One afternoon last October, with the Phillies looking like a stone-cold lock to return to the World Series, Aaron Nola sat in the dugout before a playoff game and pondered the No. 1 reason for the team’s success.
Its starting pitchers stayed healthy.
“I believe if Ranger [Suárez] wasn’t at the WBC,” Nola said, “we’d have four out of five guys make 30-plus starts. That’s pretty cool. I don’t know when the last pitching staff did that. It’d be cool to know.”
Aaron Nola and then ...? What’s next for the Phillies as the offseason enters 2024Actually, it was just last season, when Chris Bassitt, José Berríos, Yusei Kikuchi, and Kevin Gausman made 30 starts apiece for the Blue Jays. But Nola’s point was well-taken. The starting rotation that sidesteps major injuries is exceedingly rare, especially in post-pandemic baseball.
Check it out: In 2019, 59 pitchers made 30 or more starts and 313 (including 116 starters) went on the injured list at least once, according to Spotrac data. In 2021, as baseball returned to a 162-game schedule after the 60-game 2020 season, 41 pitchers reached 30 starts while 489 (181 starters) missed time on the IL.
Executives throughout the sport hoped it would be a one-year injury spike. Instead, it has turned into the new normal. More than 400 pitchers were sidelined in each of the last two seasons, including 170 starters in 2022 and 160 last year. The 2023 Blue Jays were the only team in the last three years with four 30-start pitchers. Only a half-dozen teams last season had three pitchers who did it.
Yet there were the Phillies, who put only nine pitchers on the shelf all season, tied for the second-fewest in the majors. Nola and Zack Wheeler made 32 starts apiece; Taijuan Walker made 31. Suárez, who missed his first six starts after straining his left elbow in March while training for the World Baseball Classic, was the lone Phillies starter to go on the injured list, not including top prospect Andrew Painter, whose major league debut was delayed by Tommy John elbow surgery.
Every other team had at least two starters who went down. Ten clubs had seven or more.
“I thought about that even [in 2022] during our run, like, ‘Man, we haven’t had — knock on wood — a lot of soft-tissue injuries like [hamstrings] or whatever it may be,’” Wheeler said in October. “Even just fatigue from the pitchers, you don’t see that a lot with us.”
It’s a trend that must continue in 2024. Because although good health is essential to every team’s chances of winning the World Series, some are equipped to cope with injuries more easily than others based on organizational depth.
The Dodgers, for instance, lost starters Walker Buehler, Dustin May, and Tony Gonsolin to Tommy John surgery before Julio Urías was placed on administrative leave after an alleged domestic assault incident. But they won 100 games and another NL West title because they had Bobby Miller, Emmet Sheehan, and Ryan Pepiot in the minors.
As a group, the Phillies rotation — Wheeler, Nola, Suárez, Walker, and lefty Cristopher Sánchez — is the envy of many clubs. But it thins out quickly. With Painter likely out until 2025, Dylan Covey and Nick Nelson are the No. 6 and No. 7 starters; prized prospect Mick Abel has made one triple-A start; Griff McGarry’s role is unsettled because of longstanding control problems that worsened in triple A last year.
President of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski has had difficulty acquiring rotation depth in the offseason because most free agents want more of an opportunity to start than the Phillies can give them. He’s been better able to add back-end starters in deadline trades, with Kyle Gibson in 2021, Noah Syndergaard in 2022, and Michael Lorenzen last year.
But it’s a slow-moving free-agent market teeming with still-unsigned pitchers. Spring training doesn’t open for another three weeks. There’s still time for Dombrowski to give manager Rob Thomson more options.
“I hope so,” Dombrowski said. “I’ve got a list of names and all that. Once they get done with [holding out for] the promised spot in the rotation with another club, then they can start looking and say, ‘Hey, maybe they don’t have a lot of depth over there, so maybe that’s an opportunity to go to triple A and be in that spot.’
