As teams expect less of starting pitchers, the Phillies are counting on theirs to win a World Series

Jesús Luzardo woke up early on Dec. 22 with every intention of going fishing with a friend in South Florida.

But two phone calls delayed his plans.

The first came from the Marlins, who informed Luzardo he was being traded to the Phillies. The second lasted considerably longer and was even more enlightening. Caleb Cotham, the 27-year-old lefty’s new pitching coach, couldn’t wait to share a few ideas.

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“We had like an hour conversation of just diving into pitching,” Luzardo said. “He was telling me how he viewed me from the other side all these years of me facing the Phillies, and it kind of opened my eyes. I never really talked to coaches on another team to see how they viewed me, so it gave me a different perspective on how maybe I could attack guys more with my strengths.”

Specifically, Cotham wanted to give Luzardo a sweeper, the trendy variant of a slider that breaks horizontally. Zack Wheeler added a sweeper two years ago, and it quickly became another weapon to use off his fastball. Maybe it could work for Luzardo, too.

It’s kind of Cotham’s specialty. Before the Phillies hired him in 2020, they went through pitching coaches like tissues, with four in four seasons. He was only 33 then and hadn’t overseen a staff. But one team official said he thought Cotham “has a chance to be a really good one.”

Four years later, the Phillies have built a model pitching department. It isn’t only that they improved from ninth in the National League in team ERA in 2021 and 2022 to fourth in 2023 and last season. Under Cotham, Wheeler went from good to great, Cristopher Sánchez and Ranger Suárez developed into All-Star-level starters, and the staff has stayed remarkably healthy amid a spike in pitching injuries across the sport.

And at a time when most teams are asking less of starting pitchers than ever before, the Phillies are leaning on theirs to defend a division title and win the World Series that has eluded them since 2008.

“I don’t know if it makes us unique, but not many clubs do it as much,” president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski said. “Sometimes good starting pitching costs pretty good dollars, and we have an owner that’s very accommodating to us in that regard.”

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Indeed, the Phillies have $105 million invested in the rotation this year, including $18 million for No. 6 starter Taijuan Walker. The starters account for more than 30% of the team’s estimated $306 million luxury-tax payroll. Wheeler, Aaron Nola, Walker, Suárez, Luzardo, and Sánchez are making more than the entirety of the Marlins’ and Rays’ 40-man rosters.

But the Phillies’ belief in the value of starting pitching extends beyond owner John Middleton’s money.

Dombrowski has been building teams around starting rotations for 36 years, be it adding Mark Langston to Dennis Martínez and Bryn Smith with the 1989 Expos, or David Price to Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer with the 2014 Tigers, or Chris Sale to Price and Rick Porcello with the 2017 Red Sox.

The Phillies tried to sign Yoshinobu Yamamoto two winters ago. They were in serious talks with the White Sox about Garrett Crochet at the trade deadline last July. And when the opportunity came to add Luzardo, they pounced, even though top prospect Andrew Painter is expected to make his major league debut by the summer.

“I still like when your starting pitcher gives you an edge over the other club’s starting pitcher and you know they can go deep into games,” Dombrowski said. “I still like that philosophy as a way to try to win.”

Under Cotham, the Phillies have developed an organizational pitching philosophy that blends old-school values with new-school tech. Cotham trusts data and is so fluent in the language of analytics that Wheeler calls him “a pitching nerd.” Yet Cotham also preaches a mantra of “fearlessly attacking hitters” (he likes starters to throw a four-seam fastball and a two-seamer, or a cutter) and the importance of starters going deep into games.

“We do a lot of fancier things now than we ever have,” Cotham said on Phillies Extra, The Inquirer’s baseball show. “We have different methods in the training room, the weight room. We have different ways of quantifying pitches and seam effects and orientation.

“But at its core, pitching is you vs. a batter. We want to pour all resources and have all roads leading to you making a quality pitch to get a hitter out. There’s a mindset component.”

