Spending money is easy. Sure, you could invest time and effort into scouting, drafting and developing a farm system that constantly refills your roster at a lower cost than buying up free agent contracts. But why do that when you can sign a guy who’s already good, move some numbers around on a spreadsheet, and call it an off-season?
Seems easy to me. But the Phillies are less eager to buy up relievers this winter as the top names have come off the board: Jordan Hicks to San Francisco, Robert Stephenson to Anaheim, Josh Hader to Houston, even Aroldis Chapman to Pittsburgh. Any of them, except Chapman, could have filled the role vacated by Craig Kimbrel at the back of the Phillies pen.
But, they didn’t. The Phillies have elected to look away from the big, familiar names with which people have decided they are in love and instead look for pitching help from that horrifying other place: Elsewhere.
“Elsewhere” is a jungle, or maybe a maze. Sometimes it’s just a pile. But when teams look in its direction, it typically means they trust themselves to get creative, or at least, to take a less obvious approach. For some teams, that trust in themselves is misplaced. For others, who aren’t just there because they are eager to be cheap, it can pay off.
This is not an area where the Phillies have a lot of success—until recently, when they put together what has started to be called the deepest pitching staff in baseball.
“Deepest” doesn’t mean “everyone here could be a number one starter if asked.” It means that when each pitcher fills their role—from the frontline starters to the mop-up relievers—the crew can at least adequately do their job most of the time. Some of them can even step up and fill a different role when asked, like Ranger Suarez and Christopher Sanchez giving the Phillies a start beyond what a No. 3 or No. 5 starter is supposed to do, or José Alvarado getting one to three extra outs when things get dicey late. And when the Phillies turn to any of these guys to step up, they’re turning to a lot of guys they picked up who hadn’t been making the biggest headlines when they were acquired.
Jeff Hoffman is a great example. Prior to the 2023 season, he was a 30-year-old fly ball pitcher with a high walk rate who’d been getting his butt kicked in hitter-friendly parks like Colorado and Cincinnati. The Twins picked him up for the spring—he had been a No. 9 overall draft pick at one point, you can hear his agent saying—but they dumped him before opening day. And there were the Phillies, looking for bullpen help.
Granted, it was late March, so there weren’t any high-end relievers available as an alternative, but the Phillies had signed Matt Straham and traded for Gregory Soto (and Yunior Marte). They scooped Hoffman up from Elsewhere and he became their most reliable reliever, eventually working his way into high leverage playoff situations (and coming out unscathed).
Anyone who told you they’d expected Hoffman to fare that well is lying. Not even Hoffman may have envisioned himself pitching in the NLCS. But anyone who told you they enjoyed his success is not!
It’s nice when a guy from Elsewhere works out because everybody feels a little smarter, the fans get to watch an underdog rise, and hell, you might even sell one or two more jerseys. Which brings us to this off-season, in which we have reached late January, and Craig Kimbrel’s spot is still pretty open with the bigger free agent relievers no longer available.
What the Phillies have done is sign lefty Kolby Allard, a former Braves draft pick, to a split deal between the majors and minors. He instantly joined the 40-man roster upon his acquisition, though he’s not guaranteed a spot on opening day.
Allard was one of three Braves starters, along with Mike Soroka and Bryse Wilson, to make his MLB debut at 20 years old in 2018. This is an indicator of the Braves’ horrifyingly endless talent pipeline, but also an indicator of how that pipeline doesn’t always pump straight into major-league success.
As he climbed up the farm system, Allard always seemed to be ahead of schedule, putting up great numbers faster than projected and accelerating his journey to the big leagues. However, upon reaching them, the predictions made in his minor scouting report seemed to come hauntingly true. Allard, who throws a four-seamer, curve, and cutter, had the kind of velocity you can get away with at triple-A but not against major-league hitters, who can typically jump on an 88-90 mph fastball in the right spot (or, if you’re Allard, the wrong one).
Allard’s strength was his control, which he used to put his low-speed stuff in strategic places, leading to a low walk rate from the minors to the majors. This puts him right in the Phillies’ wheelhouse: a guy with a documented strength who’s got something to work on. Elsewhere is filled with guys like that. It all comes down to who thinks they can help them.
Hoffman, too, had needed to make some adjustments—it was said he needed to use the inside part of the plate more—before he arrived in Philadelphia and found his groove. Caleb Cotham’s pitching lab was likely helpful for Hoffman, considering the Phillies pitching coach had worked with him in Cincinnati and been the reason he had “FAH” written on his glove.
So here the Phillies are with a 26-year-old lefty who has a natural strength and something to prove. Anyone who watched this team’s cursed 2020 bullpen try to faceplant its way out of trouble can tell you that pitchers haven’t always come here to succeed, and this was for some reason even more true after they’d succeeded elsewhere. But Brandon Workman, Heath Hembree, David Phelps and all the rest don’t work here anymore. The Phillies are now an organization where pitchers come and find success. At least for now.
Sure, the word is now that the Phillies may be too deep in their pitching staff, turning off hurlers from wanting to come here and split playing time or earn a role. That makes guys like Allard even more necessary. With the right adjustments, he could be the answer Jeff Hoffman became. And if the concern is wanting someone more established in there, well, there’s also Orion Kerkering around.
Kerkering began his major-league career making appearances at the most white-knuckle time on the baseball calendar as the Phillies played out the regular season homestretch and barreled deeply into the playoffs. And Kerkering appeared up for (most of) the task(s). He is now a rare breed of reliever: a 22-year-old with more playoff experience than regular season experience. And the Phillies are ready to have him carry more of the weight in 2024—although his bullpen spot isn’t reserved, it is aggressively projected.
A good spring with his devastating sweeper (or whatever 2024’s sexiest pitching trend is) would do a lot for the Phillies front office, and perhaps even for those who this very day are clawing at the walls as they wait for the Phillies to do “something,” not realizing that the somethings the Phillies have already done may just be how they are approaching relief help at the moment.
Is it going to work? This is baseball. Even if it does, nothing works forever. And it’s important that the Phillies remain committed to spending. But their increasingly frequent visits to Elsewhere have been a boon of late, and while it’s less exciting to see a signing like Allard’s now instead of Robert Stephenson or Jordan Hicks, you never know when a trip to Elsewhere is going to pay off—or what else the Phillies have planned.
