• Parent: Pitching coming undone
PHILADELPHIA » And the Phillies news before their 128th game of yet another interminable season...
“Uh,” Pete Mackanin said Saturday, “we’re going to activate (Nick) Pivetta for tomorrow.”
Alert the citizen journalists and stop the Twitter thumb presses. Pivetta, one of a few hard-throwing young Phillies currently struggling to carve a niche in the major league rotation, will be making yet another return trip from Triple-A Lehigh Valley for a Sunday showdown with the Chicago Cubs. He’s getting used to Turnpike trips, but will be making his 20th start of the season for the Phillies.
At 24, the 6-foot-5 Canadian chucker is 4-9 with a 6.73 ERA. Worse yet, in four starts in August, he’s fashioned a mark of 0-3 with a 14.49 ERA.
And now they’re bringing him up from the minors to pitch against the World Series champions. So guess where the pre-game media manager conversation went?
Yes, Pivetta’s struggles are an easy talking point, but only as part of a more problematic picture with injuries and young starting hopefuls like Pivetta, Vince Velasquez, Ben Lively and Jake Thompson all having consistent command troubles.
All of which means that a good chunk of the Phillies’ starting rotation is pretty much a mess.
Yet the team that couldn’t score in the late spring and early summer months ... and the middle part and part of the late-summer, too ... has been scoring in droves of late. Heading into this Saturday night date with the Cubbies, the Phillies had scored 52 runs in their previous seven games.
There is a powerful reason for that, of course, and its name is Rhys Hoskins. The rookie hit his ninth home run Friday night, extending a hitting streak to seven games, a streak in which he went yard six times and collected 16 RBIs, the most ever by a rookie in a seven-game span.
Oh, and if that wasn’t good enough, Hoskins came to bat Saturday night and buried another into the seats in the first inning, the seventh consecutive game in which he’s done that. Along the way, he boosted his homer total to 10 in his 17th game.
No baseball rookie had ever done that before, either.
Hoskins should be the Phillies conversation these days, though the rookie start of Nick Williams has been nothing to sneeze at, either. Together they have rejuvenated a long dormant offense, which is also being impacted by Cesar Hernandez and Freddy Galvis. For the Phillies offensively, it’s been an August to remember.
Of course, entering Saturday’s game, they had lost 16 of the 24 games they’d played this month, rolling their season record to 47-80.
Clearly, victories aren’t only “everybody hits, woo-hoo.” Pitching was, is and always will be the most important factor in such endeavors.
And pitching is where any success talk here ends, and where a conversation about Pivetta can resume.
“He’s got a lot of work to do,” Mackanin said of the rookie, “let’s put it that way.”
In his last outing, Pivetta faced the Miami Marlins and lasted just one out into the second inning before he was yanked, having allowed six earned runs and having earned a bus ticket back to the minors. But with the current state of the Phillies’ starting pitching, all tickets to Allentown seem to be accompanied by return bus fare vouchers.
Pivetta will cash his in for Sunday, and you’ll have to excuse a manager who seems visibly numbed by all the losing if he finds it hard to get excited about that, no matter how many tools Pivetta seems to have.
Asked if it wouldn’t be better to see if Pivetta could work out his issues exclusively at Triple-A, Mackanin quietly said, “I think it boils down to who’s available.” Or, who isn’t. That would include people like Clay Buchholz, Zach Eflin and Velasquez. All three would-be starters are shelved by injuries, and Velasquez’s starting status might be on the shelf, too.
A Jeremy Hellickson trade didn’t help this mess, but he was awful before he went, anyway. And Thompson only keeps proving he’s still minor-league material in his occasional auditions.
What Mackanin and his superiors probably didn’t count on was a rotation that in the final weekend of August had Saturday night victim Ben Lively (six earned runs, four homers allowed in five innings to start a 17-2 loss) and Mark Leiter Jr. as this team’s current third and fourth starters.
And No. 5? Well, we’ll see what Pivetta has in store for Sunday, but it’s more interesting to talk about what general manager Matt Klentak might have in store for the offseason. Guesses?
“I think we have to upgrade,” Mackanin piped up.
At least he’s still looking ahead.