PHILADELPHIA — If he chose to look back on it, Mick Abel could see that his major league debut on May 18 really couldn’t have gone any better.
The 23-year-old Phillies starting pitcher surprised the very surpriseable Pittsburgh Pirates by throwing six scoreless innings with nine strikeouts, which tied a nearly 78-year-old franchise record — Curt Simmons, 1947 — for most KOs in a debut.
What Abel has to look at now is where it all went wrong. Or, as manager Rob Thomson put it early Friday, Abel “needed to go down and breathe a little bit.”
With a string of bad starts chasing him that belied his first two impressive outings, Abel was ordered back to Lehigh Valley not only with an order to suck up some oxygen but also to find an out pitch. It feels ironic for the Phillies, in that the strongest facet of their game is threatening to go off the deep end.
So Zack Wheeler is the reigning pitcher of the month and should be regarded as the pitcher of the first half in the National League.
Behind him both Ranger Suarez and Cristopher Sanchez have been baffling any and all teams since early May. With an anticipated playoff schedule that many expect would require a team to have only three starting pitchers for the early rounds, the Phillies would seem to find themselves in as strong a position as anybody.
But that adage of never having enough pitching certainly trumps any speculation of whether Wheeler the Dealer, Suarez and Sanchez can carry a team through the postseason. The Phillies have to find some answers beyond those three, and right now there don’t seem to be any.
Remember Aaron Nola?
The Phillies’ most reliable pitcher of much of the past 10 years still seems light-years from a return. He’s only now starting to … or hoping to … throw some real bullpen sessions in his rehabilitation from a rib stress fracture. And remember that before that injury he pretty much couldn’t buy a win, but was selling home run pitches by the dozen.
There was Taijuan Walker the starter who again became Taijuan Walker the reliever who again on Tuesday in San Francisco will become Taijuan Walker the starter and in either case he doesn’t usually offer vocally discerning Phillies fans much relief.
There was new acquisition Jesus Lazardo starting out as a seemingly perfect replacement for the No. 2 rotation role while Nola tried to find himself.
But that was Luzardo on the mound Friday, lasting only two-plus innings and, you guessed it, getting lit up like a firecracker, before being lifted against a so-so Cincinnati Reds lineup, which recovered from a three-run deficit to build a three-run lead in the blink of a third-inning eye en route to a 9-6 Reds victory.
“I lost control,” the earnest Luzardo said afterward. “The breaking ball wasn’t landing for strikes and basically (it was) having to go into the zone with fastballs later on. So I need to find ways to limit that, and obviously, find the zone a lot more.
“Physically I felt great, strong and healthy, which is a positive. But I need to find ways to limit deep counts and obviously the pitch count. Try to get out of an inning as fast as possible.”
It’s not like he’s fallen off the table like a late-April Nola, but Luzardo has lost five of his last seven starts. The guy who was pitching to a sub-2 ERA on May 20 finished the month with an ERA of 3.58, and now is trending much worse.
Asked for a possible cause of his recent streak of lost control, Luzardo (7-5, 4.44) pointed out that he and his pitching coaches started working on adjustments to correct his little habit of tipping pitches.
“We tinkered a lot with coming out of the stretch with the whole pitch tipping thing,” he said. “We’ve made a big change in terms of my hands, so it’s just more of getting comfortable. Obviously we’re already at midseason, so there’s no adjustment period. You have to figure it out. But out of the stretch, maybe the change caused a little change as opposed to my windup being the same as it’s always been.”
Oops.
“But there’s no excuse for it,” Luzardo quickly added.
“It’s just pitching out of the stretch,” manager Rob Thomson said. “I know it’s something that they’re working on, and I think he’s comfortable, but he’s got to be able to throw strikes out of the stretch.”
If not, well there’s always Taijuan to ping-pong back into the rotation or Mick Abel to remember what he did back in May or Aaron Nola … or maybe there aren’t any or many answers behind those top three rotation rocks.
Asked what he thought he could do right now with the troubled four and five spots on his starting crew, Thomson limited his answer to the subject matter at hand.
“I still have all the confidence in the world in Luzardo,” he said. “He’s going to have, everybody’s going to have, bad outings here and there. I think we’re still fine.”
Source: Berkshire mont