PHOENIX — Every one of Orion Kerkering’s teammates had departed the Dodger Stadium dugout soon after Wednesday’s loss. The game had been over for three minutes; Kerkering did not budge. He was the last one there. He was fixated on an iPad that replayed his outing that night, pitch by pitch.
Often, Kerkering will let a bad one stew. He won’t relive it. But that causes him to remember only what went wrong. He was billed as the Phillies’ future closer, then the club acquired two right-handed relievers to insert into late-inning situations. Kerkering, who this week will mark the second anniversary of his surprising big-league call-up, is further down the bullpen depth chart than anyone imagined.
He is frustrated. The Phillies will need him in October, even if it’s for the sixth inning. The negative energy from a bad outing has lingered too long.
He studied the iPad.
“Just trying to see what moment I could slow down a little bit,” Kerkering said. “Because, like, I can’t make those same mistakes in the postseason.”
Things have moved fast and slow for Kerkering in 2025. He did not permit an earned run for six weeks in May and June. He was the club’s most-trusted righty when the summer started. But he’s been erratic since; even in his clean outings, Kerkering has run deep counts and pitched with traffic. He’s allowed 14 of his 31 inherited runners to score. He has pitched better with two days of rest. Lefties have hit him.
He has a 3.28 ERA in 66 appearances. He has permitted a run in each of his last three outings.
Kerkering still wields some of the best stuff in the Phillies’ bullpen, and that is the constant tease. He’s looked defeated on the mound at times. He’s acknowledged he can overthink things. He hasn’t been able to rely on his sweeping slider, a pitch so good that it essentially carried him from Low A to the majors over the course of six months during the 2023 season.
“I still have a lot of trust in him,” Phillies pitching coach Caleb Cotham said. “And he’s still very good. I think that’s the big thing for me, it’s just not forgetting how good he is. How good he has been. The bumps in the road are just great opportunities to refine a process. There’s not a lot of fancy things for him. It’s making sure you’re doing it how you do it.”
Orion Kerkering is interviewed in June after notching his first career save. (Jared Lennon / Getty Images)
Kerkering misses the high-leverage chances. “Everyone’s dream is to be the guy,” he said. The Phillies have a closer for now and the foreseeable future in Jhoan Duran. They signed David Robertson, who has emerged as a setup man. In Kerkering’s mind, it was a personal failure that he couldn’t retain a late-inning role.
“I wouldn’t say it’s an ego hit,” Kerkering said. “I don’t think so. I think I was more upset on my end because it felt like I didn’t contribute to this team well enough. I wasn’t consistent as I wanted to be to be the guy. Or the guy I know everyone wants me to be.”
Kerkering sometimes talks about 2025 in the past tense, but there are still outs to get. The Phillies have seen relievers stumble through September and then discover success in October. They have seen it the other way, too.
Robertson, the 40-year-old veteran who has crafted an incredible career without ever being The Guy, has become a sounding board for Kerkering. Robertson has urged him to compete; the young righty can obsess over how his stuff is working on a given night rather than how to make the next pitch.
Sometimes, Kerkering will look at a ribbon board at Citizens Bank Park after he throws his first slider in an outing. He wants to know the exact movement measurements. They help him know what he has on a given night. But it can send Kerkering down a bad path within an outing; he’ll try to be too fine and dot a pitch.
“Don’t be frustrated if it’s short or the fastball’s running more or this and that,” Cotham said. “Pitch.”
This is what Kerkering did earlier last week at Dodger Stadium in what might have been his best outing of the season — and that’s even with allowing a game-tying home run to Mookie Betts. Kerkering struck out Shohei Ohtani, Teoscar Hernández and Michael Conforto in that inning. He attacked. He let his stuff do the work.
That was all Robertson wanted to see.
“Don’t lose confidence in what you’ve got,” Robertson said he told Kerkering. “You’re a really good pitcher. These situations are going to happen in games. But they give them to pitchers that can handle that pressure and can deal with it afterwards. He’s dealt with it fine. He doesn’t seem like he’s lost any confidence.”
It has taken time, Kerkering said, to accept the failures that forced the Phillies to move him down the bullpen list. The slider’s struggles mystify him; Kerkering has lacked that strike-to-ball slider that was his calling card. He’s either throwing a ball out of the hand or a hittable one without much movement. He hung another one in Sunday’s game and Arizona Diamondbacks outfielder Tim Tawa crushed it for a solo homer.
Kerkering has studied video to compare his mechanics and hand placement. He wishes he would take a little more time between pitches — not to think, but just to have conviction. Innings have spiraled, and it’s not unusual for Kerkering to wear some of the emotion on the mound.
“Hitters see the, I won’t say the frustration, but see you’re struggling,” Kerkering said. “That’s where the blood in the water kind of feeling is. You don’t want to be the blood in the water. You want to be the shark.”
Robertson can feel the 24-year-old reliever’s stress. Everyone around Kerkering has urged him to think about October as a fresh start. The Phillies are forced to trust Kerkering because there will be moments in the middle of playoff games that call for a righty reliever.
“Whatever we did earlier in the year,” Robertson said, “is all going to change when the playoffs start.”
Kerkering has pitched a lot, but his 66 appearances are still two fewer than he posted between a minor-league rehab assignment and the majors last season. He looked gassed by the end of last season, and this is on the Phillies’ mind as they enter the final week of the season. He has been far better in 2025 when pitching with two days between outings. The club is trying to strike a balance between using Kerkering to help raise his confidence and preserving important pitches for later.
Even just one or two clean innings can boost him.
“As much as I hate it being right now and losing those bigger innings, at the end of the day, we’re trying to focus on winning ballgames,” Kerkering said. “Try to put the ego aside. Just try to get better each time. Just try to compete with it.”
(Top photo: Hunter Martin / Getty Images)