Phillies Opening Day Is Thursday As 2021 MLB Season Begins

PHILADELPHIA, PA — Like warmer weather and melting snow, nothing quite rings in the start of spring like the crack of a bat in South Philadelphia. The Phillies will begin their 2021 campaign on Thursday afternoon, with an Opening Day matchup slated against the reigning division champions, the Atlanta Braves.

While Thursday afternoon won't quite be the carnival atmosphere of 2019, when tens of thousands packed Citizens Bank Park for Bryce Harper's Phillies debut, it should be an improvement over 2020's gloomy, fan-less, late-game collapse opener that would go on to serve as a fitting hook to an upside-down season.

The 2021 opener, with first pitch set for 3:05 p.m., will be somewhere between 2019 and 2020. The city has approved a limited attendance of 8,800 fans for the first 19 home games, with a wide variety of special restrictions in place. Updated statewide capacity regulations for outdoor events mean that the Phillies can eventually offer up to 50 percent of their maximum capacity, which comes out to around 21,396, once they get approval from the city.

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Aaron Nola will take the mound for the Phillies on Thursday. It's the fourth year in a row that the Phils' ace, who has an All-Star appearance and multiple Cy Young votes on his resume, will take the mound for the season opener. He'll be opposed by Braves lefty Max Fried, who turned in a Cy Young caliber campaign of his own in 2020.

Rule changes

Fans won't be the only thing different about the 2021 season.

There will be no designated hitter in the National League, after MLB experimented with it for the first time in history during the 2020 season.

Roster sizes were expanded to 28 players during the 2020 season. That will be back down to 26 for the 2021 season. Teams can have up to 28 active players at any given time, however, with the other two assigned to the Triple-A minor league team or the franchise's alternate training site.

Meanwhile, the other rule changes put in place because of the pandemic shortened year, like 7-inning double headers, and an automatic runner on second to begin extra innings, will remain.

Season preview

The Phillies come into the 2021 season with tremendous pressure to win now, and a competitive division hellbent on stopping them. Holding their own against the Braves, widely considered to be World Series favorites behind the Dodgers, Padres, and Yankees, would be a crucial first step.

The Phillies have clearly the best roster they've had in a decade, since the Howard-Utley-Rollins days of yore. Had this present team come along a few years ago, they might have been seen as Wild Card shoe-ins. But the strengths of this Phillies team are overshadowed in the media and around the league by the raw power of the NL East.

Indeed, the biggest challenge the Phillies face in returning to the playoffs is not their own roster. It is the improved rosters of every other team in the division. The Mets and the Nationals made the biggest additions. Even the Marlins are returning a young team that made a surprise playoff appearance in 2020. It's doubtlessly the deepest division in baseball, with four teams that spent big this offseason to improve already competitive rosters.

The Phillies abbreviated 2020 ended on a disappointing note, as they failed to make the postseason even with the expanded field of eight teams in each league. This was due to a late collapse fueled by a series of injuries, but mostly a leaky bullpen that experienced a historic stretch of misfortune.

But the Phils have completely rebuilt that bullpen, which aside from below par performance, also suffered from its fair share of bad luck. With even an average showing out of the pen in 2020, the Phillies could've competed for the division title. The Phillies lost an MLB-leading 14 games in 2020 after leading by at least two runs. If they'd even held on in half of those games, they would've finished with the same record as the division champion Braves (35-25).

Of course, the bullpen is a crucial element of a team's late-season success, and the Braves were doubtlessly the better team. But the prevailing sentiment among the fanbase that came out of the 2020 season -- unmitigated failure -- is misleading and objectively false. The rest of the team showed marked improvement, with a breakout campaign from Alec Bohm and elite performances from Bryce Harper and JT Realmuto. With the resigning of Realmuto and Gregorious, this starting 9 and much of the bench is identical to 2020, and there's no reason to expect they'll be anything but even better than last year.

Rosters finalized

In recent days, the Phillies made several notable demotions and additions as they finalized their Opening Day roster.

Super utility man Scott Kingery, who shone in 2019 but struggled greatly in 2020 and this spring, will begin the year at the alternate training site and Triple-A Lehigh Valley.

He'll be joined by former number one overall pick Mickey Moniak, who is still just 22 and had a monster spring. Manager Joe Girardi has said that when Moniak is called up to the majors, he wants him to play every day.

Kingery and Moniak were both candidates to fill the Phillies gap in center field. That battle is now down to Adam Haseley, Roman Quinn, and Odubel Herrera, and will likely include some mix of at least two those players.

The Phillies also exercised their option on reliever Brandon Kintzler, who starred as the Miami Marlins closer in 2021, and should further bolster a fully revamped Phillies bullpen. Similarly, they released another veteran reliever, Tony Watson, who was not as impressive as Kintzler in camp.

Around the league

Fans will be allowed inside all 30 ballparks after a 2020 regular season that was played entirely without fans. Some fans were allowed in during the playoffs.

Teams have varied greatly in the attendance capacity rules set forth before the season. The Texas Rangers are allowing a 100 percent capacity return, which could mean more than 40,000 fans at Globe Life Park in Arlington, Texas. No other franchise is allowing more than 50 percent capacity, with most settling around 20 or 25 percent, like the Phillies.

When Nola and Fried toe the mound Thursday afternoon, it be the first time in years that all 30 teams start the season on the same day. In recent years, a Sunday night baseball game was held before a Monday Opening Day.