR

Nick Castellanos

Castellanos quieted some doubts in 2023 with a 112 OPS+ and 29 home runs but probably not good enough compared to free agent expectations.

He still has a lot to prove in his third season as a Phillie. Is he more like the guy we saw in 2022 or 23?

In 2023 he chased more, struck out more, and whiffed more than in 2022. He was able to have a better season because he stuck with a more consistent stance and showed more life physically.

They moved him closer to the plate which allowed him to slug .667 off sliders, his best since BaseballSavant started tracking it.

However, he may not be the same physical talent he used to be as a hitter. He hit the ball harder and more consistently this year but the numbers don’t compare great to the rest of his career.

Combine that with bigger chase and strikeout concerns. It’s tough to get a good feel for how he is going to do in 2024.

He’s not old yet but 32 isn’t exactly a shocking place to start seeing physical decline.

29 home runs for someone who has rarely been a massive home run guy seems hard to sustain. It was the second-highest rate of his career behind his contract season with the Reds. He’s typically sat in the low to mid-20s.

His projections think he’s going to hit around league average which is fair given the real potential for home run and physical decline.

I think his swing has looked fine in camp so I don’t want to worry about significant decline yet but it’s also hard to imagine a better season than 2023. Something right in the middle feels like an ok guess.

Final Prediction: 103-108 OPS+ and he hits Seventh in the order come playoff time

Kyle Schwarber

The leadoff conversation is pretty annoying, he’s the best guy for the job given that he’s one of their best hitters and he walks at a super high rate. He shouldn’t hit lower than third in the lineup.

That rate got him to finish fifth all-time in walks by a Phillie in a given season. He fell just four short of breaking Lenny Dykstra’s record from 1993.

It’s hard to feel concerned about Schwarber’s bat right now. He still hit the ball very hard last year (although did face a slight dip) and generated one of the highest walk rates in baseball.

He also finished with the lowest BABIP of his career. He did pull the ball more which can make your BABIP worse but it’s still hard to imagine him not getting some positive regression.

All of his projections align with this thinking and see him closer to a 120-125 wRC+/OPS+ hitter. I think it’s perfectly fair to have the same assumption.

Final Prediction: 120-125 OPS+ and he’s the leadoff hitter in game one of the wild card round

The Bench Guys

Cristian Pache never hit until a short sample stint last year. He had a .429 OPS for his career before joining the Phillies but he also played more of a regular everyday role.

He hit lefties at a very high clip last year but in a short sample size. He had a .924 OPS in 57 plate appearances.

He’s only 25 and has a solid build for someone as athletic as he is. However, I’m just not sure if I can believe he’s turned some massive corner. Even when he came back in September, he struggled with a .433 OPS. He’s struggled offensively for the majority of his career.

I think he makes the roster but I’m not sure there’s much else I can believe.

Final Prediction: 80-85 OPS+ platoon

Jake Cave was fantastic in the minors with a 1.113 OPS. He’s a solid fastball hitter but he struggles with any major league-caliber off-speed or breaking pitch.

It probably made sense to bring him back just to see if he could figure it out but I didn’t love the idea at the time or now. He’s looked like Jake Cave in camp so far, both the good and bad.

If someone gets hurt or the Phillies make a stunning change and send Rojas to AAA (they’re not going to do that) then he probably makes the roster. I would probably just keep Pache over him if it comes to that.

Cave will find work elsewhere and probably major-league work. I just don’t think it’s going to be very good.

Final Prediction: 75-80 OPS+ platoon and he plays games for the Athletics because he’s better than Seth Brown