Why Phillies pitchers can maintain such big workloads: ‘It’s a mindset thing’

CLEARWATER, Fla. — You wouldn’t have known it Saturday by watching Zack Wheeler and Tarik Skubal in a matchup that scintillates whether it’s March or September, but baseball has a starting pitching problem.

Across the sport, starters have never been asked to do less. They throw fewer pitches per start, make fewer starts per season, and, in a related trend, get injured more often. Even the champion Dodgers resorted to an opener in Game 4 of the World Series because they nearly ran out of healthy starters.

It has gotten so bad that Max Scherzer, among the best pitchers of this generation, recently proposed in separate interviews with The Athletic and Sports Illustrated a set of new rules designed to restore the value of the starter.

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Aaron Nola has a better idea.

“If we want starters to go deep in the games, we’ve got to teach it,” said Nola, the Phillies’ workhorse. “You’ve just got to do it, and it starts in the minor leagues. I think that [teams] baby some guys too much, and they just need to let them pitch and not monitor them so much. I’ve had talks with people, and a guy’s been in the major leagues three, four years starting and he hasn’t got to 200 innings. They say, ‘Oh well, he threw 150 innings last year.’ OK, well, when are you going to do it?”

As much as any organization, the Phillies prioritize volume from starters under pitching coach Caleb Cotham.

Since 2020, the season before Cotham got hired, Nola has worked 850 innings, more than any pitcher in the majors. Wheeler ranks second at 829⅓. Last year, the Phillies pushed Cristopher Sánchez to a career-high 181⅔ innings. Their starters collectively logged 903 innings, fourth-most of any team, and accounted for five of the 28 complete games in the majors.

“It’s a mindset thing,” Wheeler said after yielding two unearned runs in five innings of a 2-2 tie against the Skubal-led Tigers. “It’s seeing the guy the day before you compete and do well going deep into a game and wanting to kind of top that, or whatever it may be. It’s kind of just the standard over here that we go deep in the game.”

Not every team applies that standard. Most clubs optimize for velocity over stamina. In 2014, there were 2,113 instances of a starter throwing at least 100 pitches in a game. Last season, there were 635.

Scherzer, a future Hall of Famer and influential voice within the players’ union, has come up with rules to incentivize teams to let their starters pitch. His plan: If a starter doesn’t meet any of three thresholds — six innings, 100 pitches, or four runs allowed — his team will lose the designated hitter.

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Nola appreciates the change that Scherzer is trying to bring about. He just wishes it wasn’t necessary.

“I get where that’s coming from. I understand that part of it,” Nola said. “But I feel like it should never get down to that, you know? I think they should go back to the old ways of teaching rather than having to implement rules to do it.

“Because if I’m a fan and I don’t really get to go to many games and I want to go watch Kyle Schwarber hit, and he hits once because the pitcher didn’t do so-and-so … I don’t know. I don’t think that should be part of the game if we really care about fans.”

Nola, who turns 32 in June, is as old school as it comes. He hasn’t ever lit up the radar gun (he ranked in the 20th percentile in average fastball velocity last season) but rather has been both effective and durable by mixing pitches and locating them with precision.

Wheeler, who turns 35 in May, has more electric stuff. But he also uses spring training to develop new pitches. In 2023, he added a sweeper slider. Last year, it was a splitter. This spring, he has reincorporated a cutter as a potential weapon to throw down and in to left-handed hitters.

Against the Tigers, Wheeler said he threw 10 or 11 cutters.

“I still throw it in the bullpens and stuff like that, just trying to perfect it,” Wheeler said. “It’s been working, so now we’re trying to bring it back just to open up another pitch.”

If anything, it helps enable Wheeler to get through a batting order three, sometimes even four times, a foreign concept to most starters.

» READ MORE: How important is batting order? As the Phillies experiment with their lineup, let’s look at the numbers.

“It’s [a matter of] wanting to do it,” Nola said. “It’s how we were taught. It’s how we came up, what we were told we’re supposed to do. We all pitch. We all focus on the art of pitching. I’m not a guy that throws 95 to 100. I have to pitch. If I don’t pitch, I’m going to get shellacked. That’s why I’ve always tried to work on command. It all goes back to that, and it will always go back to that, in my opinion.”

And if only teams would revert to that philosophy with their starters, there would be no need for Scherzer’s new rules.

Ranger Suárez made his scheduled start in a back-field scrimmage rather than in a Grapefruit League game. He threw 60 pitches in four innings. … The Phillies reassigned reliever Koyo Aoyagi to minor league camp. He will open the season in triple A. Thomson said the Phillies convinced him to ditch a slower delivery from the windup and use only the quicker one that he typically goes to with runners on base. “Our hitters taking BP off him said they can’t time him up,” Thomson said. “So he’s going to use that a lot more.” … Utility infielder Rodolfo Castro, lefty Nick Vespi, and right-handers Jose Cuas, Joel Kuhnel, John McMillon, and Guillo Zuñiga also were reassigned. There are 41 players left in camp. … The Phillies honored former manager (and 1980 third base coach) Lee Elia in a pregame ceremony. Elia, 87, an Olney High graduate, attended with family, friends, and a guest list that included Lou Piniella and Pat Gillick.