Rise and Phight: 3/23/2021

On the night that Joe Girardi made his decision official about who would start for the Phillies on Opening Day, the one everyone knew already but hadn’t been said out loud, Aaron Nola went out and dominated the Yankees like it was a June night in Philadelphia.

Nola looked in midseason form, going 6 innings for the Phillies, nearing 90 pitches, and generally placing his stuff wherever he wanted to. In what turned out to be a pretty disappointing spring training for him numbers-wise, this showed us that he was clearly working on things this spring trying to get ready for the season. The toying with a cutter seemed to be the main thing since he was pretty vocal about it and what he was trying to do. Still, it was nice to see this kind of outing from Nola to set minds at ease for the season to come.

On to the links.

Phillies news:

• As stated before, Nola has been named the starter for Opening Day. Girardi also gave some good news about who might start the third game of the year.
• It looks like we can kind of pencil in who will be in the bullpen this year at this point.
• Some minor shuffling as the team made more cuts sending players to the minor league camp.
• All of these injuries that are mounting, large and small, are exposing the lack of pitching depth the team has.

MLB news:

• Who is ranked as the best player in the game? Well ESPN is counting down the top 100 and here, you get 51-100.
• You know what, while we’re at it, let’s rank all of the 30 starting rotations in the game this year.
• Doesn’t look like the Mets will be signing Michael Conforto to an extension any time soon, which means he’ll have a contract next week.
• Zac Gallen is hurting right now for the Diamondbacks and that isn’t a good thing.