Don’t Freak Out About Jesús Luzardo’s Shoulder. At Least Not Yet.

Eric Hartline-Imagn Images On August 24, I wrote about the Phillies, who’d just completed a nine-game winning streak in terrific style. After dropping the first two games of an extended West Coast road trip, they ripped off another six-game winning streak, with a run of seven games against the first-place Braves in a 10-day stretch to come. Things haven’t gone so well since. Over the past two weeks, the Phillies are 4-8, with five of those losses coming by a single run. The bullpen is showing fatigue cracks; Jhoan Duran has lost twice while pitching in non-save situations, while on Friday, three different Phillies relievers blew saves in the span of three innings. One of the bright spots of the Phillies’ last homestand came on Labor Day, when Jesús Luzardo threw a shutout in a 1-0 victory over Atlanta, thus obviating the need for a bullpen. Of the Phillies’ top four starters, Luzardo is the only one who’s never been a Cy Young finalist, but he’s been their best pitcher by far over the past two months. Since the All-Star break, Luzardo leads all NL starters in ERA, and he’s second to Chris Sale in WAR. That weekday start against Atlanta was his capstone project: 109 pitches, 78 strikes (22 swinging), 12 strikeouts, one walk, one hit batter, two base hits, both singles. By game score, it was the fourth-best Phillies start of the 21st Century. Luzardo’s performance is up among the most impressive and memorable starts in recent franchise history. You Aren't a FanGraphs Member It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed. We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member. 1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other. 2. Unlimited articles! 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We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it. Top 10 Phillies Game Scores of the 21st Century Player GmSc Date Opp IP H R ER BB SO HBP BF Pit Str Roy Halladay 98 5/29/2010 FLA 9 0 0 0 0 11 0 27 115 72 Cole Hamels 98 7/25/2015 CHC 9 0 0 0 2 13 0 29 129 83 Vince Velasquez 97 4/14/2016 SDP 9 3 0 0 0 16 0 30 113 83 Jesús Luzardo 94 9/7/2026 ATL 9 2 0 0 1 12 1 30 109 78 Kevin Millwood 94 4/27/2003 SFG 9 0 0 0 3 10 0 29 108 72 Aaron Nola 93 4/18/2021 STL 9 2 0 0 0 10 0 30 109 73 Zack Wheeler 93 8/8/2021 NYM 9 2 0 0 1 11 0 30 108 80 Zack Wheeler 93 7/6/2025 CIN 9 1 1 1 0 12 0 28 108 74 Cliff Lee 92 8/19/2009 ARI 9 2 1 0 0 11 1 31 106 81 Cliff Lee 92 4/14/2011 WSN 9 3 0 0 1 12 0 30 99 74 Source: Baseball Reference Red: No-hitterBlue: Perfect Game At least locally. I guess Mariners fans don’t have vivid memories of the day Velasquez randomly struck out 16 Padres, but trust me, most Phillies fans do. A way to tell if a pitcher is locked in is how fast the game’s moving. With Luzardo dealing and Braves starter Grant Holmes hanging onto his shirttails, the Phillies and Braves wrapped up their holiday overtime shift in an hour and 51 minutes, making this the shortest nine-inning Phillies game since 1989. How did Luzardo follow up that performance? Well, here’s the bad news. We don’t know. Luzardo’s throwing shoulder stiffened up in the days after his shutout, and he couldn’t get loose in a throwing session the day before his next scheduled start. Phillies manager Don Mattingly scratched him from Saturday’s game, which the Phillies went on to lose 12-2, and when Luzardo’s shoulder hadn’t recovered satisfactorily by Tuesday, the Phillies put him on the 15-day IL. They went on to lose to the Nationals that evening. Luzardo’s injury, in concert with the Phillies’ recent skid, has not been great for the vibes in the Delaware Valley. This despite a good week for local news in general: The Eagles won their season opener, Matt Cord is coming back for one last season as the Sixers’ PA announcer, and Tom Pelphrey won an Emmy for Task. All it takes is one balky shoulder to set the region on edge. So while we explore what this injury does and does not mean for the Phillies’ championship hopes, let’s start with two pieces of good news. First: It seems like Luzardo’s injury is troubling entirely because of its timing, rather than its severity. Luzardo spoke to reporters on Tuesday and guaranteed that he’d be ready to go for the postseason. Over the weekend, he said: “If today was Game 7 of the World Series, I’m throwing no matter what.” Like most people in his line of work, Luzardo has extreme confidence in his own physical abilities, so maybe let’s not take his assurances at face value. It’s fair to worry about his fitness for the postseason, but Luzardo would not be talking like this if he’d torn his rotator cuff or something. Both he and Mattingly said this is about making sure Luzardo is in the best possible shape for October. Luzardo also stressed that he felt good for the first day or two after his complete game, so this isn’t a case of his arm giving out from a single day’s hard work. His 109 pitches on Labor Day left him one shy of his season-high pitch count, but that’s not an aberrant total for a guy who’s been a workhorse all year and has been none the worse for wear. He went five innings in his first start after the break; he’s thrown between 98 and 110 pitches in each of his past nine starts, with an average of 104 pitches per start since July 24. One could argue that his workload last Monday was low-stress, considering the utter lack of traffic on the bases, but I don’t know that there’s such a thing as a “low-stress” 1-0 Phillies-Braves game this late in the calendar. In short: This does not seem to be an acute or severe injury, which is obviously