With a healthy Zack Wheeler and Seranthony Domínguez, Phillies would be in better shape than in 2007

Are they pinned down or dodging bullets? With these Phillies, it all depends on the news cycle. Few teams in the majors have lost as much star power, and few teams in the majors have gained as much back. Are we mourning Rhys Hoskins or celebrating his return? Stay tuned tomorrow. Is Zack Wheeler the reason they can win it all or the reason they have no chance? A week ago it was the latter. On Wednesday, he was looking good in a bullpen session and getting ready to rejoin the roster.

What will tomorrow bring? Hopefully Seranthony Domínguez. If he is as healthy as he has looked in his last two outings, the Phillies will have one of the more electric relievers in this year’s postseason field. Six up, six down, two strikeouts, 100 on the gun in high-leverage innings against the Nationals and the Marlins. Then again, those were his first two outings in nearly a month.

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Here’s the way things usually work for a team’s odds at a championship. Count the number of times you say the word “if” and then multiply by that number. Here is the way things seem to be working for your 2022 Phillies: Everything that can go wrong will, and then everything that can go wrong from there won’t.

Is there another shoe to drop? I guess that depends on how many feet they have. One thing we can say for sure: Wheeler is the one absolute deal breaker of the bunch. His situation also happens to be the most tenuous.

When the Phillies placed him on the injured list on Aug. 25, they labeled his injury as “forearm tendinitis” and described it as a precautionary move that might only cost him a couple of starts. But one of the more time-tested rules of thumb in baseball is that forearms are just elbows by another name. And Wheeler is a pitcher who missed 2½ years due to Tommy John surgery early in his career and then took nearly another full year to get back to his old level of performance. I know which way the betting men would lean.

Even if Wheeler’s time off really was the result of an abundance of caution, the Phillies would be foolish not to continue to operate in that manner. Hard pitch counts. Obsessive monitoring. Let him squeeze his own toothpaste, but get someone else to do the brushing. That’s how important this guy is. Forget about what the game log says. The Phillies might only be 12-11 with Wheeler on the mound this season, but they will be lost in the playoffs without him.

The commissioner’s office found a very shrewd way to hedge against the watering down of the postseason when it added a third wild-card team. Sure, six teams will make the playoffs, but four of them will face an absolute gauntlet of a schedule. Surviving it will require both top-end talent and depth. Losing Wheeler would leave the Phillies with little of either.

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If everything breaks right, the Phillies will enter this postseason with a much better chance at contending than they did the last time they snapped a comparable playoff drought. Back in 2007, they waited until the last day of the regular season to clinch and then faced the Rockies in the first round with the following rotation: 23-year-old Cole Hamels, 22-year-old Kyle Kendrick, 44-year-old Jamie Moyer. Needless to say, there was no second time through.

This year, the Phillies would enter the postseason with two of the field’s top 10 starters, as determined by OPS+. Any team that has Wheeler or Aaron Nola on the mound at the start of a game has more than a puncher’s chance. But the Phillies are going to need all of both of them if they are going to make a run. With three road games in three days during the wild-card round and one day off before the start of the next round, Wheeler and Nola would not be available to pitch on normal rest until Games 2 and 3 against their divisional opponent. That’s assuming they start Games 1 and 2 of the wild-card series, which they will only be able to do on short rest if they do not pitch in Games 161 and 162 of the regular season.

These last few weeks are going to be a delicate balance. The Phillies need to clinch a playoff berth as soon as possible to maximize their chances of surviving the wild-card round. Yet they also need to take every precaution possible to ensure that Wheeler and Domínguez enter October at full strength.

At 80-62 with a 4½-game cushion, the Phillies entered Thursday in a position to do both. They had a 97% chance at making the postseason, according to Baseball-Reference.com. As The Inquirer’s Scott Lauber noted on Wednesday, the Phillies could go 11-11 the rest of the way and the Brewers would still need to go 15-6 to earn the sixth seed. The chickens have not hatched, but their beaks are out of the shell.

Zach Eflin is back. Hoskins’ hand is apparently only bruised. Nick Castellanos could return before the end of the month. The Phillies are on the verge of Matrix-ing their way through this season. But the two stud pitchers are what matter. Use your thoughts and prayers on both.

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