Moore fills a need for Phillies
Veteran lefty helps Phils to 4-0 start
PHILADELPHIA » It’s been 10 years of occasional dreamy highs and more than enough lows for Matt Moore, but the Phillies’ lone left-handed starting pitcher has survived and has hopes of thriving with the Phillies.
As always, however, Moore wasn’t about to start working for his latest new team without having a curve thrown his way.
Thanks to a weekend postponement of a series between the New York Mets and Washington Nationals, the Mets’ season opener was pushed back to Monday night’s start of a series at Citizens Bank Park. Whatever first-game yips Moore, 31 years of age and a decade into an well-traveled major league career, might have had, then, they could have been multiplied by what a pandemic delay presented to him...
Guy by the name of Jacob deGrom.
“He’s got three swing-and-miss pitches,” Phillies manager Joe Girardi said Monday about the veteran Mets’ ace. “And he locates and he’s a good athlete on the mound, and he’s fairly quick to home plate. The best thing I can
tell (his hitters) is to keep grinding out bats the best you can, and I think you have to be ready to hit his fastball, because it’s that good.
“The best way to probably beat him is to get him into long counts and tire him out. But that’s not easy to do because he has so many swing-and-miss pitches.”
Yet deGrom, who entered his eighth season with this road outing against the Phillies, hasn’t always had smooth sailing. Clearly dominant much of the time, on many observers’ list for top pitching in the National League, deGrom’s career 2.61 ERA and 1.047 WHIP say all you need to know about him. But those seven seasons produced but 70 wins, a testament to a Mets club that produced only three .500 or better seasons during that time.
An example of how the Mets haven’t supported deGrom enough in one way or another would be seen again Monday night, as a five-run Phillies comeback in the eighth inning led them to a 5-3 victory. Since it was his first outing, deGrom came out after six scoreless innings of threehit ball and 77 pitches.
“The guy can’t go nine all the time,” Phils reliever Brandon Kintzler said of deGrom. “That just shows you how important bullpens are.”
Nevertheless, deGrom is
the mound leader for a Mets team that starts the season as one of the favorites in the National League East. And despite their 4-0 season start, most such lists don’t include the Phillies, whose pitching depth is always in question.
That said, a flurry of offseason moves by team president Dave Dombrowski at least figures to give the Phillies an arms-length chance of surprising people, with new No. 4 Matt Moore giving them something very new to Philadelphia ... a starting presence from the southpaw side of the mound.
Moore, on a one-year, $3 million deal, is far from the kid who won 17 games for Tampa Bay in 2013. But the Phillies, who last started the season with a lefty in the rotation five years ago, when soon-to-be reliever Adam Morgan started a woeful 2016 as the fifth starter, have needed a lefty there for years ... almost as far back as the last time they had a winning record.
Temporary late-season answers like John Smiley didn’t work. Spot starters like Ranger Suarez and Cole Irvin came and went. Even now, with names like Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels having firmly drifted into the distant past, the Phillies can’t seem to go with that left-ward flow. For Moore is but one of two left-handed pitchers of the 13 on this current staff.
All the Moore reason for him to feel some extra heat.
Yet in making his Phillies debut, Moore had some heat to give.
He could clock in the low-to-mid 90s, but mixed his pitches well. He started the game by getting seven straight outs, four of them by strikeout. Then none other than deGrom got the first hit for the Mets, an infield single in the third off Moore’s glove.
Moore was starting to overthrow a bit by then, a common command problem that impacted his more recent career years following Tommy John surgery. He would be bounced out of Tampa in 2016, then a 15-loss 2017 season in San Francisco, subsequent disappointing stays in Texas and Detroit, where a knee injury limited him to only two games in 2019.
“The walks were kind of what led to his trouble tonight,” Girardi said of Moore afterward. “I actually thought he threw the ball pretty well.”
Control could be a problem. Moore walked 42 in 102 innings with Texas in 2018; 70 in 174.1 innings with San Francisco the year before. But the book on Moore was that a successful season in Japan last year might be the impetus for a reinvigorated career. In 15 starts with the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, he pitched to a 2.65 ERA and 1.118 WHIP.
“I’ll be honest, I would have been going back to Softbank,” Moore said in a Zoom interview from Clearwater two weeks ago. “I loved that club. They were great to me. The money was much better. I just had it with the border situation (with pandemic travel). And now that I’m here with
Philly, I couldn’t be happier having made that decision.”
If anything, it gave Moore a chance to get back on the major league radar.
“From an employment standpoint, I’m a baseball player,” Moore said. “I’m just kind of looking for the best opportunity for me to do my job.”
It all led him back to Citizens Bank Park, where the one-time American League All-Star re-entered the major leagues almost exactly two years after he last made an MLB start with Detroit in 2019.
Ironically, he would be outdone by deGrom moreso at the plate than on the mound. Though deGrom was electric as usual (six shutout innings, three hits and seven strikeouts), it was a second deGrom hit – an RBI bloop single to left following a misjudged fly in center by Adam Haseley – that would give the Mets an early two-run lead and send Moore to the showers after 74 pitches.
Moore allowed two earned run on four hits and four walks against those very early four strikeouts in his 3.1 innings. Not what he wanted, but for a career restart, this start of Moore’s Philadelphia experiment could have been worse. He knows that.
“I feel I’m ready,” he said, “and haven’t left a stone unturned.”