I have some questions about the viability of a heavy bullpen strategy.
The first is very few teams have the depth to pull it off and I don't think the Phillies are one of them. My impression is their pen has been a mess without a whole lot of consistency and they've never been able to settle the back end for long, much less lock down the other roles. I'd question whether the Phillies are best served by adding to the number of bullpen players who determine the outcome of a given game.
Given the limitations of roster and the availability of quality arms, I also don't think its a particularly good idea to extend your bullpen unnecessarily. If you have a big lead and you have a starter who hasn't thrown many pitches and is cruising along, optimizing the season stress load on arms and lowering your exposure to weaker bullpen arms may well work out better than some kind of raw math score might suggest.
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I would actually love to see some data stratified by ERA+ or FIP or something that shows the differing performances between "very good" "good" "average" and "below average" pitchers third time through the order.
My guess is that all groups would decline somewhat, but that decline would be much more pronounced among the lower end groups than in the top end groups. I think there would be more examples of the lower groups going through the order a third time than is perhaps implied, because in my experience most clubs will run a starter out there until the pitch counts get right or the player gets himself into trouble.
I'd be interested to see if the blowouts from the bottom end pitchers distort the data in general. And then I'd be interested to see how much worse the top end pitchers are third time through the order and how much of that is skewed towards particularly bad innings. and then maybe think about whether the third time through the order with an opening day starter might still be a better play than your sixth inning receiver in a pretty bad pen. You don't want want to be pinch hitting Homer for Straw to take advantage of that lefty/righty matchup.
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Finally, Aaron Nola is a little young to have a book. he's not been up that long, he's had arm problems that he rehabbed rather than had surgery on, and he came up with developing secondary options. It's probably not a bad day to let him try and reach a little bit when his pitch counts are down and he has a big lead. While that's perhaps the reason they didn't pinch hit for him in the preceding half inning, I thought the hook was probably too early and as a result they turned the game over to a shaky pen that blew the game.
There is small sample size all around here though.
All data is local.
