Andrew Painter on the Phillies’ opening day roster is a no-brainer, even at 19 years old

Call it whatever you want. A six-man rotation. A modified five-man rotation. As long as Andrew Painter is one of those men, the Phillies are doing the right thing.

Give Dave Dombrowski all the credit in the world for recognizing the situation at hand. For months now, the Phillies president of baseball operations has barely bothered to qualify his belief in the organization’s 19-year-old pitching phenom. In fact, the more he talks, the more he seems to imply that a spot on the opening day roster is Painter’s to lose. Behind the scenes, Phillies personnel have been saying the same thing since late last season.

The rarest thing about Painter isn’t his age. We’ve seen 19-year-olds pitch in the majors. We’ve seen them excel. What makes Painter unique is his talent. He has a big league-ready arm, and he probably had one last year. We saw that on Wednesday when his fastball touched 99 and he wowed both his teammates and his opponents in a two-inning spring debut.

» READ MORE: Phillies’ Andrew Painter was ‘fun to watch’ — for both teams — in his spring debut

“I believe the kid’s going to be a star,” said Twins shortstop Carlos Correa, who knows a thing or two about the topic.

The Phillies are not in a position where they can turn down such a thing. Painter isn’t just a guy who can take a regularly scheduled turn in a big-league rotation. He is a potential difference-maker in a postseason series. As we saw last season, even two or three innings can make that difference.

That is where the Phillies’ focus needs to be. How do we put ourselves in the best possible position to win a World Series? Work backward from there. The season is too long and unpredictable to take a playoff berth for granted. But if you do it right, you can serve both masters.

The first step is having Painter on the big-league roster. There are plenty of legitimate concerns about the workload he can handle. He is just two years removed from facing high school hitters. He’s logged just 109⅔ innings since then. A 25% increase would put limit him to 135 innings. Which is fine. Even more of a reason to make sure that every single one of them should come against big-league hitters.

There’s something backwards about the notion that a pitcher’s arm will fall off if he doesn’t spend a certain amount of time in the minor leagues. We aren’t baking chocolate chip cookies here. The mound, the mechanics, the ball, the distance to home plate — all of it is the same in the minors as it is in the majors. The situations might be higher stress and the batters might require more effort to retire, but there’s an equally compelling argument that says all of that is canceled out or even superseded by the supervision of major league coaches and the access to major league strength and conditioning staff and facilities. If a pitcher only has so many bullets in his arm, why waste some of them on the Akron RubberDucks?

» READ MORE: The education of Phillies phenom Andrew Painter included workouts (and hoops) with Max Scherzer

Fact is, you can’t predict this stuff. In 2018, Braves top prospect Mike Soroka had 320 minor-league innings and was three years removed from high school when he cracked the big-league rotation at the age of 20 years and 270 days. Two weeks later, he was on the disabled list with shoulder inflammation. By July, his season was over. One year later, Soroka was an All-Star, on his way to logging 174⅔ innings. The following season, he tore his Achilles. Later, he tore it again. He has not pitched in the majors since.

Stuff happens, with little rhyme or reason. There’s not nearly enough science to say how the Phillies should manage Painter. Injury prevention is one of those domains where each additional data point mostly shows us how little we can know. The human body is a uniquely individual thing. There are simply too many genetic and environmental variables involved in determining how a particular player will respond to physiological stress. The Phillies could not have been more careful with pitching prospect Spencer Howard in 2020 and 2021. At the end of the day, a pitcher can either do it or can’t.

That’s not to say that the Phillies shouldn’t err on the side of caution with Painter. It’s more than possible to have him on the roster all season and keep him under 135 innings. The Angels did it last year with a 22-year-old named Reid Detmers, who entered the season having thrown just 68 minor-league innings. Detmers spent the entire year in the rotation, starting 25 games with a 3.77 ERA while at the same time finishing with just 129 innings. His season included five outings of 100-plus pitches, one of them a complete game shutout.

The Angels’ usage of Detmers was as meticulous as it gets. He had at least an extra day of rest before all of his starts, and at least two extra days before 14 of 25. This included a 16-day break at the end of June and beginning of July. The Angels’ six-man rotation had the added benefit of lessening the strain on two-way star Shohei Ohtani, who finished the season with 166 innings over 28 starts while finishing fourth in Cy Young voting and second in the MVP.

» READ MORE: Andrew Painter, Phillies’ No. 5 starter in 2023? It could happen. Just look to Rick Porcello.

The Phillies wouldn’t even need to go to a full six-man rotation to see similar benefits. There’s one scenario that would see Painter arrive at the All-Star break with 15 starts, all on at least five days of rest, and Bailey Falter only having made seven or eight starts. That’s with Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler both pitching every five games, most of them with an extra day of rest.

Dombrowski doesn’t need Painter to be another Rick Porcello, who was less than four months older than Painter when he made the Tigers’ opening day roster in 2009 and went on to pitch 170⅔ innings. Though, it should be noted, Porcello went on to start at least 27 games in each of the next 10 seasons while winning a Cy Young and a World Series.

The Phillies could do what the Astros and Dodgers did with 21-year-old Lance McCullers and 19-year-old Julio Urias in 2015 and 2016, keeping them in the minors for the first couple of months in the season. But Painter is ready now. If he is going to be pitching anyway, why not do it where it counts?