If José Alvarado took PEDs, he made a rational choice. The Phillies are cooked either way.

While the Phillies are probably cooked without José Alvarado, they also don’t have much room to complain. They were kind of playing with house money, weren’t they?

Rare is the PED suspension where the numbers lay it this bare.

They call it a decline “phase” because it tends not to be a one-year thing. Nor does it tend to reverse itself in the dramatic fashion. True, we see plenty of relievers pitch at an elite level at 30 years old. But we rarely see it after their average fastball velocity drops from 99.6 at age 27 to 98.7 at age 28 to 97.8 at age 29.

» READ MORE: Phillies reliever José Alvarado is suspended 80 games for PED use

I’m not saying that the Phillies should have been suspicious when Alvarado came out of the gates looking like a pitcher we hadn’t seen since May 2023. I’m saying they couldn’t have expected it. They knew Alvarado was in the midst of a two-year regression. They should have figured he wasn’t going to be the guy he has been for them thus far. That kind of mutes the moral indignation one can feel now that the Phillies are cooked without him.

Let me try to rephrase that. The big issue isn’t that Alvarado was suspended for PEDs and thus will miss the next 80 games and be ineligible for the postseason, according to MLB rules. The big issue is that the Phillies ended up needing Alvarado to be a guy they’d miss that badly. If PEDs played a role in that, then how would anything have played out differently without them?

After returning from the injured list in 2023, Alvarado was still a damn good pitcher. The numbers in his last 28 games that year were plenty strong: a 2.33 ERA, 40 strikeouts, 18 walks, 27 innings. He just wasn’t the guy who’d struck out nearly half the batters he faced without issuing a walk while allowing one earned run in 14⅓ innings.

He was that guy this season. At least, he was a lot closer to that guy. In 14 appearances in April, he struck out 21 with two walks and three earned runs in 14⅔ innings. That’s a far cry from the 2023 postseason (6 Ks, 3 BBs, 1 ER, 8 innings). It’s a farther cry from the 2024 regular season (4.09 ERA, 63 Ks, 28 BBs, 61⅔ innings). And it’s nothing like the guy we saw in Game 3 of the 2024 NLDS against the Mets, when he allowed three of five batters to reach base, two via walk, with two runs allowed and one strikeout.

The trend line is what’s important. For nearly two years, every step Alvarado took seemed to take him further from the pitcher who was their X factor during their 2022 World Series run. It is the journey that awaits every power pitcher who relies upon outlier levels of heat and bite to earn his room and board. There is a reason their stuff is not the norm. The human body is not built to produce it, let alone sustain it.

» READ MORE: Phillies pitching prospect Moisés Chace to undergo Tommy John surgery

In a lot of ways, Alvarado is a prime challenge case for all of the moral hubris and ethical certitude that leaves some of us reaching for the barf bag whenever the discourse turns to PEDs. Getting old stinks. There is nothing more frustrating than when you try to do something that you’ve always done with ease only to discover that your body can no longer do it. Many of us non-professional athletes spend some degree of time and money attempting to counteract this natural progression of things.

The stakes are obviously much higher for someone with a narrow earning window who occupies 1 of 25 roster spots on a team that is attempting to win a World Series. It’s very easy to say that athletes should be governed by a sense of duty and obligation to abstract principles like fair play and competitive integrity when they consider the pros and cons of PEDs. I suspect that, in the moment, the duty and obligation to family and teammates factors in.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting any of this is applicable to Alvarado. Maybe he never knowingly took PEDs. Maybe he took them years before last offseason. The only point of this little discursion is to say that I’m not going to throw stones.

The Phillies certainly don’t have a right to think that Alvarado let them down. Again, not that they should have been suspicious about his performance. They just couldn’t have expected it. They didn’t build their roster with the thought that Alvarado would be giving them high-leverage dominance. If they did, they shouldn’t have. None of the evidence from the previous year suggested that was still capable of it.

Alvarado would be the guy he was this season. There was no reason to think that he would be the single-handed saving grace of a unit that was the biggest cause for skepticism about this team. It just turned out that way.