Major League Baseball

Phillies ace Zack Wheeler has quietly become one of MLB's best pitchers

Updated Jun. 18, 2021 6:28 p.m. ET

By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer

It wasn’t that long ago that one of baseball’s best pitchers couldn’t crack his team’s Opening Day roster.

In the final week of March 2018, as the New York Mets prepared to travel north from Florida to begin play, they told 27-year-old Zack Wheeler that he had pitched himself off the roster. He instead traveled to Triple-A Las Vegas to start his season.

He started one game, before 7,000 fans, at a ballpark that has since been repurposed into a second-division soccer stadium. Wheeler was back up by the following week after a successful implementation of a delivery change that pitching coach Dave Eiland had tried to introduce during spring training.

Since that sojourn, Wheeler owns a 3.29 ERA in 85 starts, including six shutout innings against the mighty Dodgers on Wednesday.

Only five men have logged more innings than the 545 the Philadelphia Phillies' current ace has recorded in that span: Gerrit Cole, Zack Greinke, teammate Aaron Nola, Jacob deGrom and Trevor Bauer. Wheeler has been both durable and excellent. It took nine years from the time he was selected sixth overall in the 2009 draft, but the late bloomer has finally fulfilled expectations, if not exceeded them.

Wheeler entered another tier of excellence in the second half of 2019. Since then, he owns a 2.59 ERA in 37 starts, and he has lasted an average of nearly 6 2/3 innings per start. In 2021, he has lasted even longer and prevented runs even better, with an ERA of 2.15 and nearly seven innings per start. He has been the Phillies’ top performer by far, keeping them afloat when they might otherwise have already sunk.

For more up-to-date news on all things MLB, click here to register for alerts on the FOX Sports app!

Over this past approximately 175-game stretch, Wheeler has been arguably the second-best pitcher in all of baseball. The only one clearly better is his old rotation mate, deGrom.

"Besides deGrom and maybe Cole, I’m not sure who else you’d rather have right now," one National League evaluator said. "He has the velocity, he has the secondaries, and now he can command them."

How did Wheeler finally find his form as he neared age 28? According to Eiland, he was so talented that he pitched around some clear flaws for the first decade of his pro career.

When the Giants drafted him sixth overall in 2009 from a high school an hour outside Atlanta, scouts adored him. San Francisco saw effortless velocity out of a promising frame. Wheeler filled out and continued throwing hard, if wildly. But teams were not always willing to wait on him to develop command. Wheeler was the Mets’ prospect return when the Giants traded for Carlos Beltran in 2011, and he was nearly the Brewers’ return when the Mets traded for Carlos Gómez in 2015.

He used to bring his arm all the way behind his back during his delivery. That meant the arm often dragged behind him, trailing his lower body’s movement. That meant he could not consistently deliver pitches from the same release point. Once he shortened his arm path, Eiland said, he was a different, more controlled pitcher.

"It was a little bit long and a little bit lazy, but you could tell it was in there," Eiland said. "Everybody probably just kept waiting for it and waiting for it and waiting for it. He pitched well from time to time, but once he got that delivery cleaned up, then he became a lot more consistent, obviously, and now you see what he’s doing – what he’s done the last three years, actually."

Once Wheeler was that different pitcher, he could learn all the other things he had lacked. He started to understand how to best sequence his pitches against the opposition. He focused better. "He would admit sometimes," Eiland said, "he would just lose focus for two or three pitches at a time throughout a game."

Eiland compared him to Kansas City’s Danny Duffy, another pitcher he coached who made approximately 100 major-league starts before he reached his peak form. But the Royals stuck with Duffy, and he repaid them. The Mets gave up on Wheeler when he reached free agency, ignoring his calls when he informed them of the Phillies’ five-year, $118 million offer.

"The projections we had for Zack – both short-term and long-term – didn't quite match up to the market he was able to enjoy," since-fired Mets GM Brodie Van Wagenen later said.

Wheeler reportedly had an even better offer on the table from the Chicago White Sox. And, if anything, it looks like the Phillies are underpaying him. Wheeler is the rare free agent who had not yet peaked by the time he reached the open market, because of Tommy John surgery and related injuries and because of the problems with his delivery.

"He’s just starting to reach his potential," Phillies manager Joe Girardi said the day the team announced the Wheeler signing, and he was correct.

"I think I still have a lot of room for improvement," Wheeler said at his introductory media conference a week later, and he, too, proved correct.

Wheeler just turned 31, and nothing about his performance indicates that his 2021 is a fluke. He has been good for a while now, and this year, he has struck out 118 and walked only 22. Based on his most recent results, the impending foreign-substance enforcement does not appear to threaten him.

From one perspective, it’s not complicated: Wheeler is among the sport’s hardest throwers, and he combines top velocity with a slider, a cutter, a curveball, a two-seamer and command of most of them most nights. Why wouldn’t he be successful? This is what scouts saw a dozen years ago.

"The talent, it was all in there," Eiland said. "We just had to do some things to get it to come out consistently."

Those things started at the end of 2018 spring training. Wheeler’s improvement hasn’t stopped since, and this season he has benefited from new pitching coach Caleb Cotham’s data-driven teachings. Cotham is a half-century younger than Wheeler’s last pitching coach with the Mets, Phil Regan. In fact, Cotham and Wheeler were part of the same 2009 draft class. He’s adept with the modern teaching tools Wheeler said he hoped to learn from when he signed.

However it has happened, Wheeler has added a half-tick of velocity to his fastball this year. That’s one more way he’s like deGrom.

"When you’ve got a guy throwing 100 mph who can command the fastball like that," the Dodgers’ Steven Souza Jr. said after facing Wheeler on Wednesday, "it’s gonna be tough, anytime, especially with late movement."

For more up-to-date news on all things Phillies, click here to register for alerts on the FOX Sports app!

The wild thing was, Wheeler said he was operating with less than his peak stuff. "These types of days," he said, "you just have to go out there and try to do the best you can."

These days, that has been more than enough for him.

Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He most recently covered the Dodgers for three seasons for The Athletic. Previously, he spent five years covering the Angels and Dodgers for the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times. More previously, he covered his alma mater, USC, for ESPNLosAngeles.com. The son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in the Southern California suburbs. Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.