Every play in a scoreless postseason game is pivotal. The Phillies, despite being the better team on paper with a 1–0 series lead in the bag, could ill afford to give away cheap outs on either side of the ball. Six days ago, Brandon Marsh listed the lessons the team had learned from blowing a lead in Georgia two nights previous: “Put them out of it. Finish the job. Don’t let them climb back in the game.”

Trea Turner committed two errors in that game, the second of which led directly to Atlanta’s first run of the playoffs. It snapped the best offensive team of the regular season back to life and arguably started a stunning comeback that could’ve knocked the Phillies off their axis.

Aaron Nola was excellent in his first two postseason starts of 2023, but he’s been prone to big innings both in this regular season and last year’s playoffs. The last thing he needed was one of the fastest players in the league to reach base and cause trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA – The last time the Arizona Diamondbacks won a game in the NLCS, Randy Johnson took the win and Erubiel Durazo hit the game-winning home run off Tom Glavine. It’s been a minute.

When Diamondbacks ace Zac Gallen took the mound in Philadelphia, he was hoping to make a dent in that history; the Phillies have been red hot all October, but so has Arizona, and Gallen’s arm is one of the best weapons the D-backs have. But Kyle Schwarber hit the first pitch Gallen threw off the video board on the facing of the second deck at Citizens Bank Park. A minute? The Phillies took the lead in seconds. Two batters later, Bryce Harper crushed another fastball out to right center. It wasn’t quite over before it began, but the Phillies took the lead on the first pitch they saw and never gave it up.

“The reality is we were probably going to lose a game at some point,” Evan Longoria offered after the game, attempting to put the defeat in perspective. But the Phillies roughed Gallen up early and held off a series of late rallies to win 5-3. Surely it was not the manner of defeat anyone from the Diamondbacks had in mind. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — You know what they say about first impressions, right? Well forget it. It’s nonsense.

The Phillies have run back last season’s NLDS result: a 3-1 victory over the rival Atlanta Braves, the no. 1 seed in the National League bracket. This time out was a little more acrimonious than the last, at times a little more touch-and-go, as a cavalcade of pitchers only barely kept the cap on the violently fizzing soda bottle that is Atlanta’s offense.

But with Braves ace Spencer Strider standing between the Phillies and a return to the NLCS, two players who were on the verge of being run out of town in the past 12 months — Nick Castellanos and Trea Turner — put the team on their backs. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — When Bryce Harper sees a breaking ball middle-middle or middle-in, the most common outcome is not what you might think: He fouls it off. Over the course of the regular season, he saw 61 such pitches and hit 25 of them foul. Six others he took for strikes, nine more he swung at and missed, 11 others were hit in play for outs. Only two of those 61 balls went into the seats.

That still makes him one of baseball’s most dangerous hitters on such pitches. On breaking balls middle-middle and middle-in, he slugged an even 1.000 with an ISO of .524. This season, 161 hitters saw 750 or more pitches from the left side; Harper was 12th in wOBA, fifth in xwOBA, 16th in ISO, and tied for 11th in slugging percentage.

You don’t want to pitch him there. Because what if he doesn’t foul it off?

In the Phillies’ 10–2 win over the Braves in Game 3 of the NLDS, Harper saw 19 total pitches, 16 breaking balls. Three floated into the middle-middle or middle-in region. Sure enough, Harper fouled one of them off. The other two decided the game. Read the rest of this entry »

BALTIMORE — “We need to start taking a little bit of pressure off our pitchers and start scoring earlier in the game,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said before Game 2 of the ALDS against Texas. The previous afternoon, Baltimore had lost a cagey affair, playing from behind most of the way. And despite numerous opportunities, the Orioles never could tie the game back up.

In the bottom of the first inning on Sunday, Hyde’s offense obliged him, stringing together three singles (including an honest-to-God Baltimore chop from Ryan Mountcastle) and a walk to pull in front, 2–0, against the previously unhittable Jordan Montgomery. The Orioles had the lead and the initiative, and the Camden Yards crowd was out for blood.

