Will there be a more motivated team than the Phillies?

The longest baseball winters are the ones for teams that came the closest the season before. And even though they didn’t make it back to the World Series last October, the Phillies know how close they were before the Diamondbacks won the National League Championship Series and they did not. And even knowing how highly motivated so many other high-profile contenders are for 2024, no one will be more highly motivated than the Phillies.

They were ahead of the Diamondbacks two games to none in the NLCS, and it seemed as if somebody was hitting a home run for them every couple of innings. The Phillies were still one game away from a repeat trip to the Series after winning Game 5 in Phoenix. And were going home to Citizens Bank Park and as powerful a homefield advantage as there is in the sport.

Then they stopped hitting, as a group, at the worst possible time. It happened to the Yankees in 2017 against the Astros, when they led three games to two and then scored just one run in the last two games of that series in Houston. It happened to the Red Sox in 2021, when they’d gone home-run happy against the Astros and were two wins away from making a trip to the World Series that might have changed a lot of what has happened since in Boston.

The Phillies found out what those teams found out, that sometimes when you stopped hitting like that in the late innings of the postseason, you don’t start again until next season.

The Phillies scored a total of three runs in those last two games against the D-backs. They produced 11 hits and just one home run, by Alec Bohm. The very worst part is that their most important hitters -- Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber, Trea Turner, Nick Castellanos -- were a combined 0-for-28 in those final two games; the most important moment in a season that had just seen the Phillies once again knock off the Braves in October.

Dave Dombrowski runs baseball operations for the Phillies. He is one of the great front-office men, now having seen four teams of which he’s been in charge -- Marlins, Tigers, Red Sox, Phillies -- make it to the Series. Two of them, the ’97 Marlins and the ’18 Red Sox, won it all.

Dave was driving to Clearwater for Spring Training this week. Along the way I asked him how motivated his players will be by the time they’ve joined him in Clearwater.

“I think all clubs come into Spring Training [highly motivated],” he said. “Not sure how much more motivated we will be. However, do know that many of the players this winter have focused on what happened to them as a club, and, will look to address that.”

Zack Wheeler, their ace, made his last start of the season in Game 5 against the Diamondbacks, and was predictably dazzling. But his last appearance was out of the bullpen in Game 7, by which time the Phillies had fallen behind Arizona for the last time. Aaron Nola gave up three runs in the second inning of Game 6, and the Phillies never came back from that. Ranger Suarez gave up just three runs himself in the four-plus innings he got in Game 7. Didn’t matter. Harper wasn’t hitting, Schwarber wasn’t hitting, Turner wasn’t hitting, Castellanos wasn’t. No one really was for the Phillies.

It had looked like their time to win their first Series since 2008. It looked like Harper’s time to win the Series that had eluded him in Washington, the championship on which he’d missed out in 2019 because he’d left the Nationals in free agency for the Phillies. Looked like time for Schwarber to win another one to go with the Series title he had with the Cubs in 2016.

The Phillies came back from losing a tough, tough World Series to the Astros in 2022. So, there is absolutely no reason to believe they won’t come back from the disappointment of what happened at the end against the Diamondbacks.

Buck Showalter had a front-row seat to what the Phillies can do, and who they are, in his two seasons managing the Mets. Before the postseason began last season, he said that everybody better look out for the Phillies, even after a regular season that had featured some notable patches of poor play.

“Dave [Dombrowski] has put together a team that fits that city, and not all teams are built that way,” Showalter said. “And he’s got a star in Harper who’s clearly built for Philly. So much of their personality and character comes from Harper. He clearly loves the game. He plays hurt, and he plays hard. He’ll be back and they’ll be back.”

The Phillies are in there with the Braves, the chip on whose shoulders has now been put there twice by the Phillies. The Braves were 14 games better than the Phillies during the ’23 regular season, and still got clipped by them again in the postseason.

Those two teams alone make the NL East as entertaining a division as there is in the sport. The Braves got knocked down, too, last October. But the Phillies got knocked down closer to the prize. Now we see how they get back up. Again.