For the second straight year, the Philadelphia Phillies have gone from plucky Wild Cards to the NLCS. Fightins punched their ticket to baseball’s final four in dramatic fashion, outlasting the top-seeded Braves in a wild NLDS Game 4 on Thursday night. They now move on to their second consecutive NLCS, hoping for a repeat performance after reaching the World Series in 2022. They’ll be going up against quite the Cinderella story: The Arizona Diamondbacks went just 84-78 in the regular season, but they came out of nowhere to sweep the Milwaukee Brewers and Los Angeles Dodgers en route to their first NLCS since 2007. Before Game 1 gets underway on Monday, let’s take a look at the history between these two NL foes and whether they’ve ever squared off in October.
Diamondbacks vs. Phillies history
Have teams ever played in postseason?
This will be the first time the D-backs and Phillies have met in the playoffs — not totally surprising, considering that Arizona has only existed as a franchise since 1998. The teams came close a couple of times before: In 2007, Arizona’s lone previous trip to the NLCS, the Phillies were swept by the Rockies in the NLDS. (Colorado would go on to sweep the D-backs as well en route to the World Series.) Then, in 2011, both teams made it to October only to fall in five games in their respective NLDS against the Brewers and Cardinals.
Philly took the season series this year, four games to three, dropping a three-game set at home in late May before taking three of four in Arizona on a West Coast swing in June. As for the all-time series, it’s similarly close, with the D-backs holding an 85-83 edge in 168 games.