The industrywide mindset about pitching has changed over the last 10 years, with the emphasis on optimizing for velocity and spin. But the toll for throwing harder is an increase in injuries, so pitchers — starters, in particular — are pitching less. In 2014, starters averaged 96 pitches per game; last season, they averaged 85.

Don’t tell the Phillies. Wheeler and Nola averaged 98 and 97 pitches per start, respectively, last season. Sánchez averaged 90 despite not having pitched a full season as a starter until last year. Collectively, Phillies starters ranked eighth in pitches per game (88.5) and fourth in innings (903) and accounted for five of the 28 complete games in the majors.

“It’s just a culture that they’ve built for our team,” catcher J.T. Realmuto said. “A guy like Cristopher Sánchez comes up and he sees Wheeler, he sees Nola. He sees those guys getting [ticked] when they only get through the sixth inning. We have a standard here. It’s not just to throw five shutout innings.”

Said Nola: “It’s how we were taught. It’s how we came up, what we were told we’re supposed to do. But we all pitch. At the end of the day, it all goes back to that, no matter how hard guys throw, no matter how much swing and miss guys have. That’s why I feel like our staff’s really good. Our staff, our coaching staff, we talk pitching.”

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The conversation is different with each pitcher. Wheeler and Sánchez, for example, throw harder than Nola and Suárez. Wheeler has a no-nonsense personality but a curiosity about how he can keep getting better and credits Cotham for “probably teaching me the most about pitching.” Nola appreciates the craft of pitching but isn’t big into analytics.

And rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, Cotham empowers each starter to dictate his plan, from between-starts training and preparation to in-game strategy.

It was among the biggest things Luzardo noticed in spring training.

“There’s not a certain mold for every single guy,” said Luzardo, who got drafted by the Nationals and has pitched in the majors with the Athletics and Marlins. “[Cotham] can dive into the analytics, and he knows a lot about that, which is cool. But at the same time, he was a player and he sees the player side of it and the feel and the look.

“He’s like a chameleon. He can tailor it to what you need and however you need it. He’s a great blend of both.”

It extends to the training room, where Nola said head athletic trainer Paul Buchheit and director of strength and conditioning Morgan Gregory come up with an individualized plan depending on specific conditions. If Nola throws 100 pitches in a start, or if the Phillies are in the midst of a West Coast trip, they might scale back how often he runs between starts. When the schedule is less hectic, he might train harder.

And Cotham encourages pitchers to “deal in the truth,” as he puts it, by being as honest as possible about how they feel without the stigma of being soft.

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“There’s been times, especially with just the older way of thinking, where it’s like, ‘Stay out of the training room. You don’t want to be in there. It means you’re hurt,‘” Luzardo said. “Here it’s more of, ‘We want you to come in, we want you to get treatment, we want to keep you as healthy as possible.’

“And I think that goes a long way. Because there’s not that panic of, ‘I feel a little sore today,’ and maybe in the past, I would be a little tentative to relay that message.”

The result: Nola hasn’t been on the injured list (non-COVID) since 2017, and Wheeler since 2022. The Phillies safely increased Sánchez’s workload from 149 innings between the majors and triple A in 2023 to 181⅔ last season. Suárez has missed time in each of the last four seasons, but only once with an arm injury (elbow strain in 2023).

“I’m proud of our process,” said Cotham, who describes health as a “prerequisite” for everything else that happens on the mound. He also warned that “there’s no magic bullet” because pitching injuries are inevitable.

But last season, the Phillies’ starting rotation ranked third in wins above replacement — 16.0, according to FanGraphs, trailing the Braves (17.4) and Royals (16.7). It’s a reflection of three things that set them apart: talent, depth, and health.

It’s also what makes the Phillies believe they can win the World Series.

“Most of our confidence, in my opinion, comes from the starting staff,” Realmuto said. “It’s just so important, having starters that give you a chance to win every night. And we have a legitimate five- to six-man rotation that can be absolutely dominant. There’s not a guy in our rotation that anybody wants to face.”

Which is exactly why the Phillies want their starters to face as many batters as possible.