Can starters provide relief? Sizing up who could fill a need in the Phillies’ bullpen for the playoffs.

As if every front office in baseball didn’t already anticipate the Phillies will look to add to the bullpen before the trade deadline, their best reliever is a quarter of the way through an 80-game suspension and will be barred from the postseason.

Help wanted?

More like help needed.

But ever since getting the news of José Alvarado’s failed drug test last month, Dave Dombrowski has waved off the Phillies’ bullpen desperation. For one thing, it’s rare for trades to be made before July. For another, well, why don’t we let Dombrowski explain?

» READ MORE: Early Phillies trade deadline preview: Bullpen help will be costly. Here are some teams with relievers to watch.

“It’s not something you want to see happen, but you just have to deal with it,” the Phillies’ president of baseball operations said. “And it’s probably actually easier to deal with during the postseason because you have starters that can become relievers during that time period.”

OK, so that comment was loaded with more spin than an Orion Kerkering sweeper. But Dombrowski isn’t wrong, either.

The postseason schedule includes travel days within series and days off between rounds. In 2022, the Phillies rode a three-man rotation to the World Series, using a fourth starter only three times in 17 games. In 2023, they didn’t need a No. 4 starter until Game 4 of the NL Championship Series.

The Phillies played 34 postseason games over the last three years. Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, and Ranger Suárez started 29 of them.

The point is, most playoff teams move at least one starter to the bullpen. That won’t help the Phillies before Aug. 19, when Alvarado is eligible to return. (His teammates still are awaiting an explanation, by the way, from the big lefty, who skipped town before many of them even heard the news.) But it should make his postseason absence easier to bear.

Let’s play a game. Make a list of the 13 best pitchers in the Phillies organization, excluding Alvarado. Here’s mine, in no particular order after the ace of the staff:

Anything stand out? Try this: Eight of the 13 pitchers are starters. That includes Walker, who was moved back to the bullpen last weekend.

The Phillies could change Walker’s role because they have stockpiled starters behind Wheeler and alongside Nola and Suárez. Sánchez has risen to an All-Star level; Luzardo came over in an offseason trade and dazzled until allowing a total of 20 runs in back-to-back brutal starts; Abel got called up last month and pitched brilliantly in two starts.

» READ MORE: The Phillies will keep riding their starters while they figure out their bullpen mix

Oh, and Painter, the Phillies’ most prized pitching prospect since Cole Hamels, is on track to make his major league debut in the summer.

They won’t all be able to start in the postseason, if the Phillies get there. Wheeler is the presumptive Game 1 starter. Nola, once he finally returns from a sprained right ankle, is best suited for the rotation. Dombrowski said Painter won’t be used as a reliever because he’s returning from Tommy John surgery.

As for everyone else, the Phillies will discuss which starters are the most viable relief options before giving up what tends to be a steep return for relievers in deadline trades.

The Phillies swapped their Nos. 5 and 7 prospects (pitchers George Klassen and Sam Aldegheri) last July for two months of closer Carlos Estévez. The Padres dealt three top-10 prospects to get two relievers: Tanner Scott and Bryan Hoeing. At those rates, Dombrowski surely would rather trade for only one reliever, not two.

Let’s look, then, at a few starters who may be able to bring some relief to the bullpen.

Let’s be honest: Four months ago, the Phillies couldn’t say for sure that Walker would even make the team.

Not after last year. He posted a 7.10 ERA, the highest mark since 1930 for a Phillies pitcher who worked at least 80 innings in a season. With two years and $36 million left on his contract, Walker appeared to be a sunk cost.

So just because the 32-year-old righty chopped down his ERA to 3.45 in 11 games entering the weekend doesn’t remove the wishfulness from thoughts that he can be effective as a late-inning setup man.

There are some encouraging signs. Walker’s fastball velocity is up nearly 1 mph on average from last season. And in a May 7 relief appearance in Tampa, Fla., he struck out seven of 10 batters in three scoreless, walk-free innings.

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But teams value swing-and-miss stuff in the late innings, and Walker wasn’t known for generating high whiff rates as a starter. Maybe the outing against the Rays last month indicates that his stuff is amplified in short bursts out of the bullpen. Maybe it was an outlier.

There’s also an acclimation process to pitching out of the bullpen. Manager Rob Thomson said Walker won’t appear in back-to-back games right away. The Phillies probably won’t bring Walker into a game with runners on base initially, either.

