Aaron Nola’s pitch-clock complaints (and contract distractions?) must end for Phillies to win

Aaron Nola should’ve signed the extension. The pitch clock’s in his head. The contract’s in his head. The umps are in his head. Apparently, there’s lots of room up there.

Nola wants top dollar, but half the time he pitches, he costs the Phillies their best chance to win, and that means he’s costing himself millions of dollars: 14 outings, seven stinkers. These games are big, and we’ve seen big-game Aaron Nola falter before. Last year, in his first postseason, he pitched worse as the games got bigger: 0-2 with a 9.68 ERA in his last three starts.

Nola is the best homegrown pitcher the Phillies have had since Cole Hamels, but he’s twice as sensitive.

Give him any excuse you like:

He’s an elite pitcher in his prime, suddenly afflicted by chronophobia. But it’s mid-June and his $244 million team doesn’t have time for excuses. More to the point, there’s no excuse for this kind of performance.

Nola is making $16 million this season. That’s about a half-million per outing. He has one job: Throwing a baseball for strikes once every fifth or sixth day. This week, the day happens to be Thursday. It’s getaway day in Arizona, against one of the best teams in baseball.

It is the very definition of his job: Pitch well against the best teams in the worst conditions. The Phillies had a .378 win percentage on the road before Wednesday night, the worst in the National League. For them, anywhere away from Citizens Bank Park qualifies as “the worst conditions.”

He has to throw the ball within 15 seconds if there’s no one on base, 20 seconds if he has runners. Simple. He might not like it, but everybody’s got rules at work that change. My boss told me I can’t rip Donald Trump anymore, and these days, I’m getting the shakes.

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Nola got dinged Saturday for trying to subvert the pitch clock, then complained that he got dinged for subverting the pitch clock, then admitted he was trying to subvert the pitch clock:

“Honestly, I wanted to throw the ball out to get an extra second.”

Zack Wheeler hates the pitch clock, too, and the Phillies slow-played his spring as well, but he’s been golden in nine of his 14 starts and dominant in three of his last four, including Tuesday in Phoenix.

I spoke with Nola on Sunday. He didn’t deny trying to circumvent the clock; he contended that the umpire wasn’t technically justified in his ruling. Well, umpires have latitude in this matter. They also have a mandate to move the game along by enforcing the letter of these rules. They have been relentless, but remarkably consistent ... unlike Aaron Nola.

Understand this: For the rest of the season, and probably the rest of his career, every umpire is going to be looking for a reason to punish Nola for circumventing the pitch clock.

We’ve been here before, where a flighty, stud pitcher gets so far into his own head he can’t see anything besides his numb skull.

Hamels complained about having a wet hand in his playoff start in 2007 … because he wore long sleeves on a hot day and he sweated too much on the mound. The sleeves, of course, were removable.

Hamels also in 2007 blamed a monthlong stint on the disabled list on the Phillies not allowing him enough access to his Active Release Techniques chiropractor. Now, Hamels using a chiropractor to align himself and stay healthy isn’t crazy, even if it was his elbow that hurt, not his back. Asserting that the team has to import the chiropractor of his choice? That’s the crazy part. Hamels had a driver’s license.

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Pitchers are all a little nuts. They’re like golfers. They spend years mastering a half-dozen kinetic sequences. They thrive when they can repeat these motions in the proper sequence, and they become wedded to routines. They resent disruptions. They have persecution complexes.

If you make Jordan Spieth or Bryson DeChambeau play at the pace of Brooks Koepka or Rory McIlroy, they’ll short-circuit like robots in a bathtub. And if you ask Aaron Nola to pitch at the same pace as, say, Max Scherzer, he’ll short-circuit, too.

He doesn’t have the luxury of short-circuiting. Neither does his team.

And neither does his bank account.