CLEARWATER, Fla. -- Aaron Nola smiled.
Of course he’s Italian, he said.
“Nola,” he emphasized.
Right, we know his last name is Italian. But where are his ancestors from?
“Nola,” Nola repeated. “Nola, Italy.”
Nola is a town in Italy’s Campania region, less than an hour east of Naples. His bloodline to the ancient town of roughly 35,000 people is why he is pitching next month for Team Italy in the World Baseball Classic.
“Guys in here, my teammates, say the WBC is awesome,” Nola said. “I want to experience that.”
Nola, 32, hopes it is the first step in what will be a big bounce-back season with the Phillies. It is his priority.
“Last year was a tough year,” he said.
Nola went 5-10 with a 6.01 ERA in 17 starts. It was the highest ERA by a Phillies pitcher (minimum 90 innings) since Nick Pivetta’s 6.02 ERA in 2017. Bad seasons happen. But Nola also missed months because of a sprained right ankle and a fractured rib, which he believes played a significant role in his poor performance.
“I feel stronger than I have in past offseasons, coming into Spring Training,” Nola said. “WBC or not, I was going to get ready earlier this year just because I threw about 100 innings last year. I finished the season healthy, so I was to go into the offseason normally and get rolling a little earlier, get the body going and the arm moving and throwing more. Just get a little more primed coming into Spring Training.”
Nola has thrown more regular-season innings (1,527) than anybody in the Majors since the beginning of the 2017 season.
It is fair to wonder if the workload has caught up to him.
“Yeah,” Nola said. “But then I look at [Clayton] Kershaw and [Max] Scherzer and them. I know they’re way above my level. They’re Hall of Famers. But those guys have thrown way more than me. That’s how it used to be -- log innings. It’s kind of ingrained in me. It’s how I came up. [Zack] Wheeler, too. It’s what we expect of ourselves: log innings, get to 200 innings, get to 200 strikeouts every year. It gets us conditioned for late in the season. We don’t want to be five-inning guys. We want to throw a lot of innings, go deep into games, help the bullpen out.”
But can he do it again? Nola’s four-seam fastball averaged 91.9 mph last year, which was its lowest mark since 2016 (90.9 mph), when he missed much of the season with a serious right elbow injury.
Nola’s lack of velocity decreased his margin for error.
He is trying to mitigate that. Nola long tossed again in the offseason. It is something he hadn’t done the past few winters as he recovered from long postseasons.
“It’s good for me,” Nola said. “I used to do it a lot. Like, obviously, I’m not going to jump up to 98 mph, but hopefully I’ll get the crispness back and get the arm a little bit quicker. It’s trying to get the ball down a little bit easier. I feel like my ‘down’ ball was a little more of a thigh ball. I kind of want to get back to that.”
In the past, folks have indirectly asked Nola if he might learn a new pitch. Maybe a sweeper, for example. Others have tried and succeeded, like Wheeler and Jesús Luzardo.
It hasn’t happened yet with Nola. It probably won’t.
“I can make my curveball into a sweeper,” Nola said. “I can make it go left a little bit more because of my arm angle. It just depends on if I use my thumb on it a little bit more. The more thumb I use, the more depth-y it gets. I’ve been grateful to stay healthy for a little while. The last thing I want to do is tinker with another pitch. I know it’s not a for-sure thing [that a pitcher will get hurt] throwing a new pitch. A lot of guys don’t. I just want to crisp up my pitches.”
It would be huge if Nola finds the crispness again and shows last year was a hiccup in an otherwise stellar career that ranks 18th in Phillies history in WAR (34.9), just ahead of Del Ennis (32.4) and Charlie Ferguson (31.7), and just behind Curt Schilling (36.3) and Dick Allen (35.4).
It would be huge because Nola is entering the third year of a seven-year, $172 million contract. The Phillies need those final five years (or most of them) to be good. There are enough questions already about other Phils starters, including Wheeler (returning from thoracic outlet decompression surgery), Luzardo (free agent after the season), Andrew Painter (an unproven prospect), Taijuan Walker (free agent after the season) and an overall lack of organizational starting pitching depth.
Nola becoming a 30-start, 200-inning guy again would ease a lot of minds.
He begins the road back next month with Italy. Nola originally signed up because it was an opportunity to play with his older brother, Austin. But Austin just got a job as Seattle’s bullpen coach. He is no longer playing.
“But I’m sticking with it,” Aaron said. “I want to play.”