good for the Phillies. Not just in the context of this postseason, but because they just signed Luzardo, who turns 29 in two weeks, to a five-year, $135 million extension that kicks in next season. No one would be happy if Luzardo started that contract on the IL with a career-altering shoulder issue. Second: The skid the Phillies are on hasn’t actually harmed their playoff chances that much. That de facto home-and-home with the Braves featured three utter gut-punch losses, but the Phillies just about broke even against their rivals, going 3-4 overall. That was deleterious to their odds of defending their NL East title because of opportunity cost, more than losing ground. They entered that run four games back in the division, which means they could’ve closed the gap to one game by going 5-2 over those seven games, or taken the division lead outright by going 6-1 or better. That was definitely possible, but I don’t know if it was ever likely. Since September 2, the Phillies’ odds of winning the NL East dropped from 15.6% to 0.2%, and their slim chances of getting a first-round bye have gone to zero. That’s obviously not what they would’ve wanted, but it’s not really a material change in their position in the standings. Their overall playoff odds, however, have dropped from 99.6% to 94.9%. That’s nothing, unless you’ve been conditioned to expect the worst. The number of times I’ve seen 1964 brought up in the past two weeks, by people whose parents are too young to remember Gene Mauch and Chris Short, beggars belief. The Cubs are also 4-6 in their past 10 games, and the Phillies are still 3 1/2 games ahead of the Diamondbacks, the first team out of the NL bracket as of Wednesday morning. They could still blow it, but it would take a feat of ineptitude such that you’d feel foolish for spending all your panicked energy this early. So let’s try to look at this situation rationally. The most likely scenario is that Luzardo comes back, at or near full fitness, in time for a start in Game 3 of the NL Wild Card series. What have the Phillies lost in that scenario, compared to where they sat a week ago? Well, it doesn’t help the Phillies in their race against the Cubs (and, thanks to a winning streak of their own, the Padres) for the no. 4 seed and home-field advantage in the playoffs. That would be useful, but the effects of home-field advantage are easy to overstate; the Phillies, for instance, actually have a better record on the road this year. Once they get to the playoffs, Luzardo would still be in line to make that Game 3 start, if necessary. And as good as he has been down the stretch, Cristopher Sánchez and Zack Wheeler are still as potent a 1-2 combination as you’ll find in the majors. Sánchez is a presumptive NL Cy Young finalist, and Wheeler — in addition to his own estimable regular-season credentials — is one of the best postseason starters of the past 75 years. The biggest loss for the Phillies is probably going to be the opportunity to use Luzardo creatively in the Wild Card round. We’ve had five postseasons with a best-of-three first round so far in the 2020s, and I don’t think managers or front offices have figured out the best way to navigate that format yet, in terms of roster construction or pitcher deployment. From where I sit, the Phillies have four elite pitchers — Sánchez, Wheeler, Luzardo, and Duran — and a handful of others — Nola, Andrew Painter, Tim Mayza, and José Alvarado — who are sometimes trustworthy. Then there’s a third cohort, featuring pitchers — Orion Kerkering, Jonathan Bowlan, and Brooks Raley — who have been terrific in the recent past but have looked like total cheeks of late. The greater the percentage of postseason innings the Phillies shift onto that first group, the better off they’ll be. In the interest of pursuing that goal, Matt Gelb of The Athletic kicked up a stir last week by suggesting that the Phillies keep Luzardo in reserve for a multi-inning relief stint on his throw day in Game 1 of the Wild Card series. That would keep the Phillies’ elite no. 3 starter in play in a series that might only go two games while still preserving him as an option to start the decider. Especially with Nola and/or Painter available as a piggyback option in the absence of a Game 4. This was absolutely, 100% the right move when Gelb suggested it. But now that Luzardo is having trouble loosening up his shoulder, it’d be foolish to stretch him more than necessary. Definitely in his first outing back from injury, possibly for the entire postseason. Even if Luzardo is only available out of the rotation in October, Nola’s resurgence as a potentially trustworthy no. 4 leaves Painter free to take up that multi-inning bulk role, albeit at a lower standard of quality. All of that assumes Luzardo will be healthy after his 15-day layoff. For now, that seems like a safe assumption to make. If not, well, the Phillies will have to get creative. Without Luzardo, the Phillies would probably be overexposing Nola and Painter, and their already-tenuous bullpen depth would get even more threadbare. At the same time, they were without Wheeler in last year’s NLDS, against a far, far tougher first-round opponent than they’re likely to face this year. And they still gave as good as they got against the Dodgers. Anything is possible in October. But planning for a postseason without Luzardo is another day’s problem. For now, it looks like the Phillies will make the playoffs and have their full rotation available once they get there. Until and unless that changes, Phillies fans don’t have to panic. But they’re obviously free to do so anyway.