Keeping their starting pitchers healthy is key to a World Series run. Here’s how the Phillies plan to do it.

The trade deadline passed Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning, the Phillies unveiled a jersey patch sponsored by Independence Blue Cross.

Coincidence? Of course.

Apropos? You bet.

Because now that trades are no longer permitted, the best way for a World Series contender to insure its 40-man roster over these next two months is to do whatever possible, from a training and strategy standpoint, to maximize health, especially within the pitching ranks.

» READ MORE: The Phillies have a ‘complete’ roster after the trade deadline. Is it enough to win the World Series?

“It legitimately is everything,” Phillies pitching coach Caleb Cotham said this week. “Because the only way it works is we need our guys to be out there doing what they’re capable of doing. We need them to be healthy.”

OK, before you say “no duh,” consider this: Over the last two years, the Dodgers and Braves were baseball’s winningest regular-season teams, with 211 and 205 victories, respectively. But the Braves chalked up all of two postseason wins, one more than the Dodgers.

In both cases, injuries caused them to run out of starting pitching.

On the flip side, no team was better at keeping its starters running than the Phillies, and the difference was all the difference. Despite winning a total of only 177 games in the last two regular seasons, they led baseball with 19 playoff wins, with Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, and Ranger Suárez ranking first, second, and eighth in postseason innings.

“The thing nobody talks about,” an executive from a National League team said, “is how their starters haven’t gotten hurt.”

Not seriously, anyway. Wheeler missed a few starts down the stretch in 2022 with forearm inflammation. Last season, Suárez came down with a sore elbow while training for the World Baseball Classic and a strained hamstring later in the season. He’s sidelined now by a sore lower back but may be ready to return next week.

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Cotham said the Phillies “don’t have a fancy equation” for sidestepping long-term pitcher injuries, and if they did, nobody would expect them to share it. Like most things, it’s multifactorial.

The Phillies overhauled the athletic training department before the 2020 season (under the Andy MacPhail/Matt Klentak regime), and the staff was honored in 2022 by the Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Society. Pitchers swear by head trainer Paul Buchheit, with Wheeler saying he “knows my body probably better than I do.”

In 2022, the Phillies changed their strength and conditioning personnel. They hired Cotham in 2021. A year later, they created a role for Brian Kaplan, cofounder of a highly regarded training facility in Florida. As director of pitching, he helps the Phillies integrate training processes with performance in the majors and minors.

Put another way, Kaplan puts heads together with his own to help keep pitchers on the mound.

“I thought about that [in 2022] during our run, like we haven’t had a lot of soft-tissue injuries like [hamstrings] or whatever it may be,” Wheeler said. “Even just fatigue from the pitchers, you don’t see that a lot with us. I think that speaks volumes to how they handle us and how they treat us and how they prep us.

“You have to give credit to them. We’re staying on the field. And that’s what winning teams do, stay on the field.”

» READ MORE: The Phillies have gotten good at avoiding pitcher injuries. With a lack of depth, it remains key to their success in 2024.

Can they do it again? Because even amid the Phillies’ first profound struggle — a 4-11 slide entering the weekend series in Seattle — they still were on a 97-win pace. FanGraphs put their odds of making the playoffs at 99.2% and winning the division at 81.2%.

Nothing will be more important, then, than keeping the rotation — Wheeler, Nola, Suárez, and Cristopher Sánchez — on the mound and trending in the right direction. Sánchez has already eclipsed his previous high for innings in a major-league season with 120⅔; Suárez is 36 innings shy of his career-high of 155⅓ in 2022.

In a conversation with The Inquirer this week, Cotham shared a few thoughts on how the Phillies might navigate the next two months and brace their starters for another deep postseason run.

Last August, the Phillies used six starters for multiple turns through the rotation, enabling them to manage each pitcher’s workload without skipping starts.

The plan is to go back to that arrangement again this month.

“We talk about double vision, like what do I do today with also the eye on where do I want to be at the end,” Cotham said. “A lot of the guys are creatures of habit. They don’t love [extra rest]. But it’s finding a routine where we can be intelligent inside those things, and it buys a start or two that we know we’ll need later. It’s like, ‘I want to go on turn, but I know where we’re going, so I’m willing to do this.’”

» READ MORE: Why the Phillies added one lefty at the trade deadline and subtracted another

A 10-game, 10-day road trip to three West Coast cities feels like a good time for a No. 6 starter. But as manager Rob Thomson wondered aloud recently, “Who is it?” The Phillies have already called up Tyler Phillips and Kolby Allard from triple A. Depth starter Spencer Turnbull, sidelined by a strained muscle behind his right shoulder, might come back in September but likely as a reliever.

