Bullpen starting to give Kapler some relief

PHILADELPHIA » With the temperature nearing 100 and the Phillies’ run total reading zero, Gabe Kapler Sunday made a choice.

In a game the Phillies needed to win for plenty of reasons, Kapler would remove his $30 million pitcher, a recent Cy Young winner, a clubhouse leader and established major-league star. And he would trust what he expected to be the final four innings of a showdown with the Washington Nationals to his gathering crowd of inconsistent relief pitchers.

Jake Arrieta out, after five innings. Those guys up. Them? “Yeah it’s a tough decision to make there,” Kapler would say later. “But we needed to try to get some runs, scratch some hits together. And it ended up working out for us. The bullpen threw a lot of scoreless innings.” A lot. Austin Davis did. Pat Neshek and Tommy Hunter. Mark Leiter Jr. went untouched. So did Adam Morgan and Jake Thompson, who had just been recalled from the minors that morning. Victor Arano flipped a scoreless inning. So did usual starter Nick Pivetta. And eight innings and no Washington runs after Kapler trusted his bullpen, the Phillies would win, 4-3, in 13 innings, taking their fifth series out of their last six.

So was Kapler onto something all along, screeching into the darkness that, darn it, he had excellent relief pitchers, and that it was everybody else but him who couldn’t comprehend that?

“We all pick each other up,” Arrieta said. “There’s going to be facets of our game that are slightly off and not necessarily where we’d like it to be. That’s the duty of the rest of the guys.”

It was just a night earlier when Arano, Hunter, Morgan, Yacksel Rios and Seranthony Dominguez combined to allow one run in seven innings of a 3-2 victory after Vince Velasquez left early with a bruised arm. So that was 15 innings of one-run baseball and two telling victories from a bullpen that had been something less than dependable since March.

But as the Phils spin toward a two-game series Tuesday against Manny Machado and the Baltimore team he won’t likely to be playing with for much longer, their bullpen is becoming a surprising strength.

“That was a tremendous amount of confidence built today,” Kapler said after the Phils won for the fourth time in five games. “It was a tremendous amount of confidence built the last couple of days. All of a sudden you see that Austin Davis can go through some of the best lefties in baseball. We know something new about Arano, that he can go back to back to back and be very effective and actually have his stuff tick up. We know something more about Rios. He can pitch a lot and then come back and give us more. And when he comes back and gives us more he might be stronger the next time through.

“Shoot, I mean, Mo (Morgan) got a big out for us today. Our bullpen is going to come back from the off day extremely confident.”

The O’s 24-59 record should provide its own confidence-jolt. But Kapler’s bullpen has pitched to an 0.60 ERA with 13 strikeouts over its last two games. Hector Neris, recently dumped to the minors for a second time, was unable to provide the closer necessary to make any bullpen work, but Dominguez has a 1.98 ERA, seven saves, 36 strikeouts and four walks. In Davis and Morgan, Kapler has a left-handed presence. And the return of the veteran AllStar Neshek, who missed the season’s entire first half, should have a solidifying effect in a young bullpen.

“Yeah, hopefully I can catch my groove here,” Neshek said, “and kind of pick up where last year I left off.”

The Phillies believe they will contend for a playoff spot. But they will need more consistent relief pitching than they had in the first half of the season.

“Our bullpen has kind of been the subject of at least the spotlight all season long,” Kapler said, phrasing it nicely Sunday. “And our bullpen was spectacular today.”

*** NOTES » Zach Eflin, who went 5-0 in June, will pitch Tuesday at 7:05 against Baltimore right-hander Alex Cobb (2-9, 6.75 ERA). Eflin is 6-2 with a 3.02 ERA.Aaron Nola (10-2, 2.48) will pitch Wednesday afternoon at 4:05.