Here are three things that were true about the Philadelphia Phillies as of July 19, 2026, when I watched them play the Mets at Citizens Bank Park.

1. They desperately needed a fifth starter.
2. They already had a fifth starter.
3. The fifth starter was pitching.

The fifth starter the Phillies had was 28-year-old Alan Rangel, a righty who signed with the Atlanta Braves as an international free agent in 2014, a month and a half before his 17th birthday.

Until 2025, the only time Rangel had spent in the major leagues was in late September 2022, when the Braves bumped him up following an injury to Spencer Strider. He went back down to Triple-A after three days, having never pitched in a game.

It would take him three years to return to the majors.

In 2023, Rangel left the Braves and signed with the Angels. The Angels released him in the summer of 2024. At that point, he signed with the Phillies.

On June 6, 2025, almost eleven years after he was signed as a 16-year-old free agent, Rangel pitched in the major leagues for the first time. The next day, he went back to Triple-A. He moved up and down a couple more times that season, pitching here and there, doing okay. You know these guys: There’s often a little pack of them, righties and lefties, swapping back and forth between majors and minors to do relief work in a particular game and then vanish again, maybe for a few weeks. Somebody gets hurt; one of them comes back. Somebody comes off the IL; one of them disappears.

By the beginning of 2026, Alan Rangel was back in Triple-A. He came up in April for a short time, and then he went back down. At that point—the early stages of this season—the Phillies’ fifth starter was the highly touted 23-year-old rookie Andrew Painter, whom the team and the fans had been hovering over for a couple of years like they were waiting on the explosion of an unpopped kernel, if popcorn could make you wait an extra year or two because it needed Tommy John surgery.

It didn’t work out with Painter, not quite yet. He’s back in Triple-A himself after getting shelled a few times to the point where being sent down is both rehabilitative and merciful, a cozy shoebox for an ailing bird. But they still think Andrew Painter is coming. They still think—hope?—that pop is inevitable.

Until then, somebody had to be the fifth starter. Granted, you will hear fans push the idea of a four-man rotation, but they are wrong. The body of a major league pitcher already balances on a razor’s edge between well-oiled machine at peak performance and haunted junkyard full of abandoned refrigerator parts and bald tires. It is no small thing to suggest that Zack Wheeler, who is 36 years old, who is down a rib and up a grudge since last season, should pitch more often than he does now.

And so: Alan Rangel.

A quote often attributed to Lorne Michaels is that Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30. In very much the same way, Alan Rangel did not pitch in Sunday’s game against the Mets because the team was bullish about his odds against Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor. He pitched because the game was starting. He pitched because someone has to, and he’s got the jersey on. It’s the job.

He got knocked around for two innings, gave up five runs. One of the fans who sat behind me on a truly glorious day at the ballgame grumbled that Rangel sucked. Grumbled, “Get the hook.” Of course, you can’t just get the hook, because someone still has to pitch. Every time you wrap the hook around your pitcher and pull him off the field, you have to then turn that hook the other way and use the butt end to shove another guy out there. When baseball people talk about a pitcher “eating innings,” they do not mean savoring innings. They do not mean chowing down in delight, muttering “mmm, these innings are delicious, yum yum.” They mean eating innings like a person on Survivor who has to eat a plate of wriggling worms and show his empty open mouth speckled with worm remnants to Jeff Probst in order to be allowed to read a letter from his wife.

This is how baseball is. There is a ball, and there is a hill, and someone has to stand on the hill and throw the ball to the batter, or the game can’t happen. A team has only so many players who can do that. And so, even if a guy should give up five runs in the first two innings, which Alan Rangel did, they cannot just get the hook—not even if they want to, not even if he wants them to, not even if the only people in the entire stadium who do not wish his day could be over are the Mets.

Jesús Luzardo, who’s generally the Phillies’ third starter, had pitched Saturday. He did fine—only gave up one run. But he also went only five innings, meaning they used three different relievers. The Dodgers loom beginning on Monday. There were not seven innings of relief to be easily offered in order to “get the hook.” Someone had to continue to pitch, because down five runs at the end of two innings, there is still plenty of time for the offense to come to life. As it happens, it didn’t. But in other games this season, it has.

To keep that hope going, somebody’s got to keep throwing the ball, and if you are Alan Rangel, you have to go out there and try to finish a couple more innings without making it worse, without making it even harder for the offense to come back. And, for the record, he did that. He pitched two more innings without giving up another run. Yum, yum!

Baseball is a very particular sport in this way, and pitching is a very particular position. You may be able to hide a position player in your lineup who is not as good as you wish he were, and absent errors, all he’s going to do is quietly produce nothing. It happens all the time. And it often attracts very little attention, at least not in a single game.

But a pitcher in Alan Rangel’s spot has to walk to the mound with every eye on him and be in charge of trying to get Juan Soto out. Has to hope that on the 11th pitch of Bo Bichette’s at-bat, after six foul balls, Bichette will strike out, which he didn’t, instead of drawing a walk, which he did. Has to hope that if Luis Torrens rips a ball down the third base line, as happened in the second inning, it is foul by a couple of inches, which it wasn’t, instead of fair by a couple of inches, which it was.

Alan Rangel has likely made countless choices over his life in baseball, including during the ten-plus years he spent in the minors. But the choices that made him the fifth starter were mostly not his. He wasn’t in charge of all the pitchers the Phillies did or didn’t draft, did or didn’t develop, did or didn’t shell out the money for. He didn’t control how things went for Andrew Painter in 2026.

He didn’t decide to pitch on Sunday, either. The Phillies shuffled the rotation a little coming out of the All-Star break, presumably to give their two best starters, Wheeler and Cristopher Sánchez, more rest before they face the Dodgers this week. In fact, in the two games the Phillies lost against the Mets, their four and five starters, Rangel and Aaron Nola, faced what are probably the Mets’ one and two starters at the moment, Nolan McLean and Christian Scott. It was set up this way, and … it went this way.

In the history of any baseball team that is celebrated as great, you will find at least one pitcher who, like Alan Rangel, goes out and takes the ball because somebody has to pitch. And he, a pitcher so exceptional and so hard-working that he made it all the way to the major leagues in the company of a minuscule sliver of all the men who pitch baseballs, will do his best. He will do it knowing that all the headlines say the team desperately needs a fifth starter, and he is the fifth starter. He will know what they mean: They mean the team desperately needs a different fifth starter.

Today, July 20, the Phillies sent Alan Rangel back to Triple-A.

The fifth starter is a position of duty at least as much as it is one of glory. Maybe you will be good; maybe not. But you will walk up the hill with the ball in your hand, and you will throw it, and otherwise, there would be no game—good or bad, win or lose. There is no Zack Wheeler without Alan Rangel; there is no team at all.