The Phillies made a small trade with the Chicago White Sox on Thursday afternoon, sending two prospects for outfielder Derek Hill and international bonus pool money.
Hill is a low-cost platoon option and a plus defender at all three positions. It’s a good move to help alleviate some of their outfield injury issues.
Adolis García left Wednesday night’s game with a pulled muscle in his right shoulder but that wasn’t the only injury that hurt the major league outfield. Johan Rojas is set to miss all of
2026 after tearing his UCL in his throwing shoulder, so there was a need for more depth moving forward.
Hill is part of a dying breed of players, the right-handed platoon partner. Right-handed hitters are hitting just .243 with a .401 slugging percentage against left handed pitching. It would be the lowest mark BaseballSavant can track, which dates those splits back to 2008. If we just limit it to the first few months of every season, it is a little better than last season but not great.
While a .789 OPS against left-handed pitching does not sound amazing, it is getting harder and harder to find those types of niche players in today’s game.
With all of that in mind, it’s not bad business by the front office.
Aaron Nola’s lefty problem
After Aaron Nola had the worst season of his career in 2025, he came back with some adjustments to attack left handed pitching.
He cut down his four-seam fastball usage to southpaws from 35% in 2025 to 29% in 2026 and limited one of his two primary locations on it. He has exclusively worked down and away to left-handed hitters with the fastball until he gets ahead, where he tries to elevate it and work a tunnel with the curveball.
There are a few more backdoor cutters and slightly fewer changeups. Otherwise, there is not much else he can do but subtle adjustments can go a long way.
What are the results? After allowing a career worst .862 OPS to left handed hitters in 2025, he has returned with a .911 OPS allowed in 2026.
A lot of this comes from his four-seam fastball. Left-handed hitters are destroying it with a .487 batting average and a .974 slugging.
It would seem like a good idea to lower that usage but then a different problem arises: Nola is walking more left handed hitters at a 13% rate, his highest in a non-COVID season since 2019. If they lower the fastball usage even more, he could walk another dangerous line of walking too many hitters.
There could be one lever to pull, lefties are only hitting .091 against his changeup. He probably has to find a way to get that usage up.
While this doesn’t solve the biggest problem, taking the cutter usage almost entirely and putting it into the changeup might help a lot. The cutter results are not crazy from a damage standpoint but he is allowing a lot of hard contact. The changeup down and away more often might also help protect the fastball from a lot more damage if he wants to keep the down-and-away location.
Otherwise, there isn’t a lot. The curveball is doing fine, he can run the comeback sinker, and the fastball gets crushed.
It will be the problem that plagues Nola the rest of the season if results continue to look like this. He is handling right-handed hitters fine with a .717 OPS, but probably gets better with some batted-ball luck regression.
If he can figure this out, then the future may not look so bleak. If he can’t… it doesn’t look good.
