The Bittersweet Journey of the Phillies’ Playoff Pitching Star---WSJ on Aaron Nola

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PHILADELPHIA—Aaron Nola made his debut with the Philadelphia Phillies in 2015 with the hope that he was the successor to Cole Hamels as the team’s next pitching ace. But his performance over nine seasons in the major leagues was often maddeningly inconsistent—when what the Phillies needed more than anything was an anchor of stability.

This October, Nola, 30, is finally giving Phillies fans a glimpse at the guy they were hoping for all along. He has allowed just two runs over 18? innings in three playoff starts this year, including a six-inning shutout against the Diamondbacks in the National League Championship Series on Tuesday that gave the Phillies a 2-0 series lead.

Nola has watched as his teammates have slugged eight home runs in games when he has been the pitcher of record in these three starts. The Phillies are on the road back to the World Series on the power of their bruising power lineup, but the man providing a quiet pillar of stability amid the chaos was once their only beacon of optimism.

“I’m definitely grateful to have come up in a rebuild,” Nola said after his outing against the Diamondbacks. “To be a starter in the game now…I look at the guys getting sent up and down from the minors and sent to the bullpen and making starts behind a reliever. I’m just so glad I didn’t go through that and that I got to experience success and failure early. Young starting pitchers need to be in a rotation and they need to be succeeding and struggling at the same time.”

That dichotomy—succeeding and struggling—has defined Nola’s tenure with the Phillies. It has made him a complicated figure in Philadelphia, where his successes raised the hopes of fans and the failures felt personal.

Nola began his career with a rebuilding Phillies team at a time when the stands weren’t as packed, and certainly nowhere near as happy. His strongest memory of his early days with the team wasn’t his debut, but the second game he pitched.

He was tabbed to follow Hamels in the rotation—the night after Hamels threw a no-hitter against the Cubs at Wrigley Field. He pitched into the eighth inning that night, a young starter with all of the anxieties of not wanting to be the team’s letdown after Hamels’s no-hitter.

“It’s definitely different now than it was in 2015,” Nola said Tuesday night. “The knees shake a little bit when you’re young.”

These might be Nola’s final days with the Phillies, however. His contract expires at the conclusion of the World Series and the Phillies have shown significantly less interest in retaining Nola than when they did when they signed him to a four-year extension ahead of the 2019 season, with a club option for 2023.

Even as he puts on a powerful playoff showing, Phillies fans—undoubtedly the loudest characters of this year’s MLB playoffs—have seemed to grow weary of Nola. He ended this year with a 4.46 ERA. He’s lost the title of the team’s front-line ace since the Phillies signed late blooming phenom Zack Wheeler after the 2019 season

“I love it here, obviously it’s the only place I’ve been,” Nola said prior to his Game 2 start. “I came up through some special times in the rebuilding era. To be on a team like I am now, it’s really cool and special to see and to be a part of all the success and failure to get to where we are now.”

Late this season, as fans showered struggling free agent acquisition Trea Turner with cheers, they rained boos on Nola. There’s a lot of glory in being the hero who chose to sign as a free agent and propelled the team to great new heights; Nola is surrounded by them on this Phillies team in Wheeler, Turner, Bryce Harper, Nick Castellanos, and Kyle Schwarber.

Yet the cheers returned as Nola strolled to the bullpen in Philadelphia to warm up before his start against the Diamondbacks on Tuesday. The adrenaline was there, but the early-career nerves weren’t. He shut down his inexperienced opponents with, mostly, his four-seam fastball and knuckle curve. Nola’s teammates spared him more work by blasting four runs in the bottom of the sixth inning, which removed the opportunity for a well-deserved ovation for the longest-tenured Phillie.

Nola’s postseason success, if it continues into October, could be a bittersweet coda to a complicated tenure. Phillies fans waited a long time to see Nola thrive on the game’s biggest stage. Now, he’s hardly the centerpiece at all—yet he is shutting down lineups in the way Phillies fans had forgotten was, in the early days of his career, their only possible dream.

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