Yes, it is not Hector Neris’ first trip to the majors, he has one inning and a strikeout to his name to this point. But given that this should be a slightly longer arrival, lets look at Neris again.
The Profile:
Fastball at 90-93 touching 94, fairly straight with decent control. He pairs that with a sharp split finger fastball in the high 80s and a slider. The split finger is the better of the two pitches and shows good drop. In recent years Neris has been able to increase his ground ball rate at the expense of fly balls. The consequence has been that his home run rate has decreased and his ERA has looked better in small sample sizes. Neris will bring average control overall and does have the ability to go at least 2 innings and can be stretched to 3 innings if needed.
The Future:
It is a fairly standard middle relief profile with the above average fastball and above average off speed pitch. In order to have a higher ceiling the splitter, the slider, or the command is going to need to take a big step forward. Without it, Neris is going to struggle to consistently put away tough batters. However, he should be able to stick in a major league bullpen in a middle inning role. However, Neris has another option after this year and could bounce up and down between the majors and minors as the team solidifies its bullpen. Right now he is behind Giles, Papelbon, De Fratus, and Garcia on the RHP depth chart for me.
In Other News:
It is hard to see the Phillies going with McGowan for multiple starts given the likely load on the bullpen. O’Sullivan is expected to miss at least 3 starts so it will be interesting to see if they rush Billingsley back or bring up one of the starters on the 40 man roster (Biddle, Morgan, Rodriguez), or go full hail mary and bring up Aaron Nola. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.