On paper, Phils' starting rotation is better

CLEARWATER, Fla. -

Jeremy Hellickson, Charlie Morton and Brett Oberholtzer might not be the kinds of pitchers that people write poems about, but their presence on the Phillies' 40-man roster is the biggest reason you might be surprised with how the club's record looks at the end of the season. We aren't talking about the playoffs, but there's a broad spectrum between that and the 63-win dreck you watched last year.

"I think we're going to surprise people with how many games we have a chance to win," pitching coach Bob McClure said last week as the Phillies wrapped up their eighth spring-training workout of the spring.

For all of the attention lavished upon the higher-ceiling players who have joined the organization over the last year, the most immediate dividends will come from closer to the margins, where general manager Matt Klentak and president Andy MacPhail added a trio of strike-throwers in trades with Arizona (Hellickson for minor leaguer Sam McWilliams), Pittsburgh (Morton for minor leaguer David Whitehead) and Houston (Oberholtzer as one of the less-heralded pieces in the Ken Giles trade).

Just look at the numbers and think them through:

Last season, a Phillies starter went six innings while allowing three or fewer runs in just 65 of 162 starts. Hellickson and Morton did so in 23 of their 50 starts for the Diamondbacks and Pirates. Adam Morgan, Aaron Nola and Jerad Eickhoff combined to do it in 20 of 36 starts for the Phillies. So the five of them combined for quality starts in 43 of 86 outings. Sustaining that rate over 162 games would give the Phillies 16 more quality starts in 2016 than they had in 2015.

Now, let's get a little more theoretical. The Phillies had a winning percentage of .646 in games in which their pitcher logged a quality start, compared with .216 in games in which a pitcher did not log a quality start. At those rates, 16 extra quality starts would have meant seven extra wins (10.4-5.6 compared with 3.5-12.5). Granted, that's provided everything else remains unchanged, which is a significant provision, particularly with regard to the back of the bullpen, where the presence of Giles and Jonathan Papelbon was a major factor in converting those quality starts into wins. Nevertheless, it is a for-instance, however unscientific, of the impact the offseason additions can have.

Again, the caveats are numerous. First and foremost is the small sample size offered by Nola, Eickhoff and Morgan, who combined to make just 36 starts. Case in point: while Eickhoff posted a 2.65 ERA with 49 strikeouts and 13 walks in 51 innings in his eight starts in 2015, consider what Aaron Harang did in his first eight starts of last season: 2.03 ERA with 37 strikeouts and 10 walks in 53 1/3 innings. Certainly, there is reason for optimism regarding the 25-year-old righthander, but an eight-game stretch in which six of his starts came against the NL East is not a representative sample for an entire season.

At the same time, there is room for improvement as well as regression. In 2013-14, Oberholtzer posted a 3.85 ERA with averages of 5.8 K/9, 1.7 BB/9 and 0.8 HR/9 over 215 1/3 innings in 34 starts and three relief appearances. For comparison's sake, in 2014, Kyle Kendrick posted a 4.61 ERA with averages of 5.5 K/9, 2.6 BB/9 and 1.1 HR/9 in 199 innings over 32 starts. The Phillies went 16-16 in his appearances that year (on the other hand, they went 7-13 in starts by David Buchanan, who posted a 3.75 ERA with 5.4 K/9, 2.4 BB/9 and 0.9 HR/9, so take all of that for what it's worth). In 2015, they went 18-18 in starts by Morgan, Nola and Eickhoff.

Point is, the Phillies figure to start the season with at least six pitchers who have the potential to keep them competitive in the majority of their starts, all of whom are still in their physical prime. Last year, they entered the season relying on 30-year-old Chad Billingsley, who had not thrown a pitch in a big-league game in two years, and 33-year-old Jerome Williams, who had been released twice the previous season, to man two spots in the rotation. Along with 34-year-old Kevin Correia, and career journeyman Sean O'Sullivan, those four pitchers combined to make 46 starts, to say nothing of the 37-year-old Harang, who made 29. Buchanan, Severino Gonzalez, and Alec Asher combined for 29 starts. This year, they figure to enter the season as, at best, the Nos. 7, 8 and 9 options in the organization. And that's before we even consider the potential promotions of prospects Mark Appel, Vincent Velasquez, Jake Thompson, Ben Lively and Zach Efflin, all of whom can make a case for starting the season in Triple A.

"Probably the No. 1 goal of our offseason - and we identified it fairly early on - was to augment our pitching depth," Klentak said, "and with some of the trades that we made, I think we've done that. If you have quality starting pitching, that gives you a chance to win every single night. That's the goal of every organization, I would imagine, but that's defintiely the goal of this organization: to make sure that when we open the season we have five starters who give us a chance to win every night, and that we back that up with another five right behind them in Triple A that we can call on at any point to help us maintain that."

The result is that the Phillies should enter most games with something that seemed in short supply last season: a chance.

dmurphy@phillynews.com

@ByDavidMurphy

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