It wasn’t until after he had dashed 44 feet to his right, after he had slid and after he had backhanded the ball inches off the grass that Phillies right fielder Nick Castellanos realized it was a tough play, his best of the season. It was also not a play he would have made last year.
Seated at his locker a day after he snatched a double from the Mets’ Brandon Nimmo, Castellanos grins. “I was like, ‘Wow, good job, Nick!’” he says.
Clutch Casty Catch pic.twitter.com/gQMl8Uuad1
— Philadelphia Phillies (@Phillies) May 31, 2023
He has merited a lot of praise this year. At 31, he is on pace for his best year ever: He’s reaching base at a .363 clip, slugging .494 and playing, for the first time in his career, nearly league-average defense. Even as Philadelphia continues to play inconsistent, third-place baseball—six straight losses, five straight wins; five straight losses, six straight wins—Castellanos has offered a bright spot.
He credits it all to a two-week “reset” he took as soon as the World Series ended last year. He had scuffled in October, hitting .185 in the postseason and .125 in the Fall Classic as the Phillies fell to the Astros in six games. That capped a disappointing first season for Castellanos in Philadelphia, which had signed him to a five-year, $100 million deal in March.
Castellanos grew up just outside Miami, and at times he was convinced he would return there as a free agent. He looked forward to spending more time with his nine-year-old son, Liam, who lives there with his mother. Castellanos’s wife, Jess, was pregnant, and he hoped the boys could grow up together. But the Marlins front office reportedly disagreed about whether and how to spend money, and Castellanos ended up in Philadelphia. He never felt fully comfortable there last year, he says now. “I knew I wasn’t happy,” he says. “I knew my anxiety was really high.”
He had felt that way nearly as long as he can remember. He was a first-rounder out of Archbishop McCarthy (Fla.) High School, so he never spent much time on teenage hijinks, instead trying to secure a future for himself in the batting cage. He skipped college, so his adult life started the day he reported at 18 to the rookie-level Gulf Coast League Tigers. And Liam was born when he was 21.
“I've never been able to just blindly only give a s--- about the baseball field,” he says.
But in November, he and Jess hunkered down in their home in suburban New Jersey and talked about … everything, he says: “I’m here for four more years; my relationship with [baby Otto, who was born last May], how my relationship with [Liam] changes, all that, because there’s a gigantic new piece there; Jess and I talking about ourselves and how we navigate our relationship now, having our own kid—all those things. There wasn’t balance to any of that during the year, and I could feel that. So that would stress me out, and everything on the baseball field is way harder to do when you’re stressed out.” When he was physically at home, he was mentally at the ballpark. When he was physically at the ballpark, he was mentally at home. He could never relax.
Now he can. A sense of peace is the biggest difference between last year and this year, he says. But that peace has also led to one other change.
He would stand in the outfield in years past and think about everything from his family to geopolitics. Then he would look up and realize a ball was headed toward him. But even as he struggled to hit in October, something surprising happened. The second-worst right fielder in the league was suddenly making highlight-reel catches nearly every night.
“Baseball in the postseason has really locked me in,” he said at the time. “The honest truth is a lot of times on defense, I struggle with focusing for 162 games. My mind is really fast and wanders, but with this atmosphere, it’s unbelievable. Being locked in on every pitch, I think my jumps, my anticipation, has just gotten better.” He compared the feeling to taking Adderall. He loved it.
That’s all well and good when you’re playing in late October against the Astros. But to get there, you have to play in June against the A’s. And here Castellanos believes he has unlocked another secret. “My focus was way higher just because the environment demanded it,” he says. “And now that I've been able to feel that, I now can hold myself to that.”
Sometimes he plays games with himself to keep himself engaged. In the fourth inning of that game against the Mets, for example, Nimmo scaled the wall in center field and took a home run away from Castellanos, who seethed. He decided to take it personally, he says, imbuing Nimmo’s at bats with extra weight.
So three innings later, when his new nemesis strode to the plate, Castellanos was thinking about the game, not the fate of the world. He made the play. He congratulated himself. Then he got ready to make another.
