There’s not a pitcher on earth who doesn’t want to take the ball, dominate, and call it a day. A pitcher’s objective is to get outs and keep runs off the board, so a failure to meet that objective can’t qualify as a good or positive outcome.

But believe it or not, at this point in the spring, such failure may not be the worst thing.

You may have heard by now that spring training box scores don’t matter, and it’s true. A month from now, nobody will care that Zack Wheeler gave up a grand slam on Sunday afternoon, and nobody will care that Brett Gardner hit it (unless you had money on a spring training baseball game, in which case, that’s on you.)

In 2 1/3 innings, Wheeler allowed four hits and walked a pair of batters on his way to giving up four earned runs.

Objectively, it wasn’t a good outing.

Still, as I watched him work his way out of a first inning jam and then fail to escape trouble in the second, I wondered about the value of occasional struggles and setbacks this time of year. Of course, the qualifier here has to be that the struggles and setbacks aren’t caused by an underlying health issue.

After all, the point of these games is to prepare for the grind of the season. Invariably, the season will bring adversity, tough spots, and even periodic failure.

After the Phillies arrived back in Clearwater on Sunday afternoon, I asked manager Joe Girardi about the potential value of an occasional spring training stumble.

Was I onto something, or was this premise a stretch?

As it turns out, Girardi was either too polite to dunk on me, or he was in genuine agreement.

“I think there is a ton. Sometimes you find out some things you never knew,” he said. “You have the ability to do some things that you didn’t think that you could do. What I liked about Zack’s outing today was he responded pretty well giving up the four runs, and his last hitter was probably the best hitter he had all day.”

After the grand slam, Wheeler responded by retiring the final three hitters he faced, including strikeouts of Aaron Judge and Aaron Hicks to finish his outing.

“So he found himself, and during the regular season, if you give up four early, you still got to believe you have a chance to win that game,” Girardi said. “But I think players can learn a lot, and I don’t mind them going through some struggles because I’ve yet to meet a player that everything goes perfect during the course of a season. You’ve got to learn to build up stamina. If you’re a pitcher, you might get a long inning in the first two innings and really have to grind it out. You’re trying to get through seven and shut a team down, so I think there’s a lot of benefits to it.”

The ability to grind it out that Girardi speaks of will be even more important for Phillies pitchers this season as the staff navigates what right now looks to be baseball’s best division. There won’t be many easy outs for this staff as it repeatedly deals with some of the best lineups in the game.

Given both the destined turbulence of a 162-game season and the inevitable difficulties that lie ahead, spring stumbles like the ones on display during Wheeler’s outing on Sunday could ultimately prove to be much more valuable than a quiet six-up, six-down performance.