Ruiz was a one-season wonder. Outright him and bring up Aoyagi.
I guess we at least got some Mets' fans nervous but hard to come back down 5 going into the ninth. With Turner and Harper coming up down one and only one out, I had hopes.
It’s not really on Nola, they pushed him one inning too far because they are becoming leery of their relief staff. Should have pulled Nola after 6 this early in the year.
Sure but the Phillies' chance of winning the game was already down to 25% once it was 2-0 (and the team that scores first generally wins 65-70% of the time). The offense did nothing to mitigate that (and probably still would have lost 2-0 or 3-1 had the 7th gone differently) but the lack of run support is not unrelated to the early holes that have made him 0-5.
Nobody seems to have a clue why Nola breaks down so much. That's been well known about him, but this season it's gotten much worse. Watching him hit the corners and getting swinging strikes, it looks like the talent is there. Smoltz rose to become one of the toughest pitchers in MLB using a sports shrink. Maybe Nola could raise his mental game that way. It's on Nola to regain his peak performance level.
The talent scouts that built this Phils' pen must be proud.
How many pitchers in MLB have thrown more innings than Nola since he joined the Phillies rotation. I think that may have caught up with him. Also, he never really mastered holding runners or pitching from the stretch. He has contributed 35 rWAR in his Phillies career, including 3.7 last year Hardly the stats of a guy who is always breaking down. There does seem to be something wrong with him this season.
The stretch and the pitch clock has been an issue for him. And the HRs aren't new either. But this year it's a notable lack of velocity, at least for now. On the one hand it doesn't seem like something the Phillies were concerned about when they extended him. On the other, they made moves that put him as essentially the #4 starter, and he could be the #5 if Ranger returns to his first-half 2024 form.
And yet he's still a good enough pitcher to get through six most nights. Strahm and Alvarado were both unavailable yesterday and Romano and Kerkering were both coming off poor outings PC is not wrong that they chose to push him rather then use the bottom of the pen or the two guys coming off bad outings (though they probably still were going to pitch if necessary).
I thought at the time the extension was stupid, Howie learned his lesson after the 1st SB, it's a business and you can't pay for what a player did for you only what he will do in the future.
Nola had zero margin for error/loss of velocity. You could see it last year, when a pitcher starts losing arm strength, they try to compensate and it hurts their command. While he'll probably bounce back to some extent, Phillies are going to pay premium money for 5 seasons of a 4th/5th starter.
If you're talking about health, he's been quite durable, actually, an inning-eating horse.
My criticism about Nola--and some here have bristled when I said it--is that I've always thought that Nola is kind of soft. Whenever he starts a game that the Phillies desperately need to win, he often comes up short. Career in the Postseason, his numbers decline in the NLCS and WS when the lights are brighter. And, all of this is anecdotal but I have always gotten the sense that he does not proverbially "take a punch" all that well--the opposition shows a hint of starting a rally and he crumbles or he gives up a home run with the Phillies leading by two or three runs and let's that home run metastasize into a full-blown lead-blowing rally instead of bearing down and putting it behind him.
