Oddball season gives the Phillies a pitching opportunity

The Phillies rotation has been disappointing, but this year things could be a bit more even.

On July 1, MLB.com writer Todd Zolecki gave us his list of Philadelphia Phillies storylines for the coming season – despite the fact every fan of the team likely has his own list since almost everybody has recently endured some serious thumb-twiddling time.

Like Zolecki, everyone undoubtedly would list re-signing J.T. Realmuto as the Phillies first off-field priority for the coming weeks, but that’s a complicated matter for another day, seemingly. The earliest possible date to offer the catcher a contract has already come and gone.

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Instead, let’s focus for a bit on issue number two on Zolecki’s list, which he called, simply, “the rotation.” Phillies starters have been a nagging annoyance during the team’s painfully slow climb to .500 under the current front office leadership.

This is because, while Aaron Nola has progressed nicely in his young career, the addition of Jake Arrieta two years ago hasn’t worked out as well as hoped for, and other (now) youngish (not young) hurlers haven’t progressed too well at all.

As Zolecki points out, though, this season there was only competition for the number five Phillies spot as a starter, since Nola and Arrieta are still around, Zach Elfin has become the de facto number four, and Zack Wheeler was signed over the winter to be the probable number two.

None of that numbering matters, of course, after the first week of play, but whatever.

There were three hurlers vying for the number five spot when spring training was shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic – Vince Velasquez, Nick Pivetta, and Ranger Suarez.

It is no overstatement to say that Velasquez and Pivetta have been disappointments, and Eflin avoids that tag only because he rejected the advice of last year’s on-field bosses and improved for that. Among Velasquez, Pivetta, Eflin, and Suarez, any of them could emerge this year as better than currently viewed, but all except Suarez would be real surprises if they reached .600 winning percentages.

No, make .550 the surprise threshold.

And now, the additional matter of managing pitchers who have been away from even simulated game situations for three months is thrown into the mix, along with the perfectly sensible expectation that all the starters will be on innings limits early on – or for half the season – or three-quarters of it.

And that may not be a bad thing for the Phillies. Here are some of the reasons:

1. All starters this season will be carefully watched and protected, especially the prized talents. No one, not the Phillies or any other team, will chance – if it can be helped – overextending a deGrom, a Nola, or a Scherzer for this crumby, 60-game season. The bullpen door will swing freely at the first sign of any number one starter’s fatigue or funky motion on two pitches in a row.
2. Number twos will also be protected almost as carefully. Two weeks on the IL this year is a very bad thing.
3. The third, fourth and fifth starters, if everyone is honest, aren’t actually expected to go more than five innings anymore, and
4. …every at-bat will be more important this year, which means we have a match-up scramble coming up that will be an absolute circus because of the three-batter minimum rule. In other words, managers and pitching coaches will want to go to the pen quite often, but the data crunchers are going to have to think in terms of matching up against three batters, even if we start to have a fraudulent rash of sore-arm, mid-inning removals from games. (And that might be a very interesting path for analysts to run down mentally someday very soon.)

Thus, the four points above mean: 2020 will be the Year of the Bullpen Starters. The guys on the 60-man expanded teams who don’t quite make the rotation will get frequent work out of the bullpen, and the guy in the bullpen who thinks of himself as a reliever will become, often, a given game’s starter 2.0, coming in to pitch the third, fourth, or fifth inning.

Right now, with young Spencer Howard expected to debut this year, and with the pitchers the Phillies already have, no one can say they are really in worse shape “rotation-wise,” given everything above, than any other team in the East.