Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Rotation too thin for pennant push
NEW YORK >> Jake Arrieta is 33, makes $25 million a year, has pitched two no-hitters, owns a world championship ring, and, if sufficiently prodded, would endeavor put a dent in the skull of Todd Frazier.
So how would Gabe Kapler characterize his season with the Phillies?
“I’d characterize it,” the manager said the other night, “as a work in progress.”
That’s what Kapler said, and as casually as if he were discussing some rookie in Williamsport, not a veteran nearer to a Hall of Fame ballot than to his draft night. But given the moment, it was the most polite thing Kapler could concoct. So polite it would have to be.
“I would say that no matter where you are in your development stage, you’re a bit of a work in progress, aren’t you?” he said, when pushed on the topic. “But he’s had some ups and downs.”
That’s all Kapler was looking for as the Phillies backed into the AllStar break Sunday just 90 games since strutting into the regular season. He just wanted a few more ups to go along with months of pitching downs. But Sunday morning, Arrieta entered his office to report that his elbow was no less sore than it was when he’d allowed 11 hits in less than five innings a night earlier. By then, Kapler already had his own arm exhaustion, his cost for trying to lug a curiously ineffective starting pitching staff around a playoff race.
If there was a story of the prebreak portion of what should have been a more satisfying Phillies season, it was that starting staff. There was Aaron Nola, who took a no-hitter into the sixth Sunday, allowing the Phils to ease to an 8-3 victory, their second in the three-game Citi Field series. And then, there was everyone else.
While John Middleton made good on his promise to be a little stupid about offseason spending and signed Bryce Harper and Andrew McCutchen, there was something odd about how Matt Klentak approached the starting rotation. He didn’t go near it at all. He stashed some added cash in Nola’s shirt pocket. He trusted Arrieta, paying him as if he were still the 2015 Cy Young winner. Then he made Kapler try to figure something out with what three seasons ago Pete Mackanin had accurately termed, “the usual suspects.” All the general manager did was fling Vince Velasquez and Nick Pivetta, Zach Eflin and Jerad Eickhoff, and handful of minor-league talents in Allentown his way, then asked Kapler to invent the final 60 percent of his rotation.
There were some moments. Eflin was effective enough early that when Kapler casually mentioned him in conversation about a possible All-Star Game spot, Andy MacPhail didn’t have to lecture him about the dangers of insulting the fans’ sensibilities. But Kapler had barely gotten that campaign going before Eflin started to sag. The rest? Eickhoff, ever so troubled, was injured. Velasquez was placed on the starter-to-reliever shuttle. Pivetta was dumped early to the minors, returned, and rarely showed a useful competitive streak. Some IronPigs auditioned and basically showed why they were IronPigs.
That the Phillies trusted a 38-yearold pitching coach of limited seasoning but a mesmerizing grasp of analytics didn’t help. But the suspects, as they had been called, weren’t marginally worse under other coaches and managers. With that, there was the question: Can the Phillies survive a pennant race without a rotation upgrade?
“I certainly think it’s a fair question,” Kapler said. “But what we’ve seen recently is Nola returning to form, and we also have hope and trust that some of our other guys will step up.”
That’s the problem: Too much hope, and even more trust. Klentak has been in charge since 2015 and has given the starting rotation an over-priced Arrieta and Velasquez, who’d arrived in a package for Ken Giles from Houston. He did acquire Charlie Morton, too, from the Pirates, but got four games out of him before he was injured, became a free agent and resurfaced as one of the better pitchers in baseball.
None of that has been enough to appropriately support what is being paid as a championship-level offense, no matter how much the clubhouse spin suggests otherwise.
“I think that with a lot of our pitchers,” said Jay Bruce, who hit two home runs Sunday. “We feel confident with all of them when they take the mound.”
They shouldn’t. Because that’s why the Phillies have been reduced, at least at the break, to a team hoping to stay relevant in the wild-card race: They trusted pitchers who were not good enough to supply more ups, as the manager said, than downs.
Sunday, Nola showed that he would be a handful in that onegame wild-card playoff. But with Arrieta injured, the Phillies would finish the day having taken a startingpitching net loss. Kapler was even reluctant to discuss the idea of a staff with Nola but without Arrieta.
“For me,” he said, “it makes more sense to get more information before speculating on what might be.”
But it has come to that point where Klentak must make a move. Because being a work in progress is no longer enough.
To contact Jack McCaffery, email him at jmccaffery@21stcenturymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @JackMcCaffery.