A Phillies key: Coach Price and the rotation’s back end?
While the Phillies rotation in 2020 isn’t set in stone, the season will start with important interactions between Bryan Price and three weak starters.
While a number of Philadelphia Phillies fans are still hoping for the late holiday gift of a good starting pitcher, there have been a number of indicators the team will once again expect at least two of three relatively young, disappointing pitchers to step up and nail down the fourth and fifth spots in the team’s rotation.
The latest indicator came in a Todd Zolecki piece on the Phillies website Jan. 16 quoting new pitching coach Bryan Price as follows: “As I kind of investigated [the probability that Zach Eflin, Vince Velasquez, and Nick Pivetta would improve] through meeting these guys or talking to them on the phone, and then talking to our staff members here and looking at a lot of video, I was extremely encouraged. I think there is a lot of pitching here that has room to get much better, and I’m looking forward to being a part of that by helping where I can.”
Of course, Phillies fans have been hearing this sort of thing about these three pitchers for a number of years now – meaning, at least three, and in Eflin’s and Velasquez’ cases, four.
Thus, however disappointed Phillies fans may be, it is becoming pretty clear that a pivotal relationship for the team will be that of Price and these three pitchers. The Fightin’s are just not strong enough on the mound altogether yet for both the fourth and fifth starters to fail or to be constantly changing.
Price is one of the strong indicators the Phillies are moving just a bit away from the Phillies field management’s fully analytical approach for the past two years. He is much more an “old school” thinker, a guy who emphasizes that pitchers should “command the strike zone.”
Second, he believes in being aggressive. And he makes this observation that initially seems to involve a contradiction: “[We] have all this data, but at times we’ve oversimplified pitching. Let’s get four-pitch starters back out there that command the strike zone. Ninety-five-plus is great, but if you can’t manage the strike zone, typically you’re not going to be effective.”
Hmm, more data leads to oversimplification?
What Price may mean here is either that pure velocity is overvalued, or that too much data leads to something like panning for gold – lots of rocks are thrown away, and one that’s shiny is seized upon as “the answer.” Or both of those notions.
It’s a remark that seems to demonstrate that old school guys can think beyond what a baseball man sees when he stares at a data spreadsheet. However, it’s hard to tell. Does Price have a little Casey Stengel in him?
Four Pitches?
More from Call to the Pen
- Philadelphia Phillies, ready for a stretch run, bomb St. Louis Cardinals
- Philadelphia Phillies: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
- Boston Red Sox fans should be upset over Mookie Betts’ comment
- Analyzing the Boston Red Sox trade for Dave Henderson and Spike Owen
- 2023 MLB postseason likely to have a strange look without Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals
Hey, Eflin, Velasquez, and Pivetta all have at least four pitches although Pivetta leans heavily on three. He may have abandoned the sinker, and he seems to have thrown a cutter in only one month of his career, last April. For what it’s worth, all three can easily hit 95 mph.
Additionally, while traditional, Price seems to be player-sensitive enough to at least consider what a player himself thinks. Zolecki reports Price likes the notion of finding out how pitchers “see themselves.” Moreover, he has spoken to both Pivetta and Velasquez “multiple times” this off-season, presumably about that and other matters. Something about Eflin, however, may well have caught his attention, however many times they’ve spoken.
Last summer, after a certain point, Eflin basically scrapped instructions he’d been given to throw more four-seam fastballs, and returned to a reliance on his two-seamers after a brief stint in the minors. After his return to the Phillies, his last five decisions resulted in a 3-2 won-lost record. His previous four decisions had been losses.
Eflin seems the likeliest of the three struggling Phillies starters to get the number four spot in the rotation. On balance, his overall WHIP, ERA, W-L, HR/9, and H/9 numbers are in the same ballpark as Velasquez’ and Pivetta’s for his career (he barely trails Velasquez in HR/9 and ERA, and trails by a tiny bit more in H/9), but he is the youngest of the three, and he booked 23 decisions last season. Additionally, for his career is merely minus-6 in wins and losses for four years; he also has the best WHIP figure if 1.341 is something “best” can be attached to.
But it should be kept in mind that, last season, the Phillies expected Pivetta to step forward decisively, based partly on what he did in Spring Training, and that didn’t happen, and altogether these three guys are a collective minus-24 in wins and losses in an aggregate 12 years in MLB.
Eflin’s independence may strike Price as a very positive matter, but how well he gets along with any of them once they are dealing with each other face-to-face every day remains to be seen. As far as command of the strike zone goes, maybe Old School Price would want to dig into those graphs from Brooks Baseball on “grooved pitches” for these three pitchers.
Or maybe he wouldn’t. At first glance, their graphs don’t look wildly different from Jacob deGrom’s, and yet deGrom’s WHIP, ERA, W-L, HR/9, and H/9 figures over a slightly longer career than any of the Phillies considered here are significantly better, and he has two Cy Young awards. Why is that?
MLB: A Congressman wants Astrogate hearings. Oh. dark. Next
Maybe Bryan Price’s first face-to-face instruction to his young pitchers in February should be, “Guys, here’s what I want you to do – hit the corners and the top and bottom of the zone. That’s key.”