Aaron Nola uses a skin disorder and common sense to become a Tom Brady-like iron man for the Phillies

Aaron Nola might be the only pitcher in history who’ll give up a leadoff double and have his blood pressure go down.

“I’ve had a lot of practice with that over the years,” he said, chuckling. Hits happen. Shrug. Stretch. Next pitch.

And the next. And the next.

Nola’s got a nasty knuckle curve, three different fastballs that bite, and a signature changeup, but this is Nola’s superpower: the next pitch. The next start. The next season.

Since he settled on a workout routine before the start of the 2018 season and started watching his diet, no pitcher has logged as many as his 1,039 innings. He keeps trading the lead with the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole, but the guy in third place, Phillies ace Zack Wheeler, is more than 60 innings behind.

In that span, barring the truncated COVID-19 season of 2020, Nola has averaged almost exactly 200 innings per season. There have been only 40 200-inning seasons in that span, and Nola has hit the 200-inning mark three times. With 167⅓ innings entering September, he’s headed for a fourth. Again, only Cole matches his dependability.

“I want to take the ball every time,” Nola told me Sunday evening after his seven shutout innings, the best start of his rocky walk year: 95 pitches, two base runners, and an active heart rate that registered somewhere between “Snail” and “Sloth.”

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How?

Nola, a devout Christian, pitches with a rosary in his pocket. His faith, he said, keeps him from sweating the small stuff.

“Even if the season goes up and down, like this year,” he explained, “you go out, you pitch, you never know what can happen. No matter what day it is. No matter what team you’re facing. That’s how my mindset has always been.”

Nola also has psoriasis, a skin condition that can be triggered by foods that promote inflammation. That’s why, for the past few years, Nola has eaten like the G.O.A.T., loosely mimicking the “TB12″ diet that helped Tom Brady stay productive in the NFL until he was 45.

Nola is in the final year of modest, four-year, $45 million contract, but he declined an extension this spring and so he will become a free agent this fall. Unlike Cole, Justin Verlander, or Max Scherzer, Nola has never dominated hitters for any extended length of time, so he probably won’t see their $35 million-$45 million salaries.

However, a strong postseason run last year helped his value, and nothing has made him more attractive than the fact that, like greenhead flies on a Brigantine beach, he always shows up. As many of his contemporaries drop like, well, flies, Nola hasn’t missed a start due to injury in almost six years.

How does he do it?

He listens to his body, talks to his God; he eats smart, and he doesn’t overthink the pitching stuff.

Nola’s first pitches Sunday afternoon missed, missed, and missed again. His first two pitches, four-seam fastballs, drifted outside to lefty hitter Tommy Edman. His third drifted into the center of the plate, and Edman crushed it to right field for a double. Miss, miss, miss.

“I was on the side of it. I wasn’t getting through it,” Nola explained. He didn’t want to walk the leadoff batter so, he aimed another fastball and served Edman a cookie. Edman crushed it. Miss, miss, miss.

Nola didn’t miss again for the next hour.

“After that I just made sure to stay through the baseball,” Nola said. Why didn’t he panic?

Nola struck out No. 2 hitter Alec Burleson on three straight knuckle curves. Paul Goldschmidt, the reigning National League MVP, rolled an 0-1 knuckle curve to shortstop Trea Turner, who backhanded it and threw behind Edman and nailed him at second. Four pitches later, the knuckle curve ended the at-bat of eight-time All-Star Nolan Arenado.

In fact, after Edman’s double, Nola retired 12 in a row. His four-seamer drifted again during a one-out, six-pitch walk of Nolan Gorman in the fifth, but Nola grinded through the last two outs of the inning to start a run of eight outs in a row. After Edman, he set down 21 of 22. He needed just nine pitches for a perfect seventh, Goldschmidt-Arenado-Willson Contreras. He posted nine strikeouts to tie Curt Schilling for fifth on the franchise’s strikeout list, at 1,154, but Nola needed 264⅓ fewer innings to do it.

Through 2017, Nola was a slave to a rigorous routine between starts, but he suffered minor injuries in 2016 and 2017. He changed his pitching motion before the 2017 season, but, when Jake Arrieta arrived in 2018, Nola also changed his outlook on fitness. He believes that combination has kept him healthy since.

“There’d be times I didn’t want to go in the weight room, or feel like running. But I’d do it,” Nola said. “I’ve come to figure out, for my body, that doesn’t work. I want to enjoy it. If I don’t enjoy it, it becomes something I have to do, and that could be detrimental to me.”

It’s not often a player admits to anything but regimented exertions, but Nola’s a different cat. He advises younger starters to be themselves, too.

“Starters have got to figure out a routine that works for them, understand what feels good,” Nola said. “We travel all the time. Different beds. Hotels. Me? My body feels good right now.”

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Nola has found what works for him.

Game day: Warmup before, arm care afterward.

Day 1: Bike or run hard. “I like to sweat a lot the day after. It takes the soreness out two days after; two days after my start day I’m not sore at all.”

Day 2: Bullpen session, lift (upper body), run sprints.

Day 3: Totally off. “I’ll stretch, do the hot and cold tub. I’ve done that the past couple of years.”

Day 4: Run sprints, throw off flat ground.

He’ll occasionally set up a massage or cupping session, and he lifts harder before the All-Star break than after, but that’s pretty much it.

That, and the itching.

Nola actually adds salt to most foods — “I sweat more than the regular human being, as you can see,” he said, wearing a soaked T-shirt — but he loves the healthy options the Phillies’ kitchen instituted around 2018, the beginning of the brief Gabe Kapler era. Those options keep him cool on the mound.

Psoriasis is a chronic, incurable skin condition that presents in itchy rashes. Nola controls it, to a degree, by avoiding foods that have caused him to break out, suffer from congestion, and suffer from joint pain.

“I definitely try to eat healthy,” Nola said. “That’s big for me. Psoriasis obviously stinks, but it’s helped me understand what foods are bad for me.”

He goes by touch and ... fatigue?

“I’ve learned which foods make me tired,” Nola said. “Certain foods make me flare up. Make me stuffy. Yeasty stuff. Bread. Rice. Chips. I don’t really eat sweets much. Don’t really eat pizza.”

It’s not as if Nola’s eating cauliflower crusts and avocado ice cream, but he does his best.

“The more I stay away from that stuff the easier it is,” he said, his smile just a little bit guilty. “But the more I smell it, the more I want it.”

We feel you.