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2021 report card: Seranthony Dominguez

How does one write a report card about one inning?

MLB: Spring Training-Philadelphia Phillies at Toronto Blue Jays John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports

How does one report on a player that threw one inning of consequence for the big league roster?

2021 stats

1 IP, 0.00 WHIP, 33.3 K%, 0.0 BB%, 0.0 HR/9, 0.00 ERA (1.17 FIP), 0.0 fWAR

The good

He made it back to the major league mound. That’s about as good as it gets for Dominguez.

The bad

It’s hard to really say anything bad about Dominguez when it comes to his getting back to Philadelphia this season.

Was his control in the minors bad? Sure, 12 walks in 20 13 innings ain’t great shakes.

Was he giving up a lot of gopher balls? Well five allowed in those same 20 13 innings isn’t exactly confidence inducing.

Should we have a little bit of concern that his velocity wasn’t where it was? 97.3 in 2019, 95.1 in his lone outing isn’t great.

Should he have gotten the Tommy John surgery sooner? Maybe, but that’s a personal medical condition. Plus, during the Covid quarantine, elective surgeries were hard to get.

But folks - he hadn’t pitched in the major leagues in over two years. Give the guy a little bit of a break. Anyone thinking he’d come in and dominate again after being off that long needs to recalibrate their internal baseball watching clock.

The future

Dominguez is up for arbitration and shouldn’t see too much of a raise, so he’ll definitely be back next season. If you’re worried about how he wasn’t that good in his rehab, let’s look at some of his outings.

Here are some videos in chronological order this year.

You can see the stuff getting crisper and crisper as he moved through his rehab games. It was a matter of time before the stuff finally showed since it’s always been there, so perhaps it does take a month or more to get back to where you want to be after not pitching for almost two years.

Final grade: Incomplete

Dominguez figures to be a big piece of the team’s bullpen plans in 2022. But we can’t really use what he did in 2021 with the Phillies as any indication other than it’s good to see him back on the mound.