GDT 9/5/19 Philadelphia Phillies (Vargas) @ Cincinnati Reds (Gray, S)

[andyb]

Kapler gets a bit of a punt on bullpen use because there is really any difference in quality once you get past Neris and Alvarez and they both pitched an inning. Vincent FWIW is equivalent to guys like Hughes and Morin. Major league reliever with some track record of success that fell through the cracks. That is what we have unfortunately.

Really needed to score more. The pitching was good enough today.

[HopeSpringsEternal]

I got the feeling that this kind of ending was inevitable. Offense was having trouble getting much going. Running out of pitchers that were good bets to keep the other team off the scoreboard. I think it was a mistake by Kapler to pinch hit for Haseley in the 9th, and then not bat Neris in his spot and thus limit him to only pitch one inning. But overall, this loss is on the offense which continues to frustrate.

[allentown]

I'm with you on that one. I've always believed that if you play Russian roulette with relievers, the dud was certain to come up. In this case, gives up the HR without getting an out.

[LoneStarPhan]

Phillies TV crew was fooled on the lack of a double switch move that would have put Neris in the 8th slot. He ended up throwing only 9 pitches. Maybe that will help in NY. We never know what move is the right move, only what the move made resulted in happening.

Sadly, I do think there is too little season left to have any reasonable chance for the post season, but who knows? Baseball can take some strange and unexpected turns.

[growe]

I had noticed that AZ had ran off a 9-1 10 game streak to catch the Phillies in the Wild Card and it made me wonder if the Phillies had ever gotten that hot this season. Not only have they never gone 9-1 in a 10 game stretch, they haven’t even gone 8-2. 7-3 is the best that they could muster. And that’s not really surprising since they only have had one or maybe two good starters at a given time, an average at best set of arms in the bullpen and an offense that relies too much on streaky type hitters. With that make-up, what are the chances of firing on all three "cylinders"
for 10 straight games? This doesn’t bode well for the Phillies making up serious ground on the teams ahead of them by winning – we have to hope that the other team(s) loses.

[flyers19rw]

Andy, I don’t give Kapler a punt on this. He has mismanaged the BP from his first game as a manager. In fact it may well be that the number of injuries in the BP is a product of this. While watching Tuesday night’s game my thought was, “What is hoping on here? Every inning, another pitcher. Doesn’t he have a string of consecutive games coming up? There aren’t going to be any fresh arms left in the pen.” Perhaps relievers are fungible and the season is coming to a close but that’s no reason to run them into the ground. Kapler seems to manage for the moment. The next inning, game, series, month or year are not in his mind.

[zambonir]

I kind of thought he was managing for next year given some of the guys he is willing to use in a close game at this point

[andyb]

But who was demonstrably better in the situations we were in today? Tough question to answer. He got Neris and Alvarez high leverage innings. Is anyone else in the bullpen really any good, or clearly better than anyone else?

I get that he is using too many pitchers than ideal. But that would only be a huge problem if we had a deep bullpen and we don't (at least deep in quality, not just numbers).

[zambonir]

It's always easy to focus on bullpen management. Gabe's arguably lost more games in the past 10 days sticking with his starter just a hair too long. And then he got one the other day doing the opposite. And some nights when the bullpen isn't perfect our hitters have come through, while other nights they haven't.

I'm kind of not kidding about managing for next year though. This team hasn't been in a serious postseason race for weeks (even a month), and the one they are in is just a hair of a chance at a sliver of a spot (even the Cubs are not likely to do much with it, and have all the same bullpen issues we do with the $ to Kimbrel on top of it). So at this point when I see Irvin and Pivetta in tight spots, as well as Hughes, Parker and Morin, it's not just because there are so few options but because they have some decisions to make about off-season roster spots and contracts. They are certainly not going to go out and sign four free agents to replace Nicasio, Hunter, Neshek and Robertson (to say nothing of Seranthony) so figuring out whether Hughes can get back to his earlier form and deciding which of the scrapheap guys and failed internal starters are keepers does matter. And since there's no one more reliable to use at any given time (even our two best guys, Neris and Alvarez, are hardly perfect), you roll the dice (except it's neither dice nor roulette, there is more information and real probabilities at work, even when they don't pan out).

Anyway, it's fun that winning three games in a row this week injected some hope into September but losing these games certainly wasn't a killing blow, losing twice to the Mets at home after they'd lost six straight was still worse.We are clearly not going to play the .650 baseball required to get anywhere and the Cubs probably aren't gonna play .450 either.

