Outspoken Tommy Hunter defends Phillies’ bullpen, tells fans, “We want to win”
Critics snickered when Phillies general manager Matt Klentak described Tommy Hunter, when healthy, as one of the best setup men in baseball a couple of weeks ago.
Now, it will take a lot more than a couple of good outings for Hunter to make Klentak’s words look prescient, but credit where credit’s due – Hunter has come up big in the last two games, both Phillies’ win.
He pitched a scoreless inning late in Sunday night’s 5-4 win over Atlanta. Tuesday night, he came back and got four important outs in a two-run game before the Phillies pulled away late for an 8-3 win over the Washington Nationals.
The win left the Phillies at 11-14.
Manager Joe Girardi says Hunter’s success is simply the result of the veteran reliever building more arm strength and getting more pop and movement on his fastball-cutter mix.
Hunter has a more basic explanation.
“That’s baseball,” he said after Tuesday night’s win. “Same guy, just different results.”
The Phillies’ much-maligned bullpen has allowed just two runs in 7 2/3 innings in the last two games. Now, it took a dazzling, game-saving play by the trio of Roman Quinn, Didi Gregorius and Andrew Knapp to save new closer Brandon Workman from a blown save Sunday night, but the bottom-line results have been good.
But even with strong performances in the last two games, the Phillies bullpen is still the worst in the majors with a 7.37 ERA.
Hunter and his mates in the bullpen hear all the talk. They know how they’ve been ripped, criticized and blamed for the Phillies’ slow start.
“Yeah, it pisses you off,” Hunter said of the criticism.
But any self-respecting competitor will tell you: Criticism can be a great motivator.
It has been for Hunter.
“That’s the thing, man,” he said. “I come in every day like everyone else. We want to win the baseball game at the end of the day. There are no days that we come in that we want to work harder than what we’re giving. That’s the thing: We’re giving everything we have. Sorry it wasn’t good enough. But it’s not like we’re giving more now because we’ve been getting a little bit of heat. We’re the same guys showing up every day with the same mindset and the results are just working for us now.”
Hunter pointed to a key moment in Tuesday night’s game to illustrate the volatility of baseball and relief work in general.
He faced Asdrubal Cabrera with two outs and a man on base with the Phillies up two runs in the sixth.
Cabrera was 9 for 17 lifetime against Hunter.
“Pretty good against me?” Hunter, in mock horror, shot back at a reporter who pointed out Cabrera’s success against him.
Hunter struck out Cabrera for one of the biggest outs of the game.
“He was sitting on a two-seamer and I didn’t throw one,” Hunter said. “J.T. (Realmuto) caught it early, put down good fingers and we saw vulgar language from Asdrubal Cabrera because he swung at a pitch he thought was a different pitch.
“Baseball is so messed up. Every day. You have no idea what you’re going to do. That’s what makes baseball beautiful.
“That’s a bad matchup, right? It’s a bad matchup. And I struck him out. It’s amazing.
“You can put as many numbers as you want in there and what it boils down to is who basically wants it more and there is not a single person on this club that does not want to win a World Series. That’s our goal, that’s what we’re going to do and we’re going to try to do that until somebody tells us we can’t. That’s it.
“We want to win and that’s what our fans base needs to know. This team wants to win really bad and so do I. I have three runner-up rings sitting in a coat closet and I don’t like them. I want to win and so does everyone else.”
