Philadelphia Phillies: The bullpen is ruining another season

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the Philadelphia Phillies have bullpen issues.

The relievers are far from the only problem with this team, of course, but even a quick look at how Saturday’s 5-3 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays played out demonstrates the gap between a good bullpen like Tampa’s and a below-average one like what the Phillies have trotted out so far in 2021.

The Phillies got a fantastic start from Zack Wheeler, who registered a career-high 14 strikeouts. Wheeler, however, had to leave after seven innings in a tie game once he had eclipsed the dreaded 100-pitch mark. His counterpart, Rays’ starter Ryan Yarbrough, went only 4.1 innings on the day. But that doesn’t really matter for some teams, Tampa especially, who have a bullpen so good and so deep that they can mix and match for the better part of a game without fear of an opposing offense jumping all over them.

On Saturday, Tampa got 4.2 innings of one-run ball from their four relievers, who combined to strike out seven Phils, surrendering just two hits and one walk. The Phillies, meanwhile, stumbled their way through one inning of bullpen work that decided the game, as Sam Coonrod started a fire that Jose Alvarado (a former Ray) made worse, allowing two Tampa runs to cross the plate in the 8th inning.

The Philadelphia Phillies’ bullpen looks to be wrecking their 2021 season.

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It was more of the same story for the Phils, whose bullpen ERA of 4.62 on the season entering Saturday’s game got even worse, sitting in the bottom-ten leaguewide. The group of teams with a worse mark on the year include some of the culprits you’d expect, like the Rockies and Tigers. But teams like the Orioles and Pirates have a better bullpen ERA than the Phillies this year, a sad state of affairs for a team who overhauled their reliever corps in an effort to prevent the same disaster we saw in 2020.

A new strategy under new management has made the bullpen objectively better (because it couldn’t possibly have gotten worse), but even this course of action hasn’t proven to be good enough. I’ll at least give Dave Dombrowski, and company credit for the attempted revamp, but it hasn’t worked as we all would have hoped.

Veteran Brandon Kintzler, who looked like a decent gamble for the Phillies to take, has been a disaster, sporting an 8.22 ERA and looking very much like a pitcher whose days as a major leaguer are numbered. Archie Bradley hasn’t been too great in his limited appearances either, but we’ll have to reserve judgment and see how he does in the coming weeks after recently getting over an oblique injury that took a concerningly long amount of time to heal.

The aforementioned Coonrod seemed to be a nice addition for the first six weeks, but his recent trend of allowing multiple runs in three of his last four appearances is a major cause for concern. And then there’s Alvarado, whom the Phillies acquired for next to nothing in a three-team deal last offseason. That’s the problem, though, as the other two clubs involved were the Rays and Dodgers, perhaps the two clubs with the best pitching development and evaluation abilities in the league. And when two teams like this get together and are fine flipping a pitcher to you, it might be in your best interest to ask yourself, “Why would one of these pitching-smart clubs let us have this guy instead of wanting to keep him or trade for him themselves?”

Hmmmmm.

Alvarado hasn’t been bad, per se. And his stuff is electric and nearly unhittable when he can keep his emotions in check and hit his spots. Too often, though, that hasn’t happened this year. He’s walked 17 hitters in 17.1 innings pitched through Saturday’s loss, throwing in three hit batters and four wild pitches for good (or bad) measure. At those rates, teams don’t even need to hit the ball against him. Alvarado, unfortunately, looks to be just another “thrower” who can hit 100 miles per hour but has little actual idea of how to pitch.

I was happy that the Phillies at least tried to bring in some talent to fill out the bullpen this offseason, rather than going back to their “bring in a grab bag of retreads and see what happens” strategy that blew up in their faces so historically last year. But, nearly one-third of the way into the 2021 season, this bullpen just isn’t cutting it.

Next. Ranger Suarez should be in the starting rotation. dark

The Philadelphia Phillies are too flawed of a team to have playoff aspirations when they lose the kind of games where they get starting performances like Zack Wheeler’s on Saturday. The problems don’t start with the bullpen, but the issues are popping up too often at the ends of games to provide much hope for this club over the next few months.

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