Inside the Dazzling Defense of Defensive Liability Nick Castellanos

The second-worst regular-season right fielder in the league can’t stop making incredible catches in October.

PHILADELPHIA — Nick Castellanos took his position in right field in the top of the first inning of Game 3 of the World Series against the Astros and he did something he has only recently begun trying out: He paid attention.

The second-worst regular-season right fielder in the league can’t stop making incredible catches in October. Every few days, it seems, he changes a game with his glove. He leaves fans in awe—then often celebrates alongside them.

Castellanos has made three incredible catches this postseason, including this one for the first out of World Series Game 3.

Matt Slocum/AP

How did he go from liability to capability? “Baseball in the postseason has really locked me in,” he said. “The honest truth is a lot of times on defense, I struggle with focusing for 162 games. My mind is really fast and wanders, but with this atmosphere, it’s unbelievable. Being locked in on every pitch, I think my jumps, my anticipation, has just gotten better.”

He added, “You’re just kind of all by yourself out there, you know?” Over the course of a long season, he sometimes catches himself thinking about his wife, Jessica; his sons, 9-year-old Liam and 6-month-old Otto; his parents; his siblings; his last at bat; and “the status of the country, the economy, global relations,” he said. “All of it.”

Sometimes all this contemplation detracts from competition. He swears he has never missed a pitch. But … “Have I gotten bad jumps because my mind is elsewhere?” he said. “Yeah, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.”

So you’ll have to forgive him if he doesn’t get to every ball in April. There’s a lot going on in the world. But in the playoffs, there is only one thing going on. And Castellanos is thinking about it.

“The best I can describe it is friends of mine who are prescribed Adderall or Vyvanse, it probably is very similar to that,” he said. “I don’t take anything like that. But my mind is empty. I’m just watching a swing, waiting to get a read on a ball, and nothing else matters.”

The Phillies will take the results. On the first pitch of Tuesday’s 7–0 win, Astros second baseman Jose Altuve flared a sinker into shallow right field. Castellanos charged in and made a sliding catch. It looked quite a bit like a play he made in the ninth inning of the Game 1 of the National League Division Series against Atlanta to help seal a 7–6 win, and another one in the ninth inning of Game 1 of the World Series, to help preserve a 5–5 tie. (Philadelphia took the lead in the 10th and won the game.)

By now, Castellanos’s teammates have come to expect this performance from him. “I see a blooper over to right field, I picture Nick sliding in and catching it and laying on the ground,” said third baseman Alec Bohm.

But it wasn’t always that easy. During the season, Castellanos and outfield coach Paco Figueroa work on fundamentals. Figueroa reminds him to get underneath the ball—Castellanos stands 6’4”, so he needs to position his body correctly in order to be able to dive—and to get his uniform dirty.

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They also experiment with strategies to keep Castellanos focused. Teams get five PitchCom systems, which most distribute to the pitcher, the catcher, the second baseman, the shortstop and the center fielder. Not the Phillies, who at midsummer took it away from the center fielder and gave it to Castellanos. “To find a way to stay locked in,” said Figueroa. (When center fielder Brandon Marsh arrived from the Angels at the trade deadline and began to play regularly, the team gave him the system; these days, Castellanos doesn’t need it anyway.)

“It’s a work in progress,” Figueroa said.

Castellanos’s sliding snag in Game 1 of the World Series robbed Astros shortstop Jeremy Peña of what would’ve been a walk-off single.

Eric Gay/AP

Defensive metrics suggest that there remains quite a lot of work to be done. According to Statcast, only the Padres’ Juan Soto ranked worse than Castellanos’s –10 outs above average in right field. (Castellanos pointed out that Soto was named a Gold Glove finalist in right field nevertheless. “A lot of [the award] is just marketing,” he said. “They pick the popular guys.”)

Castellanos and Figueroa dispute the metrics, anyway.

“There’s some people that talk about the numbers and how they show him playing defense and all that, but at the end of the day, Nick works and he catches the ball he needs to catch,” said Figueroa.

Castellanos scoffed at the whole system. “The defensive metrics, I compare it a lot to the stock market,” he said, gesturing at the air as if to catch butterflies with his fingers. “You can’t touch it. I think that we get knocked on our defense, but I think our defense is great. We make the routine plays. We hit the cutoff men. We minimize mistakes. And we’re in the World Series.”

It was pointed out to him that perhaps he could try to achieve this level of play during the regular season.

“Ideally, I’d want to be as locked in as I possibly could be, but I’m human,” he said. “My mind even when I was a little kid has always run extremely fast and had multiple movies playing at the same time about things that pertain to baseball and things that don’t. But I think this highly competitive atmosphere just calms me down and keeps me where I’m supposed to be.”

More often than not these days, that’s where the ball is.