The Best is Yet to Come for Philadelphia Phillies' Slugger Nick Castellanos

You might not remember how the whole saga started. On March 18, just after midnight, and two days after Kyle Schwarber agreed to terms with the Philadelphia Phillies, Nick Castellanos posted a picture of himself sitting on the Art Museum steps.

Philadelphia sports media went into a frenzy, "Could John Middleton and his Phillies finally be exceeding the luxury tax?"

The next day the rumors were confirmed, it was true, Nick Castellanos was coming to Philadelphia. The most fearsome lineup in Phillies history was to be assembled. Schwarber, Rhys Hoskins, Bryce Harper and Nick Castellanos were leading the way at the top of the lineup.

Schwarber has done more than live up to his billing, Rhys Hoskins has been the player Phillies fans have witnessed for the last half-decade, Harper kept up his MVP track record before injury took him down in June, and Castellanos... well, he has not been the player the Phillies had hoped for.

His defense was always going to be bad. That's why he was slated to start at designated hitter, but Harper's injury has forced Castellanos in right field since mid-April.

Fine, the Phillies aren't built to beat teams defensively, Castellanos is here to crush baseballs, but that hasn't gone according to plan either. There is not one metric that favors his hitting this year.

His average exit velocity is down, his HardHit% is down, so is his Barrel%, Chase-Rate, BB%, OPS, home runs, OBP, and SLG.

It's not like Castellanos is being pitched to any differently than he was in 2021. In fact, he's seen a lower percentage of pitches low and outside than he did last year. The book on how to pitch to Castellanos hasn't changed.

He's still seeing about 28% fastballs, and while Castellanos is a slightly above average hitter on fastballs this year, he was one of the best fastball hitters in baseball in 2021, with a SLG of .776.

The bigger problem is that Castellanos has gone from being an entirely average hitter against sliders to one of the worst in baseball. That's unacceptable when a player sees 31.4% sliders.

The outside pitch has always been Castellanos kryptonite, but he's especially struggled with it in 2022. He used to punish the high-outside and outside-outside pitch, especially those that ended up in the zone. In 2021, Castellanos had a batting average of .407 and .333 respectively against those zones. This year he's batting just .308 and .233 respectively.

Castellanos has never hit well against the low-outside pitch, the Phillies didn't expect that to change when they signed him to a $100 million deal. What they did expect what for him to crush everything that wasn't there, and Castellanos has failed to do so.

Suddenly hitting the low-outside sliders isn't going to turn his around around because it won't happen. But to see improvement, Castellanos needs to start hitting the high-outside pitch like he used to.

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