If the Phillies had a wish list heading into the second half, shoring up the back end of the rotation would have been near the top.
Step one was getting Aaron Nola back to being a pitcher who can consistently give Philadelphia a chance to win each time he takes the ball.
That is exactly what he has done.
His latest start, Wednesday night at Citizens Bank Park, was another clear example of the pitcher he can still be, even with diminished velocity and a big breaking ball in the ABS era.
It was key in the Phillies’ 4-1 win over the Miami Marlins.
The pitch that will keep Nola afloat in this league is his knuckle curve. The biggest factor is whether he can get into enough favorable counts to use it when he needs it most.
With two strikes.
Against Miami, the longest-tenured Phillie faced 25 hitters and got into 17 two-strike counts, tying his highest tally of the season.
Being on the attack, pitching with confidence and not falling behind allowed Nola to play his game. He struck out eight batters, tied for his second-most this season behind the nine he had in his last start at the Field of Dreams.
He also completed seven innings for the first time since July 5 in Kansas City.
That kind of rhythm becomes easier to find when the Phillies give him something to work with.
In the bottom of the second, Philadelphia manufactured a run with the bases loaded when Garrett Stubbs legged out an infield single. An inning later, Luis Arraez drove out his second homer as a Phillie, a two-run shot that gave Nola a three-run cushion.
That was meaningful against Sandy Alcantara, a former Cy Young winner who has routinely pitched well against the Phillies.
From there, Nola settled in.
He completed five scoreless innings before Don Mattingly sent him back out for the sixth. Nola allowed a leadoff homer, which has become a recurring issue in most of his starts, then allowed two more batters to reach with one out.
The score was 3-1. The tying run was on base. Griffin Conine, one of the hotter bats in the Marlins’ lineup, was at the plate.
That is where Nola’s breaking ball took over.
He opened the at-bat with two changeups, evened the count at 1-1, then threw three straight knuckle curves. The last one got Conine swinging for a huge second out.
Heriberto Hernández followed, another power bat who has hurt the Phillies before. Nola took a similar path, starting him with the curveball and finishing him with it for another strikeout.
He bent, but he did not break.
That gave Mattingly enough confidence to send him back out for the seventh, a valuable development for a bullpen that has been leaned on heavily this month.
The Marlins whiffed on 63 percent of Nola’s knuckle curves Wednesday. In the 51 knuckle curves he threw against them across his first two starts versus Miami this season, they whiffed on 35.7 percent.
That is a major difference.
Nola has now faced the Marlins three times this season and allowed just two earned runs over 18 2/3 innings. His surrounding pitch mix has changed each time, and changing looks has been a key part of his recent success.
Miami is no easy assignment, either. The Marlins entered Wednesday as a top-seven offense in baseball by batting average.
The more starts Nola stacks together like this, the more confidence the Phillies can have in handing him the ball during another postseason run. That confidence is growing.
Over his last five starts, Nola has posted a 2.51 ERA across 28 2/3 innings with 34 strikeouts. He has averaged more than five innings per outing over that stretch and has looked much more like the stabilizing arm the Phillies need behind their top three starters.
Nola handed the ball to Jonathan Bowlan in the eighth, and the inning got tense quickly.
Bowlan put two on with one out, bringing the tying run to the plate. Then Brandon Marsh scaled the wall in foul territory to take away a potential problem for the second out.
Bowlan finished the inning by striking out Conine, then screamed toward the Phillies’ dugout as he walked off the mound.
For a team trying to line up the bridge to Jhoan Duran, that has been under the microscope lately, too.
Duran handled the ninth for his 28th save, locking down a win built on exactly what Philadelphia needed.
And how about this?
The Phillies are now 12 games over .500 — for the first time in this rollercoaster of a season. They now sit 4.5 games out of first place in the National League East.
What a wild ride.