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How prized prospect Spencer Howard would have greater impact for Phillies in shortened MLB season | Scott Laub - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Last month, before phrases like “social distancing” and “flatten the curve” seeped into the vernacular, the Phillies’ biggest challenge was figuring out how to maximize their top pitching prospect’s impact on a season in which his workload almost certainly would have been capped by an innings limit.

It was a more innocent time.

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"If our season goes the way we hope it's going to go, Spencer Howard is going to be pitching meaningful innings for this team in the second half of the season and maybe before that," general manager Matt Klentak said on Feb. 13. "We need to make sure he has enough innings and pitches remaining in his season to help us down the stretch. So every pitch he throws in March is a pitch he's not going to be able to throw in September."

Needless to say, that isn't a problem anymore.

After following a more deliberate schedule than other pitchers in the Phillies’ big-league camp as a consequence of having his 2019 season shortened by a sore shoulder, Howard finally made his Grapefruit League debut on March 10, allowing two hits in a scoreless inning against the Minnesota Twins. Two days later, Major League Baseball suspended spring training and delayed the start of the season because of the outbreak of coronavirus.

You know what happened next. After COVID-19 was classified as a pandemic, players were directed to their offseason residences and opening day was pushed back at least eight weeks in compliance with orders from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

But amid the nearly unprecedented uncertainty for the sport, this much is clear: Time, the Phillies’ enemy in terms of their plans for Howard this season, suddenly is on their side.

An eight-week hiatus would mean that spring training won't resume until mid-May and the season won't begin until the first week of June. And those are best-case projections. If the virus isn't contained until July or August, the entire season would seemingly be in jeopardy.

MLB and the Players’ Association have met almost daily to discuss everything from financial relief for minor-league players to the allocation of service time, which will impact the future of salary arbitration and free-agent eligibility. They have barely broached the topic of redrawing the schedule. There’s little sense in doing that until they have a better idea of when/if the season might start.

Both sides seem to strongly prefer to play 162 games, even if it means staging the World Series in December at a warm-weather neutral site. It’s not yet clear, though, if that’s practical.

A more likely scenario, perhaps, is that the season will be truncated. If the Phillies play, say, 100 games or even 125, they will find it much easier to chart a course for Howard, who threw a grand total of 99 1/3 innings last season, including a playoff start for double-A Reading and six starts in the Arizona Fall League.

There isn’t one formula for a generally accepted innings increase from one season to the next. Several years ago, Sports Illustrated senior writer Tom Verducci and former major-league pitching coach Rick Peterson concluded based on a study that pitchers under 25 years old risk injury or regression if their workloads are increased by more than 30% over the previous season. Some evaluators and team officials agree with that theory; others contend the 30% figure is arbitrary.

“Not every inning is created the same," Klentak said when spring training began. “We have a lot of ways to measure fatigue now, whether it’s measuring an arm slot, velocity, and different technologies that we can use to see when a player is tiring. We will have some guidelines in terms of innings, pitches, workload, but we don’t want to box ourselves into a hard cap.”

Using the Peterson/Verducci model as a loose guide and erring on the conservative side (manager Joe Girardi has said repeatedly that the Phillies are keeping Howard’s next 10 years in mind), the team could cap the 23-year-old right-hander at roughly 130 innings. In a theoretical 125-game season, he could average five innings per start over 25 starts and be only bumping against his limit.

Assuming most starting pitchers will be restricted early in the season because of an interrupted spring training, Howard wouldn’t even need to be handled much differently than anyone else.

“This is the best I’ve felt in spring training in three years,” Howard said on March 10. “I stayed on top of my mound work a lot [more] this offseason. Tried to stay off a slope in offseasons of the past, just trying to get away from baseball and let my body recover. But I figured that’s something I needed to do if I was ever going to repeat my delivery. As much as they’ll let me go, I’m ready.”

The Phillies hadn’t settled their fifth-starter competition before spring training was halted. Neither Vince Velasquez nor Nick Pivetta had seized the job based on their performance in Grapefruit League games. Left-hander Ranger Suarez remained in the mix, too.

It all seems almost moot now.

Regardless of which pitcher the Phillies choose to complete the season-opening rotation behind Aaron Nola, Zack Wheeler, Jake Arrieta and Zach Eflin, they’re going to need every available arm to get through the first month of games. They likely will be able to carry more pitchers, too, because rosters figure to be expanded at the outset. In 1995, for instance, teams were allowed three extra players for the first month of the season.

"My question is, as we run through this, if we're out a long time and spring training is short, I think we're going to need multiple-inning guys. So, I think we're going to use all of them in a sense," manager Joe Girardi said last week. "We have not named anyone yet [as the No. 5 starter] and we probably won't because we have to see where we're at."

It’s too soon to say exactly where that is, only that it’s going to be easier for the Phillies to make Howard a larger part of whatever plan they come up with for this season.

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