A Phillies key: Coach Price and the rotation’s back end?

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?

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.”