Dave Dombrowski talks trade deadline: How Phillies aim to address biggest need

He is 35 trade deadlines into a career that is likely going to lead him to Cooperstown. So Dave Dombrowski doesn’t need any advice on how to handle the 2025 deadline.

Not from The Athletic. Not from his favorite talk-show callers. Not from all those unpaid assistant general managers roaming around Ashburn Alley.

Nope, he’ll be tuning all that out — because everything starts with one fundamental question, the Phillies’ president of baseball operations said on the latest edition of The Athletic’s Starkville podcast: Is your team good enough to win the World Series or not?

And after watching these 2025 Phillies play nearly 80 games now, Dombrowski thinks he knows that answer.

“We feel like we have a legitimate chance to win,” he said, with no ifs or buts anywhere to be found.

So when the president of baseball ops decides that his team has a chance to win, Dombrowski told me and my Starkville co-host, Doug Glanville, “then the answer, to me, is, you may give up a little bit more than you would want to in other circumstances. But that opportunity (to win it all) doesn’t always come. And I always tell people: Don’t take it for granted when you’re in a position where you’re in it, year in and year out.”

So in a fascinating 30-minute conversation, Dombrowski laid out what he thinks is at stake for his surging Phillies team — and how his front office will attack its most obvious need: Finding a difference-making bullpen arm (or arms) for the most pressure-packed innings of the season … and postseason.

But you should also know this: The July 31 deadline might not go like a lot of Phillies fans think it will go.

That’s because Dombrowski didn’t sound like a man shopping for multiple high-leverage relievers, at least not at the moment. Instead, he told a story that felt both instructive and foreshadowing.

It wasn’t a story of anything that has happened since he arrived in Philadelphia, either. It was a story about his 2018 Red Sox.

That team did employ a famous closer: a fellow named Craig Kimbrel. But he was not the centerpiece of the October bullpen that won the World Series. Instead, the most important bullpen innings of that postseason were often pitched by men with a whole different job description — a job commonly described as …

The starting pitchers.

David Price pitched out of that team’s bullpen. Nathan Eovaldi was a monster stomping out of that team’s October ’pen. And the final outs were collected not by Kimbrel, but by a dude named Chris Sale. It was all by design. And you might see that same design in Philadelphia this fall if the Phillies are still playing, Dombrowski indicated.

“The postseason bullpen is a lot different than the regular-season bullpen,” he said, “because in the National League this year, if you advance past the wild-card round … you play five games (in the next round, the NLDS). Well, the way the schedule is (with an extra off day), you only need three starting pitchers during that time period. So if you have five (starters), two of them can go into the bullpen as it is there. Plus, if you have additional (surplus starters), they can go into the bullpen there.

“A good example,” Dombrowski went on, “was in ’18, when I was in Boston. Alex Cora was our manager, and he did a masterful job of working our starters into our bullpen and using some of them at times in the ’pen. I mean, we ended up using Sale in the ’pen. We ended up using Eovaldi in the ’pen, and they did very well for us. And we’d give somebody an extra day’s rest because we knew we could fill in with somebody else.”

The Red Sox swarm Chris Sale after he finished off Game 5 to win the 2018 World Series. (Harry How / Getty Images)

It was clear Dombrowski didn’t tell that story just because he felt like reminiscing. He was laying out his team’s most likely approach to this deadline — and this Octoberfest.

Over the next few weeks, the Phillies will lean on the accelerator, trying to acquire a reliever with the talent to get huge outs in October and the temperament to handle getting those outs in a place like Philadelphia. But do they need more than one arm like that? Dombrowski talked like someone who thinks he can use his starting-pitching depth to solve his bullpen issues. And it’s not hard to understand why.

Just peruse the names of all the Phillies’ starters if everyone is healthy:

Zack Wheeler
Aaron Nola (currently on the injured list)
Christopher Sánchez
Ranger Suárez
Jesús Luzardo

Plus …

• Former first-round pick Mick Abel, currently rocking a 3.47 ERA in five big-league starts.

• One of the most buzzed about pitching prospects in baseball, Andrew Painter, currently at Triple A, who is nearly through working his way back from Tommy John surgery.

• Not to mention Taijuan Walker, who has already been moved to the bullpen.

So I asked Dombrowski who in that group was a candidate to transition to high-leverage relief at some point.

“Well, I won’t speculate on names,” he replied, “because that always creates a little bit of consternation. But I would say I don’t think Zack Wheeler is that guy.”

Top prospect Andrew Painter is expected to join the Phillies later this summer. (Mike Janes / Four Seam Images via Associated Press)

Then I asked a follow-up question: How early could he envision the Phillies shifting a starting pitcher to that bullpen? Dombrowski left that door open — for now.