For most of this season, Zack Wheeler has been the Phillies’ answer when they needed a game steadied.
Lately, he has become one of their biggest questions.
The Phillies’ nine-game winning streak ended Monday night at T-Mobile Park, where Seattle battered Wheeler for eight runs and four home runs in a 9-2 victory. It was easily his worst start of the season and, considering what has been happening since the All-Star break, considerably more troubling than one bad night.
Wheeler lasted just 4 1/3 innings. He allowed seven hits, walked five and struck out four while throwing 103 pitches. The four home runs matched a career high.
That is not the sort of history Wheeler usually makes.
“To be totally honest with you, I feel perfectly fine,” Wheeler told reporters afterward. “Healthy, strong — everything’s there. I don’t know. Just got to zone it back in and figure it out.”
That may be what makes this so difficult to diagnose.
The Phillies gave Wheeler a 1-0 lead in the top of the first. It lasted only a few minutes.
Julio Rodríguez launched a three-run homer off Wheeler in the bottom half, and Cal Raleigh followed later in the inning with a two-run shot. Seattle scored five times before Wheeler could get through the frame.
And the contact was not cheap.
Four Mariners hit balls at least 100 mph in the first inning alone, the first time Wheeler has allowed that many triple-digit exit velocities in a single inning during the Statcast era. Seattle eventually collected eight hard-hit balls against him.
The Mariners were seeing mistakes and doing something with them.
That has increasingly been the problem.
Wheeler entered the All-Star break at 10-1 with a 2.13 ERA, a 0.89 WHIP and 108 strikeouts against 22 walks in 93 innings. Opponents hit .185 against him with a .551 OPS.
Since the break?
The numbers barely resemble the same pitcher.
Wheeler is 0-4 with a 7.18 ERA in seven second-half starts. He has allowed 36 hits and nine home runs in 31 1/3 innings, with 16 walks. Opponents are hitting .286 with a .368 on-base percentage and a .571 slugging percentage — a .939 OPS.
August has been worse.
In five starts this month, Wheeler is 0-3 with a 7.59 ERA and a 1.88 WHIP. He has walked 15 batters in 21 1/3 innings after issuing only 22 walks over his first 93 innings of the season.
That is probably the most revealing number of all.
Wheeler has spent years controlling at-bats. He gets ahead. He forces hitters to protect. Then he uses one of baseball’s deepest arsenals to finish them.
That sequence has disappeared lately.
“I mean, I’m just really struggling the past few,” Wheeler said. “All I can really throw for a strike — a good quality strike — is a fastball right now, and that’s not even fully consistent. So when you’re pitching kind of with one pitch, it’s pretty hard up here.”
Baseball Savant’s numbers from Monday support that diagnosis.
Wheeler still has his stuff.
His four-seam fastball averaged 94.9 mph, only three-tenths below his season average of 95.2. His sinker sat at 94.5, just two-tenths below normal. His splitter averaged 87.4, actually a tick above his season mark.
There was no dramatic velocity collapse.
The movement profiles were not wildly different, either. His four-seamer showed 13 inches of induced vertical break compared with a season average of 14. His sweeper produced 15 inches of horizontal movement compared with 17 normally. The splitter had slightly more vertical and horizontal action than his season averages.
Even his ability to miss bats did not vanish.
Wheeler generated 15 whiffs on 46 Seattle swings, a 33 percent whiff rate. His four-seamer produced six misses on 16 swings. The sweeper generated two on five swings. Overall, 31 of his 103 pitches resulted in either a called strike or whiff.
Those are not the numbers of a pitcher whose arsenal suddenly disappeared.
But pitching is more than stuff.
It is where the stuff goes.
J.T. Realmuto told reporters afterward that Wheeler’s misses have become larger than usual and that more pitches are finding the middle of the plate. When a pitcher is missing badly outside the zone and then compensating by leaking pitches back over the plate, hitters no longer have to defend everything.
They can wait.
Seattle waited Monday. Then it attacked.
The fifth inning provided one final example.
Despite allowing six runs through four innings and sitting at 94 pitches, Wheeler returned to the mound. Raleigh homered again. Cole Young followed with another. Mattingly finally came from the dugout.
“He wanted to go back out, and I kind of wanted him to go back out,” Mattingly said. “We were going to keep it short.”
It lasted two batters.
Raleigh eventually hit a third home run against the Phillies bullpen, but by then the game had long since gotten away.
So has something else.
Excluding Wheeler’s rain-shortened outing in Baltimore on Aug. 2, he owns a 9.27 ERA over his past five full starts. He has not completed six innings in any of them.
Maybe the encouraging part is that nothing in the underlying data screams physical breakdown. Wheeler insists he feels healthy. The velocity remains. The pitches still move. He is still capable of getting swings and misses.
That makes this less mysterious in one sense and more frustrating in another.
The tools that made Wheeler an ace appear to be sitting right there.
The command that allowed him to use them is not.
For years, Wheeler has dictated the terms of an at-bat. Right now, hitters are doing the dictating.
The Phillies have enough season left for him to fix it. But October is close enough now that this can no longer be dismissed as a bad night, or even a couple of bad starts.
For most of the year, the Phillies could look ahead to a postseason series and know exactly who they wanted holding the baseball when everything was on the line.
Five weeks from October, they are waiting for that version of Zack Wheeler to come back.
Loading the latest Phillies coverage...
Loading Phillies schedule...
Loading NL East standings...
