Short but positive stint for rookie Howard
If you squint really hard, you can see the positives in Spencer Howard’s third major league start. The Phillies righty gets the benefit of the doubt, since his rookie season is unlike any that has come before.
From the outside, 3.2 innings against the Blue Jays in Game 1 of a doubleheader Thursday doesn’t look great. But Howard had more in the tank when he left after 67 pitches. If not for a one-run margin with two on in the fourth inning of a seveninning affair and, maybe he would’ve gotten a longer leash.
“It’s different but, hey, it happens,” Howard said after the Phillies’ 3-2 walk-off loss.
As it was, Joe Girardi made the right situational decision. In the bottom of the fourth, Howard had allowed three singles to load the bases. Nine-hitter Santiago Espinal lofted a deep sacrifice fly to cut Toronto’s deficit to 2-1, and Girardi went to Blake Parker. Against the top of the order, Parker walked Cavan Biggio than induced a groundout from Randal Grichuk.
“It’s possible,” Girardi said of Howard staying in longer. “If you look at the inning I took him out, they hit three or four balls on the screws. There were some line drives. I felt like they were starting to square him up a little bit.”
Modest as the final line was, the underlying stats are trending well for Howard. He al
lowed five hits, all singles, and two walks. He struck out five. After allowing two homers in each of his first two starts, he kept the Jays in the ballpark, though the wind was blowing out at Buffalo’s Sahlen Field.
“It’s definitely a step in the right direction,” Howard said. “Still, that’s not the best I’ve been. But I’ve made a couple of minor tweaks within the past couple days and I’m starting to feel a little bit better on the mound. I think that was a step in the right direction.”
Those tweaks include working off his fastball. Though the sample size is small, opponents had been hitting his breaking stuff at a near-.500 clip. Two of the five hits Thursday came off breaking balls, but he went with a four-seam fastball that topped out at 97 miles per hour 73.1 percent of the time. He didn’t throw a single curveball.
The fastball is Howard’s elite pitch at this point. Commanding it and varying speeds off it is essential.
“It’s good to get into that groove with the fastball,” he said. “It wasn’t perfect by any means and I was in and out of consistency with it. But I think overall, definitely a step in the right direction.”
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Jose Alvarez had to be taken to the hospital after getting hit, in his words, in the “private parts,” and even that may not have been the worst day among Phillies relievers.
A two-run lead in Game 1 wasn’t enough. How about a seven-run edge after half an inning in Game 2? Still nope.
Thanks to the Phillies deciding that they had done enough hitting, thank you very much, plus a sudden inability to field ground balls and the ongoing cultural and financial disaster that is the bullpen … well you know where this is going. It ended with Hector Neris blowing his third save in four outings, the tying run scoring on a wild pitch, followed by a Rowdy Tellez two-run single in a 9-8 loss in Game 2.
“We just made a couple of errors behind Hector that led to them tying it up and taking the lead,” Girardi said. “Hector might have been out of that first inning with just seven pitches.”
In Game 1, Parker and Alvarez got their jobs done, Alvarez painfully but valiantly in still fielding a Lourdes Gurriel liner that went off his, y’know, but still got the out. (Alvarez was carted off and got an ultrasound that showed no damage and, “I feel much better now”.)
Tommy Hunter blew the lead in the sixth, with a two-out Biggio double. Deolis Guerra sealed the deal, allowing three straight hits, including a blooper to Gurriel over the drawn-in infield.
Vince Velasquez was very much not the problem in Game 2, pitching into the sixth. He retired 13 of 14 batters and struck out seven after a first-inning blip. But with the ‘pen limited, Girardi tried to stretch him. Tellez led off the sixth with a solo homer, and the wheels came off like the hubs were made of plutonium. Velasquez left with one on and the game at 7-3.
First was Connor Brogdon, who allowed a three-run homer to Gurriel to make it 7-6. Then Neris allowed a hit, a walk and a reached on error, making all three of his runs unearned.
“Today’s a tough day, no doubt about it,” Girardi said. “We lost leads both times in the sixth inning. It’s just really frustrating because those were two games that we could’ve won and had some momentum going into Atlanta. Now we’ve got to turn the page.”