Fifty-five minutes, three pitching changes, and just seven outs later, the Rangers led 9–2 in the top of the third. Though the Orioles cut the lead to 11–8 by the end of the night, the game was basically over then, leaving the Rangers in the driver’s seat and Baltimore in need of a mighty comeback in order to extend a Cinderella season. Read the rest of this entry »

BALTIMORE — The Orioles were one of the toughest teams to put away in the regular season, as their record, status as the AL’s top seed, and distinction of never having been swept all attest. But in Game 1 of the ALDS against a Rangers team that kept going the wrong way in the standings in September, the script was reversed.

In front of a capacity crowd in a game delayed an hour by rain, it was the Rangers who clung to a narrow lead for six innings, as every Baltimore rally fell short. Despite the conditions and an unfavorable pitching matchup, Texas took an upset 3–2 win behind the tandem of Andrew Heaney and Dane Dunning. With that win comes control of the series. Read the rest of this entry »

I guess we statistically inclined writers aren’t technically supposed to believe in momentum. At least, we’re not supposed to believe it’s measurable or predictive. In baseball as in physics, the trajectory of events can be altered in the blink of an eye. Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint the moment momentum changes. Not so here.

On Wednesday night, Aaron Nola followed up Zack Wheeler’s Game 1 masterpiece with seven scoreless innings of his own. The Phillies got to Braxton Garrett early and broke the game open with a late Bryson Stott grand slam. Final score: 7-1. Time to crank the Tiësto remix of Calum Scott’s cover of “Dancing On My Own,” play the video of Harry Kalas singing “High Hopes,” and hop on a plane to Atlanta for the NLDS.

It looked very, very easy, even by the standards of a two-game sweep, but it was not preordained. Needing one win to clinch the series, the Phillies were presented with two obvious chances to seize control of the game. They grabbed both without hesitation. Read the rest of this entry »

When I laid out a potential path to a Marlins upset in the NL Wild Card Series, it started with Jesús Luzardo hanging with Zack Wheeler. The 33-year-old righty has been one of the best starters in baseball over his tenure with the Phillies, whose run to last year’s pennant was in large part the result of a procession of dominant Wheeler starts. But Luzardo is an excellent pitcher himself; perhaps a player of his youth and talent could raise his game in the biggest start of his life.

Luzardo didn’t pitch badly by any means, but on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, there was simply no hanging with Wheeler. I’ll list his stats here, but they don’t do the performance justice: 6.2 innings, five hits, no walks, one run, eight strikeouts. The Phillies won, 4–1, and now have a stranglehold on a series they were heavily favored to win from the start.

“I think the story was Wheeler,” said Marlins manager Skip Schumaker. “He was excellent tonight. The sinker/sweeper combination gave us trouble. A lot of weak ground ball contact…. He was just excellent.” Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the novelties we’re going to see this postseason, this series is one of the weirdest. The Phillies and Marlins have never met in the postseason before. In fact, they’d never made the playoffs in the same season before; apart from a stretch from 2003 to ’09 when it seemed like they only ever played each other, the two franchises had never even finished above .500 in the same season before.

But here we are: Three games to determine who gets eternal claim to the legacy of Darren Daulton and Alex Arias, and more importantly, a berth in the NLDS against Atlanta. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, Johan Rojas knocked a single up the middle off Pirates closer David Bednar. Cristian Pache, who’d just entered the game as a pinch runner to start the 10th inning, came around to score easily. When he crossed home plate, the Phillies were guaranteed a playoff spot for the second straight year, and by night’s end they were locked in as hosts of one of the NL Wild Card series.

Typical scenes ensued. In college baseball, where budgets are smaller and buying alcohol for the freshmen and sophomores can get a little dicey from a legal standpoint, this kind of celebration takes the form of a dogpile. In fact, “dogpile” has become the accepted shorthand for a victory that either secures or advances a team toward a championship. You’ll hear “two dogpiles to Omaha,” and the like.

Big leaguers don’t dogpile, or rather, they don’t only dogpile. And the Phillies, having developed a reputation over the past 18 months as baseball’s lascivious chaos agents, know the post-dogpile rigmarole by heart. Champagne and beer were sprayed around the clubhouse, cigars handed out, and Garrett Stubbs procured a set of overalls. Read the rest of this entry »