[flyers19rw]

It seems to me that if you’re going to yank a starter early in a game, you’d like to put in a reliever that could do multiple innings rather than run through a bunch of guys at an inning per.
Gabe overworks his relievers. Too many appearances; short inning stints, multiple days in a row; and the like. It causes guys to tire and possibly break down.
Also I quibble with the roles that he has for several pitchers. Ex-The closer should be used to close not hold on to a tied score. Other pitchers can do that.

[Austinfan]

Geez, guys, Kapler has crap to work with, do I stick with Vargas when I know at some point the opposing team will time his pitches, or do I put in a bunch of scrub RPs picked up off the waiver wire? Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

If Gabe can finish this season with 85 wins, that's a great job of managing.

[zambonir]

Who are our good multiple-inning relievers? Hunter, Seranthony, Robertson, Nicasio? Arano? Morgan? Suarez has shown some potential but nothing where you could actually say he's better than playing match-ups, especially when you have a 36-man roster. Pivetta, who pitched his way back to AAA two weeks ago? Eflin and Velasquez were also among the "long" options and they're starting again.

And really, we're still clinging to the "never use your closer in a tie game on the road" rule? Seems like a lot of the second-guessing about Kapler specifically is because he doesn't do the traditional bullpen stuff that our old managers got second-guessed for too.

It just seems to me that the argument that Kapler should stick with pitcher X for three outs or extend pitcher Y over two innings isn't actually based on anything, other than a wish that relievers (all of them, but especially these guys) are better than they actually are and should just be able to get guys out regardless of match-ups and situation. Anyway, these are not the reasons we lost the game. We might have lost it sooner, even.

Cubs about to go up 4. One thing about them is they aren't even playing for the wild card spot. They are chasing the Cards, and have a better chance of catching them than we do of catching the wild card. They just seem like a sharper team - since they flopped so hard against us, that is.

[mdougherty12]

It seems to me that if you’re going to yank a starter early in a game, you’d like to put in a reliever that could do multiple innings rather than run through a bunch of guys at an inning per.
Gabe overworks his relievers. Too many appearances; short inning stints, multiple days in a row; and the like. It causes guys to tire and possibly break down.
Also I quibble with the roles that he has for several pitchers. Ex-The closer should be used to close not hold on to a tied score. Other pitchers can do that.

This discussion got me curious about whether Kapler's pitching staff management is really out of the ordinary or not, so I downloaded the 2019 NL team pitching data from Fangraphs and took a look:

One thing that surprised me is that the Phils are actually above average in IP/game started for the starting pitchers. I would have guessed they would be below average.

NL average is 5.41 IP/GS, high is 5.80 (Nationals), low is 4.96 (Brewers), the Phils are at 5.47 (slightly above average).

Next is the reliever data:

NL average is 1.07 IP/relief appearance, high is 1.17 (Pirates), low is 0.95 (Nationals), the Phils are at 1.05 (slightly below average).

In general, at the team level, IP/GS and IP/relief appearance are negatively correlated. Teams that let their starters go longer tend to change relievers more frequently.

Based on these data, I'd say that while you might not like the way Kapler manages his pitching staff, he appears to manage it more or less the same way everyone else does in 2019.

[andyb]

Kapler's overuse of relievers was more of an issue during the pre-September phase of the season. We have 16 total pitchers now with 11 relievers in the bullpen. We can even get another pitcher like De Los Santos if we had a really long extra inning game. With a smaller staff Gabe definitely needs more multi-inning outings. But it is also hard to say he needs to do that now in September.

The bigger issue is they all are pretty mediocre. Maybe he should give Pivetta a chance to stretch out to 2 or 3 innings, but not sure his extra innings would be better than the first innings from guys like Hughes and Vincent on average. Fewer starter innings does mean we need to fill more reliever innings, but this September is an outlier in usage because of the extra pitchers.

[zambonir]

I'm just not sure what any of it had to do with how and why the Phillies lost the game yesterday. Those six relievers in between Vargas/Hughes and Vincent pitched four scoreless innings. Yeah, there were a few one-batter outings but that means the moves mostly worked. I can't say I would have wanted to see Pivetta work a full inning of a one-run game and Irvin came in to get his lefty (as did Suarez). Morin pitched badly in between but that doesn't mean the lefthanders would have fared better. And if Vincent had pitched the 9th Neris might have never appeared in the game because there wouldn't have been one to save.

[Lawman]

I pin yesterday's loss on the offense's inability to generate runs on a consistent basis.