For Aaron Nola, the Philadelphia Phillies ace, the early part of the 2019 season has been like a climb up a steep hill with loose rocks.
Some people picked Philadelphia Phillies righthander Aaron Nola to win the NL Cy Young award this season. After all, he finished third last year in that balloting, so it made some sense. He’s young, he just had a break-out season, he’s cool under fire. Very cool.
Then, they started playing games that counted. It all started well enough as Nola took the ball for the season and home opener against Atlanta and held the talented young Braves to one run over six innings and notched a win. This was a good start, the five walks notwithstanding – they were likely chalked up to Opening Day adrenaline by most.
The next three games, however, seemed to let the pitcher’s endocrine system off the hook, and that wasn’t a good thing at all. Nola was lit up. Over a 13-day stretch between Apr. 3 and Apr. 15, Nola gave up 15 earned runs, 19 hits, and six walks to division rivals Washington (twice) and New York. The Phillies lost all three games although he didn’t take the loss-line hits.
Only in the next game, at Colorado, did Nola seem to straighten out a bit. But that was only for about half the game, or more accurately, in the second half of the 5.2 innings he lasted. Oddly, at altitude, his breaking pitches moved somewhat better as the game progressed, and he picked up his second win. That day, Apr. 20, his ERA dropped from a hideous 7.45 to a still hideous 6.84.
After an Apr. 25 loss to Miami in which Nola pitched reasonably well – perhaps with a little less movement on his pitches than for some of them in Denver – the pitcher’s WHIP stood at 1.579. Once again someone else took the loss, statistically, but it couldn’t have escaped all Phillies fans that this WHIP stood in stark contrast to Nola’s ’18 figure – 0.975.
Some fans had to be quietly wondering where their ace had gone, but few relayed such fears to sports talk radio programs. It might have been they had an actual fear that 2018 was a Nola outlier year.
As the pitcher took the mound for his next start, May 1, his ERA was merely “early season bad” – 5.68 – as opposed to hideous. His opponent was rebuilding Detroit.