Alec Bohm kept moving out of the early-season hole on Saturday night, going 2-for-4 with a double and a single in the Phillies’ 6-0 win over the Pirates. The performance helped him lift his batting average above.200 for the first time since the opening series and gave Philadelphia a.500 record for the first time in more than a month.
Bohm’s recent run has looked nothing like the start of his year. He began the season in the worst slump of his career, with his average falling as low as.128 in April. But the Phillies third baseman carried an eight-game hitting streak and a.209 average out of Sunday’s 6-0 win after going 2-for-4 against Paul Skenes and Pittsburgh, a stretch that has given him something he did not have a few weeks ago: stability.
“I think when you start to get results, it starts to calm you down a little bit, and you start to get a little confidence,” Bohm said. He added that the work he has put in at the batting cage is finally showing up in games, and that he feels much more comfortable and better about his at-bats. For a player with a.275 career average, the slump was jarring. The rebound has been just as noticeable.
What has changed is not a single swing so much as the way the at-bats are unfolding. Bohm said he feels more competitive pitch to pitch and less like he is giving away plate appearances. His chase rate this season is 24.4%, with a 16.4% whiff rate, both numbers that sit close to the levels he posted in his All-Star season in 2024, when he had a 27.2% chase rate and a 17.6% whiff rate. That does not mean every problem has vanished. It does suggest the approach is becoming more usable again.
Manager Don Mattingly said the staff has pushed Bohm to be more aggressive and to play with urgency, even if the results did not come immediately. Bohm has been penciled into the cleanup spot for three straight games, a sign the club still trusts the bat even while it works its way back into form. The timing matters because the Phillies have needed production in the middle of the order while trying to steady themselves after a rough month.
The more dramatic play on Saturday night came from the other side of the ball. Justin Crawford made a sliding grab in the eighth inning that helped Cristopher Sánchez preserve his shutout, covering 83 feet to track down Henry Davis’s ball in the left-center gap. StatCast gave the catch a 25% probability, a difficult play for any outfielder and one that stood out even more because Crawford has minus-2 outs above average and minus-7 defensive runs saved in center field this year.
That is why the catch mattered. Crawford has elite speed — he is in the 98th percentile — and Mattingly said the rookie was a little tentative early in the season as he tried to find his footing in the big leagues. The Phillies can live with growing pains when a young player is adjusting, but they also know the defense in center field has to hold up. The sliding stop was a reminder that the athletic tools are there, even if the numbers have not yet caught up.
For Bohm, the bigger story is simpler. The hits are starting to come, the average is moving in the right direction and the pressure that sat on him through April is easing. The Phillies need that version of him to last, because a cleanup hitter who is seeing the ball well changes how the rest of the lineup plays. Saturday was another step. Sunday kept it going.