In a week or two, Taijuan Walker might be back in the rotation. The Phillies have slow-played the veteran righty’s return from a blister on his right index finger to give him time to regain a feel for his signature splitter and take advantage of a weighted-ball program to add velocity back to his fastball.

Walker, owed $36 million over the next two seasons, threw 41 pitches in 2⅔ innings Wednesday night at double-A Reading, and, well, the reviews weren’t good. His heater scraped 93 mph once but was mostly in the 90-92 range, and he allowed hard contact on his splitter.

The Phillies expect Walker to start again Tuesday night at triple-A Lehigh Valley. They haven’t decided whether he will get another minor-league start or rejoin the rotation.

If nothing else, they hope Walker — a 15-game winner last year — can be a back-of-the-rotation innings-eater through at least the middle of September.

“He’s capable of doing a lot more than eating innings,” Cotham said. “I think he would say that. Because when he’s right and he’s doing what he’s capable of, guys play behind him, and we go. He wins games.”

» READ MORE: South Jersey’s Tyler Phillips and his family are living a Phillies dream. And his dad hopes he never wakes up.

Unlike the last three seasons, when the Phillies traded for a starter at the deadline (Kyle Gibson in 2021, Noah Syndergaard in 2022, and Michael Lorenzen last year), they didn’t prioritize rotation help this time around. One reason: Phillips, a South Jersey native living out a dream, gave the rotation a boost with a 1.80 ERA through three starts, including a four-hit shutout on July 27.

But the market didn’t favor buyers. Prices were high, and supply was low. Neither Tigers ace Tarik Skubal nor difference-making White Sox lefty Garrett Crochet was dealt. The Astros gave up three prospects for Yusei Kikuchi (4.75 ERA with the Blue Jays). The Braves didn’t land a starter, even though Spencer Strider isn’t coming back this season after Tommy John surgery, Max Fried is dealing with a forearm injury, Reynaldo López recently had an elbow scare, and Chris Sale and Charlie Morton are 35 and 40 years old.

The best starter who moved: Jack Flaherty to the Dodgers, who have Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Walker Buehler on the injured list and their fingers crossed that Tyler Glasnow and Clayton Kershaw can stay off.

» READ MORE: Building the Perfect Phillies Pitcher: The signature pitch from each starter, and what makes it special

“We’re comfortable where we are, and I think part of that has to do with Phillips has thrown the ball well for us,” president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski said. “I think we’re at a point where we can hold the fort for the time period until [Suárez and Walker] come back.”

At which point, the six-man rotation likely will be in effect, at least for a few turns.

“It’s worked for the most part,” Cotham said. “They’ve been fresh. But also I think if we do go to a six-man, it’s being intelligent with not giving them too much rest. It’s balancing the freshness with routine because super-fresh, out-of-routine, you’re rusty almost.”

In spring training, Suárez plainly stated one of his 2024 objectives.

“Two hundred innings is a good goal,” the lefty said.

For a while, it looked doable. Through 15 starts, or roughly half a season, Suárez worked 92⅓ innings — and posted a 1.75 ERA. But he struggled in three starts before the All-Star break, felt tightness in his lower back, and got 10 days off before starting July 22 in Minnesota.

When another area of his back flared, he went on the injured list.

» READ MORE: From teen prospect in rural Venezuela to All-Star: How Ranger Suárez became ‘that guy’ with the Phillies

Team officials insist they aren’t worried. If there was concern that Suárez would miss significant time, Dombrowski would’ve been more aggressive about getting a starter at the deadline. Instead, Cotham actually believes a few weeks off now might benefit Suárez later.

“He’s pitched through some things, and it just got to the point where we want to get this right, especially if it trends a little worse or starts moving around to different spots,” Cotham said. “You could call it a blessing in disguise, maybe just a blessing, that we can have a chance to just take a breath. We can work through things.

“Maybe we can talk a little bit more about what he wants to do more of, less of, some planning stuff, while he’s getting healthy. Because it’s tough to do a bunch of things in practice and prepare when you’re playing for a tie in a sense to make your next start.

“I think it’s going to be a good thing long-term.”

Maybe. And Cotham said workload monitoring is “a little more top of mind” for Suárez and Sánchez than for Wheeler and Nola, who have topped 200 innings in a season and developed a routine for pushing through the midsummer grind with an eye on the postseason.

But Cotham said the Phillies will stay on top of everything possible.

“Are we sleeping well enough? Are we doing everything we need to do from a recovery standpoint?” he said. “And then, we start talking volume. Maybe a de-load bullpen [session] makes sense. It’s maybe pulling back on conditioning. Or pressing the gas. It’s individual, for sure, and we have a really good team helping us make those decisions.”

Few teams are better at it than the Phillies. And nothing is more important now.

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