Don Mattingly and the Phillies have tried all season to find some sort of spark from their left-handed relief. Nothing has worked. The Phillies’ left-handed relievers as a unit rank second-worst in batting average allowed at .273 and sixth-worst in home runs allowed with 23. Some of this is poor luck, which we will get into later, but they’ve tried plenty of things and nothing really works.
In Seattle on Tuesday night, Don Mattingly walked out to the mound to remove Orion Kerkering in the bottom of
the seventh inning for Brooks Raley. Raley has made a living over the 2020s with five different teams as a veteran left-hander who gets left handed hitters out. Against left handed hitter Dominic Canzone with the bases loaded, Raley left a sweeper up in the zone just enough for Canzone to get bat-to-ball and poke a single to score two runs and seal Seattle’s fate.
In nine appearances for Raley since being traded from the Mets, he has not been an awful acquisition but the poor moments have killed them. He has surrendered two home runs, both in key leverage spots, and has given up at least one hit in four of his last five appearances.
This is not super surprising given that Raley’s Mets tenure featured real red flags and he didn’t go for much at the trade deadline even with a 1.96 ERA there.
His sweeper has seen a slight decline in whiffs and his cutter has dropped half a tick in velocity. It has translated into below average swing-and-miss compared to his past, which is natural for a reliever that is 38 years old. This is just not a guy with the type of stuff to get leverage outs which is why he has been struggling to get outs for the Phillies in leverage situations.
José Alvarado is on the complete other end of the spectrum, both in season results and role. Three of his last four outings have been in situations with an average leverage index well below the 1.0 average. His season has been a disaster results wise, bad enough that pitchers have been cut from the team in the past.
What is keeping him on the team, rightfully, is that a 5.94 ERA is not telling the entire story in this specific case. He has had a massive BABIP spike compared to his career, the lowest left-on-base rate of his career, and still has a 27% strikeout rate, even while suffering velocity decline.
While Tim Mayza is on the roster, his lack of swing-and-miss and concerning hard hit issues probably leave him out of this discussion, although maybe that is just the answer they arrive at when the season ends.
This is all to say that while Alvarado has had his issues, there is a real argument to make that trying to see things out with him is their best path to finding an October left hander. None of these guys are reliable but someone might need to take the ball in a spot where you need a reliable left hander and it should be José Alvarado.
To put it another way, the Phillies probably need to find who the hot hand can be and which guy gives them the most upside. Given what the regression to the mean cases probably look like moving forward, José Alvarado seems to be the answer.
