NEW YORK — Jeff Hoffman stood there, surrounded by anguish, and it was difficult to talk. Some of his Phillies teammates shared beers at a small card table. Brandon Marsh, still at his locker, could not remove his No. 16 gray jersey. The loudest sound came from running water from the adjacent showers inside the visitors clubhouse at Citi Field.
The enormity of it all — this failed promise — filled the room.
Here was Hoffman, a 31-year-old former prospect who resurrected his career in Philadelphia. He warmed up three different times Wednesday night during Game 4 of the National League Division Series. He entered in the fifth inning with two runners on base. He extinguished the threat with seven pitches. He told manager Rob Thomson he could keep going. The Phillies, faced with a leaking bullpen the New York Mets clobbered all series, decided this was the best path forward. It was aggressive.
They needed 12 more outs. Hoffman had to give more.
“I wanted the ball in my hand,” Hoffman said. “In my head, I would’ve had a clean one right there, and then gone back out for another one. Whatever the team needed. But it just didn’t happen that way.”
The Phillies provided Hoffman with a new life. Hoffman gave them so much. He allowed 16 earned runs in six months. Then, in a five-day span against the Mets, he surrendered six runs. His runners rounded the bases when Francisco Lindor bashed a back-breaking grand slam off a 99 mph fastball from Carlos Estévez.
Mets 4, Phillies 1. The end.
Hoffman will be a free agent in November and he’ll land a lucrative, multi-year contract with someone. It might be the Phillies.
“Yeah,” Hoffman said. He paused. “That’s all I want.”
He could not hold back the tears.
“It’s hard,” Hoffman said, “to think about right now.”
This hit him — all of them — hard. It was supposed to be this team’s time. They will all be older in 2025. This whole endeavor will be harder to trust because the Phillies have drifted further and further from the ultimate goal. But they had created something amazing, and this is why he started to cry.
“Just the people,” Hoffman said. “The people.”
The people are going to be different in 2025 because the Phillies have no other choice. They kept much of the same roster from a season ago, when they fell one win shy of back-to-back National League pennants. They won 95 games in 2024 and captured an elusive division title. They owned one of the strongest rosters in October, but that group was exposed by an upstart New York team.
Maybe it wasn’t so deep. The Phillies’ No. 6 through 9 hitters went 5-for-54 (.093) in the four-game series — the lowest-ever postseason batting average for a lineup’s back half. The bullpen, a strength all season, had a 11.37 ERA.
The Phillies scored two runs before the sixth inning over the entire series. The Mets had an answer for every perceived Phillies strength.
“Give them their credit,” Nick Castellanos said. “They beat us. Are there a lot of things that we could have done better? Yes. Are there things that we could have done different? Yes. Do I think that they are a better team than us? No. But this series, they were.”
This is why the winter will feel longer. The Phillies had a healthy Zack Wheeler all season and, at 34, he was one of the best pitchers in baseball. They probably lost this NLDS when they failed to build a larger lead in Game 1 as Wheeler dominated the Mets. They had 199 1/3 innings from 31-year-old Aaron Nola and a breakout season from Cristopher Sánchez, 27. They boasted two All-Star relievers in Hoffman and Matt Strahm, both in their early 30s.
They had Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper, both 31, as formidable forces atop the lineup. They had a focused 32-year-old Nick Castellanos, who improved with every month. They saw J.T. Realmuto, 33, fight through injuries to still be an above-average hitter at the toughest position in the sport.
“Every year we don’t get it done, that’s one more that passes us by,” Realmuto said. “Obviously, I feel like we’re all in our prime now. I don’t feel like anybody’s close to being out of their prime. So there’s still time for this group to get it done. But every time we don’t, it hurts a little more and stings a little more.”
It felt like they wasted something.
“It’s hard,” Realmuto said. “I mean, honestly, anything short of a World Series this year we would have felt it was wasted. Those are very high standards. But, I mean, that’s what you want in this game. That’s what you want for our city — to have those standards of winning the World Series. And if we don’t, it’s a disappointment.”
Realmuto took two of the biggest at-bats in Game 4. The Phillies somehow clung to a one-run lead. He batted with runners on the corners and one out in the fourth inning. He just needed a fly ball. He hit one too shallow to right field. In the sixth, the Phillies had runners on first and second and one out. Realmuto struck out on six pitches. The Phillies failed to score an insurance run for Hoffman.
“We knew we weren’t playing our best baseball coming into the postseason,” Realmuto said. “But we were hoping that once the lights turned on, we’d flip the switch and our offense would get back going. It just didn’t happen for us.”
That’s a candid and concerning observation. The Phillies were a great fastball-hitting team until they weren’t. They chased too many pitches. Do they think teams formed a better plan on how to beat them over time?
“I don’t,” shortstop Trea Turner said. “Personally, I think we get ourselves out. I don’t think it matters who’s on the mound.”
As Turner spoke, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski circled the room to shake the players’ hands. Dombrowski, the veteran executive who constructed this team, will have to consider a better balance for his lineup. His two trade deadline acquisitions, Estévez and Austin Hays, disappointed in October. There was no trade that would have saved the Phillies; they made legitimate overtures to the Chicago White Sox for hard-throwing lefty Garrett Crochet, but he wouldn’t have helped the Phillies score more runs against the Mets.
“My sense in the clubhouse with our players was that they never lost their edge,” Thomson said. “They may have gotten tired over the course of the year, but everybody does at some point.”
They’ll all be a year older in 2025.
“For it to come to an abrupt stop like this,” Bryson Stott said, “I can’t really put it into words.”
Harper packed his bags. He lowered his bats into the custom trunk that follows him across the country for eight months. As the tying run in the ninth Wednesday night, Schwarber struck out to end it, which meant Harper finished the season in the hole.
“I wish I could have had that last at-bat, obviously,” Harper said. “In that situation it would have been a lot of fun, but just wasn’t able to get it.”
Harper had his moments in this series; his two-run homer in the middle of Game 2 awakened Citizens Bank Park. That’ll be one of the few positive memories from this postseason for the Phillies.
He’s completed another season without winning a World Series.
“This is going to be a crazy answer, but I think my prime is for the next 10 years,” Harper said. “You know what I’m saying? I don’t think I’m faltering in any way. Kind of the way I run my stuff, and what I do. … Obviously, age, right? But at the same time, age is getting younger and younger, so I don’t think this is my prime years. I think the prime is coming as well.”
It is wishful thinking, but time is undefeated. Harper has found methods to stay effective and available. He will be in the middle of it all. But Schwarber and Realmuto will be free agents after the 2025 season. The team’s collection of younger players — Marsh, Stott and Alec Bohm — had uneven seasons. They did not all progress.
Harper acknowledged the finite period these Phillies have.
“But,” he said, “at the same time, you don’t pay Wheels and Noles if you don’t think you’re going to be competitive for the next five years.”
This was what the Phillies believed they started in 2022 when they held an Irish wake inside the visitors’ clubhouse at Minute Maid Park after losing the World Series. They could have never anticipated the heartbreak of 2023. The Phillies were the better team — and they knew it.
This time, as the Mets celebrated their own unexpected gift, that wasn’t as clear. Maybe the Phillies had more talent. The Mets had a larger payroll. They are ahead of schedule. They will be a force. It was hard, as the Phillies departed this place, to not feel as if an opportunity had passed.
The final bus of the season left at 9:25 p.m.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Schwarber said. “It f—ing hurts. It’s not a good feeling.”
(Top photo of Jeff Hoffman: Adam Hunger / Associated Press)
