Why Phillies manager Joe Girardi is worried about pitchers hitting again this season | Scott Lauber

The pitch was up, and Zach Eflin won’t live it down.

Not if Zack Wheeler can help it.

Wheeler, you see, has one home run in 250 major-league plate appearances. Guess who gave it up. It happened on April 23, 2019, in a 9-0 Phillies loss to the New York Mets. Eflin threw a first-pitch fastball at the belt, Wheeler drove it out to left-center field at Citi Field. And for a year, it has been fodder for good-natured chops-busting between rival pitchers turned teammates with the Phillies.

“Probably once every ... couple of days,” Eflin said of how often he hears about Wheeler’s dinger. “There’s always a jab or something. It’s all fun and games, man. It’s embarrassing on my part, especially that he’s in the clubhouse and everybody knows it.

“I just hope he goes out and hits a couple more homers. It’ll make me feel good if his only career homer isn’t against me.”

Wheeler will get the chance. After a 60-game reprieve last season, National League pitchers are expected to hit again this year in a reversion to a rule that most players and some managers, especially the Phillies’ Joe Girardi, would just as soon see permanently scrapped.

Last year, Major League Baseball and the Players Association approved the universal designated hitter as a health and safety measure. Given the heightened risk of injury to pitchers in a shotgun season after an abbreviated training camp, the parties agreed to spare them from swinging a bat and running the bases.

But that was always intended as a one-off in an unprecedented season. Although most insiders believe the universal DH will be adopted in 2022 after the negotiation of the next collective bargaining agreement, the owners won’t give in on an issue that has long been favored by the players without getting something in return. And the players won’t trade the universal DH for the expanded postseason that MLB desires.

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Here we are, then, with NL pitchers dusting off their bats in spring-training workouts. Never mind the health challenges associated with retraining their arms to withstand an increased workload from the two-month 2020 season. Pitchers must also go back to doing something that they haven’t done in more than a year and, with a few exceptions, they aren’t good at.

“I don’t know, honestly,” Phillies right-hander Chase Anderson said last month about being ready to hit again. “I know our union fights for certain things. But we kind of have to go with what rules are there and make the adjustment from not hitting in a year.”

Vince Velasquez (.224 average, .508 OPS) is the best hitting pitcher in Phillies camp, although even he has more career strikeouts (40) than hits (30). The worst: probably Iván Nova, 6-for-149 (.040) with 96 strikeouts in 11 seasons. Wheeler, Eflin, and Velasquez each have a home run; reliever Archie Bradley legged out a triple for the Arizona Diamondbacks in the 2017 NL wild-card game. Aaron Nola claims to enjoy taking batting practice, but there’s little evidence of it working. He’s 17-for-222 (.077) with 129 strikeouts.

But the pitchers’ respective abilities at the plate are largely irrelevant. Save for perhaps Arizona’s Madison Bumgarner (19 career homers), Houston’s Zack Greinke (.600 OPS), and the special case of Los Angeles Angels two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, there isn’t a pitcher who would merit at-bats over a DH. Larry Christenson and Rick Wise aren’t walking through the door anymore.

Even then, the risk of injury to a key member of a starting rotation wouldn’t be worth the offensive reward.

“If they hit last year I’d still have apprehension, just because I don’t think it’s an action that they practice a ton,” Girardi said. “We see mishaps when they bunt; we see mishaps when they’re on the basepaths. Once in a while you see a ribcage strain. You worry about that.”

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Girardi has reason to fret. In 2008, three months into Girardi’s first season managing the New York Yankees, Chien-Ming Wang -- a 19-game winner in each of the previous two years -- tore the Lisfranc ligament and the peroneus longus in his right foot when he hit the grass after rounding third base while trying to score from second on a single to right field. He missed the rest of the season and was never the same pitcher, going 14-14 with a 6.01 ERA over parts of five seasons from 2009 to 2016.

Then, as now, Girardi called pitchers on the bases “a manager’s worst nightmare.”

Girardi said he probably wouldn’t tell a pitcher to take three strikes and come back to the dugout as a way of avoiding potential injury. But the Phillies are preparing their pitchers for a return to hitting and running by putting them through drills in spring training. Pitchers won’t hit in exhibition games until later this month.

“We have them all bunting right now,” Girardi said. “Everyone is bunting because you never know when the situation might arise. We’re trying to help them where they become proficient bunters but also protect themselves.”

Pitchers have gotten injured even while trying to bunt. Girardi cited Washington Nationals ace Max Scherzer, who broke his nose two years ago when he fouled a bunt into his face in batting practice.

For trivia buffs, the last Phillies pitcher to bat was Nick Pivetta, who drew a leadoff walk in the eighth inning on Sept. 28, 2019. Eight days earlier, Nola became the last Phillies pitcher to get a hit.

Nola, drafted and developed by the Phillies, prefers the NL style of play. Besides, he said hitting provides a welcome distraction in the midst of a start. Anderson joked that he’s peaking at the plate, with hits in three of his last four starts for the Milwaukee Brewers in 2019. Eflin only half-kidded last week that his swing is in good shape “because I play golf pretty frequently in the offseason.”

Wheeler doesn’t see what the big deal is, either.

“We’re professional athletes,” he said. “Some freak things happen sometimes, an oblique [injury] or whatever it may be. But we come into spring training, the season, physically ready to handle this type of stuff. Around the locker room, guys haven’t been worried about it or anything. For the most part they’ve been excited.”

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For those who aren’t, Wheeler can always queue up video of his home run off Eflin.

“It gets mentioned,” Wheeler said, laughing. “He’s a good sport about it.”