Philadelphia Phillies: Aaron Nola climbing April’s hill

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(Photo by Dustin Bradford/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) /

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.

A New Month

Aaron Nola throws four pitches, two and four-seam fastballs, a curve, and a change-up. The four-seamer is the one that comes back to the inside corner against lefties or jams righties and is the pitch he threw most often last season. Many think his curve is his best pitch when it’s working, but basically, when two of these pitches work well, Nola should win. If only one works well or he isn’t hitting spots, he struggles as he did in April.

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As with all pitchers who have four pitches, though, he can battle through. Sometimes, of course, pitches start to work better as the game progresses. This was the story for Nola Apr. 20 in Colorado.

Against Detroit, as May began, the weather outlook was iffy as well as a bit cool. In his past three games, Nola had surrendered five, then three earned runs, then one, in that order. The question seemed to be: Would progress continue?

Early on, the righthander was quite effective, leaning somewhat heavily on curves and change-ups that moved well. Miguel Cabrera looked particularly befuddled in the first inning by a very slow breaking pitch he missed for a third strike and clearly wasn’t ready for.

Nola piled up three of his eventual six strikeouts before the second inning was over.

The Phillies scored a run in the bottom of the second, and the score remained 1-0 until the top of the sixth when suddenly there were just too many Tigers on base. Eventually, one who had walked scored on a bloop to left by JaCoby Jones, who came into the game hitting .137. And Nola was gone in fewer than six full innings for the fourth time in seven starts.

After the game, former Phillies closer Ricky Bottalico, now an NBC Sports Philly commentator, said Nola looked “tired” in the sixth and that his “tempo was off.” He wasn’t giving up missiles, but he didn’t keep people off base either. Bottalico would have Nola use his four-seam fastball a bit more.

However, Nola’s teammates picked him up, exploding for six runs in the seventh and eighth innings, cementing a Phillies victory by 7-3. Nola obviously didn’t figure in the decision. However, he dropped his ERA to 5.06 (2.50 in the past three games) despite giving up seven hits and three walks while gathering only 17 outs.

Next. Toronto Blue Jays: Time to kick off the rebuilding process?. dark

Aaron Nola, Cy Young candidate, probably found May Day a little too much like his climb up April’s hill.

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