As Phillies ace Aaron Nola searches for his sinker, he might benefit from facing different opponents

When the St. Louis Cardinals arrived Friday to Citizens Bank Park, they ended the Phillies’ streak of 81 games -- in a span of 572 days -- against East Coast teams.

Aaron Nola, for one, could stand to see some different faces.

Thirteen of Nola’s last 15 starts and 18 of his last 22 are against division rivals. Nearly one-third of those, including two starts already this season, are against the New York Mets. With Nola scheduled to stare down the Cardinals on Sunday, it will mark his first start against a team from neither the NL East or AL East since Sept. 4, 2019, when he faced the Cincinnati Reds.

It was a somewhat unavoidable imbalance. Because of the pandemic, teams played a regional, mostly intradivisional schedule last season. Nola isn’t alone in facing the same teams again and again.

But the Phillies’ top starter hasn’t been as effective as usual thus far this season, allowing 19 hits in 15 2/3 innings and pitching beyond the fifth inning in only one of his three starts. Hitters have barreled 8.2% of his pitches, according to Statcast, the highest rate of his career. By comparison, they barreled 5.4% last season and 6.8% in 2019. Twenty-one of the 49 batted balls against him have been classified as “hard hit,” a 42.9% rate that is up from 38.1% last year and 39.5% in 2019.

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Here, then, is the question: Is Nola’s stuff not as sharp, or has the unusual frequency with which he has faced the same teams given those hitters an advantage?

“Yeah, man, it feels like I’ve pitched against these guys 100 times,” Nola said this week in New York after giving up three runs on seven hits in five innings of a 4-0 loss to the Mets. “But I think obviously when I don’t have my stuff it’s hard to navigate through these guys.”

Nola conceded he hasn’t had his best stuff. In particular, he seems to be pitching without his sinker. It can be difficult, even for manager Joe Girardi, to discern between Nola’s fastball varieties. But according to Statcast, Nola threw a total of four two-seamers (sinker) in three starts compared with 123 four-seamers, a heater with a different grip and less movement. His velocity on the sinker is down a few ticks, too, from 91.7 mph last season to 89.8.

“It hasn’t been feeling as good as the four-seam as of late,” Nola said. “There’ll be times when it’ll feel better than other times. I’ve just tried to stick with the four-seamer right now until the two-seamer feels a little bit better. It’ll come around, for sure. It’s just one of those things where I’ve got to get the feel back a little bit.”

Girardi hasn’t seemed overly concerned. Asked this week if Nola might be going through a “dead-arm” phase that can be common for pitchers, he said, “I don’t think so. Is it possible? Of course it’s possible. But I have not got that sense from him. I just feel like he’s been out of sorts his last couple outings. It happens to pitchers, and you’re like, ‘Well, why?’ I don’t know. It just happens. We need to get him back on track.”

And that means finding the sinker again. Nola has one of the highest ground-ball rates (49.3%) among starting pitchers since the beginning of the 2019 season. The sinker tends to induce weak contact on the ground. It’s one of Nola’s calling cards.

Nola has other ways to get hitters out, including a curveball that has been effective so far. But he’s different without his sinker.

“Whenever you’re not using some of your best pitches because you don’t have a feel, you’re going to be different,” Girardi said. “We have to help him get the feel back of that pitch because a lot of times that can get you out of jams. When you have the ability to freeze left-handers inside or get weak ground balls, I think it’s really important. But I always think Aaron’s success a lot of times depends on his fastball command, and it seems like this last two starts he has not had great fastball command.”

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Both of those starts were against the Mets, who fouled off 17 pitches against him Tuesday night and 18 on April 7. Perhaps those would have been swings-and-misses against hitters from a team that hadn’t seen him for a while.

Girardi said preparing for the next 13 games against the Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, and Colorado Rockies required him to do “more homework” because the Phillies haven’t seen those teams in so long. Surely the same thing applies to hitters who are preparing to face less-familiar pitchers.

“[The Mets] take a lot of pitches; they foul a lot of pitches off, too,” Nola said. “They make me battle. That’s what makes them good.”

It wouldn’t be so bad if Nola sees a few other teams for a while.