In time, though, they want to give him the full-fledged reliever experience.

“I think Tai’s got a chance,” Thomson said, “to make us a lot better coming out of the ’pen.”

In 2019, Suárez broke into the majors with a 3.14 ERA in 37 relief appearances. Two years later, before becoming a mainstay in the Phillies’ rotation, he had a 1.12 ERA as a reliever and recorded four saves.

And guess who closed the pennant-clinching win in 2022.

Based on experience, Suárez figures to have more impact as a temporary reliever than any of the Phillies’ starters. What the 29-year-old lefty lacks in fastball octane, he makes up for with big-game guts. He’s also chiller than a refrigerator, as evidenced by his 1.43 postseason ERA, the lowest ever for a Phillies pitcher with at least 20 playoff innings.

As third baseman Alec Bohm put it during the 2022 World Series, “He might not know it’s the World Series. Ranger is the calmest guy I’ve ever played with. Really.”

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Sounds like someone you’d want in the late innings, doesn’t it? Maybe even in the ninth, à la Brett Myers in 2007 when the Phillies turned him from a starter into a closer.

It’s complicated, though. Suárez is eligible for free agency after the season, and a move to the bullpen could diminish his earning power. But the Phillies likely wouldn’t shift Suárez into a relief role until late in the season — and only if every other starter stays healthy.

Would Suárez even be open to going back to the bullpen?

“That’s a tough one,” he said through a team interpreter last month. “I would say that I want to be in the rotation all of the time. I want to be a starter all of the time. But if it’s for the team’s sake, if it’s to win something, if it’s to get the World Series, I’m willing to do anything.”

In the spring of 2022, when Sánchez still had a hard time commanding his fastball, the Phillies flirted with making him into a reliever, evidence that sometimes the best move is staying the course.

Stuff-wise, it’s easy to see Sánchez as a dominant reliever in the postseason. Armed with the best changeup in baseball and a mid-90s sinker that likely would pick up steam in one-inning stints, he wouldn’t even need the slider, his third-best pitch.

And Sánchez tends to get a higher rate of swings and misses (29.9% since June 2023) than Suárez (21.2%) and Walker (19.8%).

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But Sánchez also has been among the top starters in the sport for the last two years. Since June 2023, he ranks sixth in ERA (3.29), second in ground-ball rate (57.3%), and eighth in wins above replacement (7.4, according to FanGraphs). Among Phillies starters, only Wheeler has been better.

Sánchez supplanted Nola last year as the Game 2 starter in the divisional series against the Mets. If the postseason started this weekend, Sánchez likely would be Thomson’s Game 2 choice again.

Luzardo has a repertoire similar to Sánchez’s but hasn’t come out of the bullpen since 2021. If anything, his recent struggles may be an indication that he’s fatiguing. He has already topped his innings total from an injury-marred 2024.

There isn’t a better Phillies story this season than Abel.

In two fill-in starts for Nola — May 18 at home against the Pirates, and Wednesday night in Toronto — the 23-year-old righty allowed one run and struck out 11 batters in 11⅓ innings. Most notably, he didn’t issue a walk.

» READ MORE: ‘Phillies Extra’ Q&A: Mick Abel on overcoming failure, collecting baseball cards, and more

“Mentally, I think I’m in a really good spot right now,” Abel told reporters this week. “Not trying to ride the highs too high or really lull in the lulls. It’s just trying to stay neutral the whole time.”

Abel isn’t going anywhere — to the bullpen or certainly back to triple A — until Nola returns. Eventually, though, Abel’s short-term future will hinge on how much the Phillies believe in what they’ve seen.

Abel plummeted on most prospect lists after struggling to a 6.46 ERA last season in triple A. But the 2020 first-round pick has learned to trust his stuff and be less analytical. His confidence keeps growing. Against the Blue Jays, he retired 16 of 17 batters before tiring in the sixth inning because he was making a rare start on four days’ rest.

Skeptics would advise the Phillies to trade Abel while his value is high. But he looks increasingly like a future asset to a rotation that could lose Suárez to free agency and won’t be anchored forever by workhorses Wheeler and Nola.

In that case, Abel’s greatest value to the Phillies is on the roster, not as a trade chip. And just because there isn’t a spot for him in a healthy Phillies rotation doesn’t mean his stuff — a high-90s fastball and solid curveball — wouldn’t loom large in the playoff bullpen before he goes back to starting next year.