Aaron Nola, a Phillie since 2015, relishes his journey with the team — and a new role as mentor

CLEARWATER, Fla. — It took seven years for David Buchanan to make it back to the Phillies, an odyssey that included stops in Japan and South Korea. He was gone for so long that everything, even the name of the spring-training ballpark, is different now.

Well, everything except the occupant of the locker near the far door.

“Aaron [Nola’s] still sitting right there,” Buchanan said Tuesday, “with the same number, doing the same thing. Just even better.”

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Indeed, Nola was there in 2015, alongside Buchanan in the starting rotation for the last two months of a 99-loss Phillies season. And after the 2016 season, when Buchanan got released. And in 2019, when the Phillies signed Bryce Harper; and 2022, when they finally returned to the playoffs.

Save for 17 days in November when he was a free agent, Nola hasn’t left.

And now, having signed a $172 million contract that could keep the 30-year-old righty with the team through 2030, he will be the pitching bridge that eventually links the end of Cole Hamels’ Phillies years with the start of the Andrew Painter era.

Let that sink in for a moment.

“It’s really cool,” Nola said. “I’m blessed, man. I really am. I feel like not many guys get to go through a rebuilding phase and then be [part of] a championship-caliber team with the same organization. I think the only ones who are able to do that are the ones who stay on one team for their entire career. I definitely don’t take that for granted.”

When the Phillies drafted Nola out of LSU in the first round in 2014, they believed he could move quickly through the minors. But they didn’t invite him to major-league camp in 2015. Instead, with rain in the forecast for a spring-training game against the Yankees, they called him up to pitch three innings against a lineup that included Alex Rodríguez, Carlos Beltrán, and Mark Teixeira.

“I think I was so nervous I didn’t really talk to hardly anybody,” Nola said, laughing. “Never been in the big-league clubhouse before. And it’s the Yankees, you know? A-Rod and all those guys, I watched them growing up, winning all those championships. To be a 21-year-old kid pitching in spring training against them, it was just a different ballgame.”

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By the middle of July, Nola was in the majors for real. At Citizens Bank Park, the Phillies assigned him a locker two stalls down from Hamels and in a row with veterans Chad Billingsley and Aaron Harang. After Hamels spun a no-hitter at Wrigley Field on July 25, he stood in the middle of the clubhouse and asked who was pitching the next day.

Nola sheepishly raised his hand.

It was Nola’s second big-league start — and Hamels’ last start for the Phillies. The 2008 World Series MVP got dealt to the Rangers at the trade deadline, the unofficial beginning of a painful rebuilding project.

“I wish I had more time that I was on the team with him,” Nola said. “But I watched his career a lot, and I watched him after he left Philly a lot. I got to face him when he was with the Cubs. That was pretty cool.”

Nola took the baton from Hamels as the homegrown staple atop the Phillies’ rotation. And he has an opportunity to mentor Painter, fellow prospect Mick Abel, and other young pitchers in a way that he once thought Hamels might for him.

It isn’t a responsibility that he takes lightly.

“I want to be as accessible and approachable as possible because I’ve been in their shoes,” Nola said. “I think that’s very important. They’re going to struggle and they’re going to have a lot of success, and they need the guidance just like I had. I’m always available for that.”

Said Buchanan, who signed a minor-league contact last week: “He was the first person that I called when I was coming back, and he was more than happy to talk to me. Signing the contract that he signed, you would never know that it’s the case. He’s very kind and gentle, soft-spoken. He hasn’t changed in that regard, which is really cool to see.”

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Nola has started every opening day since 2018. And whether or not he gets the ball from manager Rob Thomson on March 28 against the Braves, his streak of opening-day starts is the longest by a Phillies pitcher since Steve Carlton made 10 in a row from 1977 to 1986.

Carlton and Nola in the same sentence? Get used to it. The Phillies have existed for 141 years, and Nola already ranks among their top 10 in several pitching categories, including strikeouts (fifth), starts (seventh), and WHIP (ninth). As the years go on, he’s only going to keep climbing the charts.

“If I stay healthy, yeah, I think I have a chance to be up there with those guys,” Nola said. “Those individual accolades are great and all, but what I really want to do is win a World Series.”

Like Carlton and Hamels.

“Not being in the playoffs for seven years and being able to do it the past two years, there’s nothing like it,” said Nola, who started the wild-card clinchers in 2022 and 2023 and has a 3.70 ERA in nine postseason starts. “I can only imagine winning a championship and bringing it back to the city of Philadelphia. I kind of get chills thinking about it.”