The Phillies offseason goals clearly revolve around the final signing location of Manny Machado and Bryce Harper. As much as the Phillies talk about it being a success if they don’t sign one of the two superstars, the truth is that it is very hard road to respectability without signing either. What the Phillies have done this offseason is start to set the foundation, as Matt Klentak called it, of their offseason. They added some left handed pitching depth, they are pursuing a high end left handed reliever, they are looking to add one more starting pitcher (preferably a left hander), and they made a bunch of high profile hitting moves. Those moves upgraded shortstop from Scott Kingery to Jean Segura, slightly downgraded first base from Carlos Santana to Rhys Hoskins, and then replaced Hoskins in the outfield with Andrew McCutchen. A set of moves that greatly upgraded their team defense. Couple that with a preference for Manny Machado and his glove at third, and the Phillies emphasis on putting a good defense on the field comes very clearly into focus.
There are obvious reasons to upgrade team defense, like run prevention is good. There is also sustaining the Cy Young contender upside of Aaron Nola even if he slips a bit, or trying to take advantage of Jake Arrieta’s ground ball tendencies a bit more. However, one thing seems to stand out more than others and it comes back to the fact that the Phillies are only looking for one starting pitcher, and that is the 2018 seasons of Nick Pivetta and Vince Velasquez.
It feels weird that two pitchers with ERAs of 4.77 and 4.85, respectively, would be important to a team trying to win in 2019, but the two 26 year olds (Pivetta is 25, but will be 26 by opening day), might be the two most important players on the current roster. ERA estimators have their flaws, but stats such as FIP (which seeks to minimize all things out of the pitcher’s control) and DRA (which seeks to control for all the other variables) give us ways of breaking out where some problems may exist. I am also going to add in a stat of my own making of sorts which is taking a partial step in Baseball Reference’s WAR calculation and taking their RA9 (runs allowed per 9 innings) and adding that to their defensive adjustment for the Phillies defense.
| ERA | DRA | FIP | RA9+Def | |
| Nick Pivetta | 4.77 | 3.40 | 3.80 | 4.30 |
| Vince Velasquez | 4.85 | 4.20 | 3.75 | 4.40 |
| League Average SP | 4.19 | 4.22 | 4.21 | 4.60* |
*includes all pitchers and is park adjusted for Philadelphia schedule
These numbers do include a September collapse for both players, especially Vince Velasquez who posted a 10.70 ERA in 17.2 innings of gassed baseball to end the year. However, even with that we see that both players are vastly better than what their ERAs say they are. At very worse, it looks like both are at least league average starting pitchers. Just taking these estimators and throwing them out as points for true talent and regression wouldn’t tell us whether that ERA regression is coming, because the causes may be structural to the Phillies. This brings us back to defense, and in particular here is the BABIP on ground balls for each of the Phillies 5 main starting pitchers:
- Aaron Nola – .183
- Jake Arrieta – .207
- League Average – .236
- Vince Velasquez – .288
- Zach Eflin – .299
- Nick Pivetta – .304
There is bad luck there clearly for Velasquez, Pivetta, and Eflin and possibly some good luck on the other side. We do know that Nola and Arrieta specialize in weak ground ball contact and the other guys are known more as fly ball pitchers. Also they theoretically stood in front of the same defenders, except they didn’t. Here is the breakdown for first base, shortstop, and third base for the 5 main starting pitchers (Cesar Hernandez started 153 of 162 games at second base) by percent of starts with that player starting at the position.
| First Base | |||
| Bour | Hoskins | Santana | |
| Nola | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% |
| Arrieta | 0.0% | 6.5% | 93.6% |
| Pivetta | 9.4% | 3.1% | 87.5% |
| Velasquez | 6.7% | 13.3% | 80.0% |
| Eflin | 8.3% | 12.5% | 79.2% |
Carlos Santana is the superior defender to Bour and Hoskins, but the difference isn’t enough to really tip the scales.
| Shortstop | |||||
| Cabrera | Crawford | Florimon | Kingery | Valentin | |
| Nola | 12.1% | 21.2% | 3.0% | 60.6% | 3.0% |
| Arrieta | 6.5% | 16.1% | 6.5% | 71.0% | 0.0% |
| Pivetta | 21.9% | 25.0% | 6.3% | 46.9% | 0.0% |
| Velasquez | 16.7% | 10.0% | 3.0% | 70.0% | 0.0% |
| Eflin | 25.0% | 4.2% | 4.2% | 66.7% | 0.0% |
| Team Average | 15.4% | 16.7% | 4.9% | 62.4% | 0.6% |
For the most part Nola and Arrieta were shielded from Cabrera starts, and Nola was shielded early from Kingery at shortstop as well. Pivetta got more Crawford at short and less Kingery, but got a large group of Asdrubel Cabrera starts.
| Third Base | ||||||||
| Cabrera | Crawford | Florimon | Franco | Kingery | Santana | Valentin | Walding | |
| Nola | 12.1% | 6.1% | 0.0% | 72.7% | 6.1% | 3.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Arrieta | 9.7% | 6.5% | 3.2% | 67.7% | 6.5% | 3.2% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Pivetta | 9.4% | 3.1% | 0.0% | 68.8% | 6.3% | 12.5% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Velasquez | 6.7% | 6.7% | 0.0% | 60.0% | 3.3% | 13.3% | 6.7% | 3.3% |
| Eflin | 0.0% | 8.3% | 0.0% | 66.7% | 0.0% | 16.7% | 4.2% | 4.2% |
| Team Average | 7.4% | 5.6% | 0.6% | 67.9% | 4.9% | 9.9% | 2.5% | 1.2% |
What we have here is functionally an even distribution of Cabrera, Crawford, and Kingery all with a +/- of a game or two. However what we see is a large quantity of games with Carlos Santana at third base for the non-Nola/Arrieta group. They also got the Walding and Valentin starts there as well. Overall, a pattern starts to emerge from the Phillies defensive deployments, shifting to offense over defense on the infield when Pivetta, Velasquez, and Eflin start games. On the surface this makes sense, except Pivetta with a ground ball rate of 46.7% in 2018 is nearer to Nola (50.6%) and Arrieta (51.6%) than he is to Eflin (41.2%) and Velasquez (37.7%). That means Nick Pivetta is seeing a high rate of ground balls and getting crap defense behind him to deal with them.
That brings everything around to how the Phillies strategy is based around its pair of hard throwing 26 year olds. They are upgrading the defense as a replacement for adding starting pitchers. Already they have replaced the revolving door at shortstop with Jean Segura, and while it was out of scope for this piece, they made a large outfield upgrade by going from Rhys Hoskins to Andrew McCutchen. If the Phillies are able to bring in Manny Machado, they will take a negative infield defense and make it a positive. Based on their 2018 player usage, that should help Pivetta and Velasquez become the mid rotation arms the Phillies need to win the NL East.
DRA is created by Baseball Prospectus, FIP used here was from Fangraphs, RA9 information as well as playing time breakdown is from Baseball Reference, other stats come from a mix of all three sites.