PAIN IN THE PEN
Column: Klentak’s mishaps costing Phillies in their push for playoffs
PHILADELPHIA » The Phillies’ bullpen was atrocious and wasn’t improving, dirtied by inexperience, low on confidence, lower in accomplishment.
That’s when Matt Klentak went to work.
That’s when he went to work to make it better, trusting, of all things, that the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees would be complicit in his plot.
Not long after promoting 35-year-old Blake Parker to the big leagues, Klentak was able to wrench David Hale and Heath Hembree from the Yanks and Brandon Workman from Boston. Shortly after, he would promise to send three players to Milwaukee for David Phelps, whom Joe Girardi would remember as a determined competitor in New York.
There were some in-between moves, a constant hum of traffic
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
from Allentown and back and some injured-list shuffles. And as always, there was the eternal belief in Tommy Hunter, superreliever. So from about the middle of August to its end, Klentak would have reconditioned one of the worst relief staffs ever to have rolled through Philadelphia. And there had been one or two.
At that point, if only because effort is respected around any ballpark, Klentak was saluted for recognizing that changes had to be made. But in addition to that acknowledgement of professional decency, there should have been an awareness that one of two dynamics were in play. One was that the Sox, Yankees and Brewers felt sorry for the Phillies’ general manger and, in a we’re-all-in-thistogether moment, decided to help him out of a professional jam. The other was that Klentak wouldn’t have been able to sniff out a good pitcher if he’d been the only scout at Bob Gibson’s pro day.
It had to be one of those.
It was one of those.
By the time the Phillies reached the South Philadelphia SkyDome Friday to be the visiting team in a doubleheader against Toronto, the answer was clear. For in what had to be one of the great achievements in major-league roster construction, Klentak had managed to assemble at warp speed not one, but two of the worst bullpens in modern baseball history. His first draft silly with guesses, his second has proven absurd with over-aged pros with tired arms. The 7.48 bullpen ERA Girardi’s team dragged to work Friday was the worst since the Phils’ 1930 arm-a-palooza rang up an 8.01 spot. Give Klentak this much, though. Proving that baseball is a game of inches, his bullpen ERA was better than the 7.77 excellence being sprayed around Cincinnati this season.
If that was a surprise to anyone, it had to be to Klentak, who took the occasion of the trade deadline season to express his own satisfaction in a job well executed.
“We added four relievers,” he said. “But on top of that, Ranger Suarez is active. We’ve seen JoJo Romero’s stuff and what he can do. And Tommy Hunter and Hector Neris are much different pitchers today than they were a couple weeks ago. So it’s really a combination of all those things that have put us in a good position to have a good bullpen here.”
That’s what the man thought. That’s what he believed. That’s what people were sold, and, for the most part, were willing to accept in the spirit of improvement, any improvement. But that one comment alone revealed plenty about a general manager who has had nearly five years to construct a championship-level pitching staff and continues to have himself convinced that Tommy Hunter and Hector Neris can be “different pitchers.” Even if Klentak did mean that he was rounding into form after 2019 season-ending injury, Hunter has been an inconsistent, undependable roster drain who wasn’t signed once by the Phillies, but twice. And how many years must it be, anyway, before the Phillies’ front office acknowledges that Neris’ accomplishments will not match his talents? They have tried demoting him to the minors, reducing him to a setup man and coaxing him through multiple managers and pitching coaches, and he is still not to be trusted. The other night, he dropped the ball on the mound, committing a balk, and losing a game.
Even if some of the arms he had on staff were roundly disappointing, Klentak’s addition of 128 years’ worth of trade-deadline roster dumps in Hembree, 31, Hale 32, Workman 32 and Phelps, 33 violated the first rule of first aid: Do no harm. Girardi has tried to commit to Workman as his closer, only to have the right-hander respond with maddening zone-nibbling and dangling breaking pitches. Hembree and Hale haven’t helped. And the Brewers likely will find something better than Phelps tucked in the package of righthanded pitching prospects Juan
Geraldo, Brandon Ramey and Israel Puello they received Friday to complete the trade.
Zach Eflin was strong in a 7-0 complete-game victory in the opener Friday. If the starting pitching was always so reliable, the bullpen wouldn’t be as critical. But Klentak’s contribution to that assembly has been Vince “Four-Inny Vinny” Velasquez, high-priced if occasionally injury-challenged Zack Wheeler, and, for the win, Jake Arrieta, who cost nearly $70 million and has gone 22-23. Again, a question: Was Theo Epstein just being neighborly when he opened the back door to Wrigley Field and allowed Arrieta to leak to Philadelphia?
The Phillies still have time to make something of the 2020 mini-season. In a strange year, other teams have their issues, too. But even if it turns out to be as unfulfilling as it had been into the final “homestand”, it will be easily remembered. That’s because it’s difficult to assemble one bad bullpen a year. It’s an art to do it twice.