“Do I think [there are enough pitching options]? Yes. Will it shake out that way? You never really know.”
How much will it cost the Phillies to keep Zack Wheeler beyond 2024?Regardless, the Phillies will lean on their success with keeping starters healthy. Team officials insist there isn’t a secret sauce. Dombrowski cites collaboration across multiple departments, many of which have changed or expanded since he took over in the winter of 2020-21.
After the 2021 season, Dombrowski and general manager Sam Fuld led an overhaul of the strength and conditioning staff, hiring Morgan Gregory from the Reds and promoting Furey Leva from the minors. Nola has noticed a more individualized approach in the weight room. To wit: Gregory, a Russell Wilson doppelgänger, advised him to lift more weight but with fewer reps. For other pitchers, the routine may be different.
“Obviously, he likes to work out a lot. He’s pretty jacked,” Nola said. “Those two guys, Morgan and Furey, what they like to do and the workouts they’ve written up for us, I’ve learned so many new things from those guys that I’ve never learned before.”
In 2022, the Phillies hired Brian Kaplan for a newly created position as director of pitching. Kaplan, 41, studied the biomechanics of pitching and co-founded Cressey Sports Performance, a training center in Florida.
Kaplan’s assignment with the Phillies: to better connect the pitching coaches with the athletic trainers and strength coaches at all levels of the organization, especially the majors. For two years, he has worked alongside pitching coach Caleb Cotham. Kaplan focuses on helping the pitchers to better understand their bodies; Cotham handles the actual pitching.
Early last season, for example, Kaplan noticed a trend with lefty Matt Strahm. Whenever Strahm strayed from his mechanics, the root cause was that he rushed his delivery. In pointing out something that more traditional pitching coaches may not spot as quickly, Kaplan helped Strahm get back on track without making changes that can often lead to injury.
“They’re a great combination together of the strength background, the body movement from Kap, and Caleb’s pitching knowledge,” Strahm said. “It’s unbelievable, this group that Dave’s put together here.”
At the center of it all is head athletic trainer Paul Buchheit. He joined the Phillies one year before Dombrowski’s arrival, but worked for him with the Red Sox. They won a World Series together in 2018.
Buchheit, 41, is regarded as a good communicator. He has the trust of the players — “He knows my body probably better than I do,” Wheeler said — as much as the respect of the coaching staff and front office.
Even before the Phillies advanced to Game 6 of the 2022 World Series, Buchheit began putting together offseason training programs for each pitcher, many of whom weren’t accustomed to pitching in the playoffs. His recommendation: Don’t take additional time off. If anything, start throwing earlier than usual in the offseason.
“That was kind of mind-blowing to me,” Wheeler said. “But it worked.”
Almost to perfection. Save for Suárez’s setback with Venezuela’s WBC team, the Phillies shook off the toll from their 2022 playoff run, barely even tapping into their organizational depth. Strahm made 10 starts, mostly in place of Suárez. Otherwise, Sánchez’s arrival from triple A in June was prompted by the ineffectiveness of No. 5 starter Bailey Falter, not an injury.
“I think it speaks volumes to how they handle us and how they treat us and how they prep us,” Wheeler said. “They’re in there and working tirelessly, and they’re all doing their job. You have to give credit to them. We’re staying on the field. And that’s what winning teams do, stay on the field.”
But depth helps, too. In hindsight, Dombrowski said the deadline move for Lorenzen enabled the Phillies to manage other starters’ workloads. They used a six-man rotation at times in August and September, which likely helped keep everyone healthy for the playoffs.
In time, the Phillies hope this year’s staff will feature similar depth.
“[Hall of Fame manager] Jim Leyland always used to say this: It’s not always the best club at the end of the year; a lot of times it’s the healthiest club,” Dombrowski said. “So, it’s an ongoing focal point. You discuss it every day between all your departments. There’s a premium put on that.
“Because, I mean, what’s your most valuable [asset]? Really, it’s your health in many ways, so you do whatever you can.”
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