Phillies Jump on Gallen Early, Hang on for 1-0 NLCS Lead

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.

“I think they just ambushed him. I think they came out ready to jump on his fastball,” Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo said. “There’s no mystery that Zac fills up the zone. He has an aggressive fastball and aggressive mindset. They just counterpunched him.”

Lovullo speculated that Gallen had just missed his spot: “I know when Zac gets squared up, it’s usually a couple-inch mistake.”

That’s precisely what happened.

Gallen is a superb pitcher, one of my favorite players in the entire league. His command and ability to tunnel four pitches made him the National League’s All-Star starter this year, and a Cy Young vote recipient in both 2020 and 2022. He’ll get more votes this year. Gallen is famously meticulous, competitive, and self-critical; these qualities have brought him from comparatively humble prospect origins to the pinnacle of his profession. It would not surprise me in the least if he continued to improve through his late 20s and actually won a Cy Young in the next couple years. Don’t just take my word for it.

“Zac is really good, man,” Harper said after the game. “He relies on everything. Like, he just doesn’t have one good pitch. He has four good pitches.”

For all Gallen’s positive qualities, there’s one thing he can’t do: throw hard enough to sneak a center-cut fastball past guys with 70-grade power. The first pitch he threw in the bottom of the first came in at 92 mph, essentially middle-middle. Schwarber has been goin’ through it this season; he hit .197 and led all of baseball with 215 strikeouts, and he went 4-for-25 with zero home runs, one walk, and 10 strikeouts in his first six postseason games.

But throw him 92 down the pipe, and Schwarber, like an eel in a cave, will ambush it:

YOU'RE JOKING pic.twitter.com/XNDCbcJ1e4

— Philadelphia Phillies (@Phillies) October 17, 2023

This leadoff dinger gave Schwarber an even 100 home runs in a Phillies uniform, regular season and postseason included, and at 117.1 mph, it is tied for the 10th-hardest-hit home run of the season. It’s also the second-hardest-hit home run of Schwarber’s career, after the 119.7 mph, 488-foot bomb he dropped on Yu Darvish in Game 1 of last year’s NLCS.

“I think the biggest thing is just, one, you know when you make a good swing, you don’t really feel it. You know that’s when it’s barreled,” Schwarber said. “Two, you hear the crowd roar, and you see the trajectory and I think that’s a pretty good sign.”

Gallen got Trea Turner to line out, but then, with Harper coming to the plate and the crowd frothing with excitement, he made the same mistake: first pitch, 93.3 mph, right in Harper’s wheelhouse. Throw that pitch to Harper and he will [expletive] your [expletive] up. And sure enough: 109.4 mph exit velo, 420 feet. Five pitches, two home runs.

All parties involved — Harper, Schwarber, Gallen, the two managers — expected Gallen to go right after the Phillies’ hitters, and for the Phillies to be ready to jump on him.

“I think they were just ultra-aggressive,” Gallen said. “I was just trying to get ahead, and that’s an aggressive lineup. It’s no secret they try to get the crowd into it as early as possible, and that plays into the aggression.”

“For us as an offense, in general, we’re not looking to take hitters’ pitches,” Schwarber said. “We’ll give him some pitcher’s pitches, but we’re not trying to chase as well. The biggest thing is trying to get him in the zone, and he is such a great pitcher. He has had such a great year to where if you get him in the zone and you’re going to get a good swing, you don’t want to miss it.”

According to Harper, the Phillies weren’t sitting on fastballs — they were just determined not to let Gallen pile up strikes early in the count. If Gallen gave them something to swing at, the Phillies would oblige him.

So the two parties were set for a decisive confrontation from the very start. Gallen said he had good stuff, but he failed to locate the two fastballs that Schwarber and Harper hit out. Afterward, he stood by his game plan, but regretted the execution.

“You can look at the data and understand what those guys are trying to do, look at previous at-bats when I’ve faced those guys, what they’ve tried to do,” Gallen said. “The selection, I don’t know that I would take the selection back, just maybe execute a little bit better. If that pitch is up a little bit more or off the plate a little bit more, do I get a fly out? I think it’s hard to take back pitch selection. We could sit here and second-guess it all day, but I think it just comes down to lack of execution.”

It never got easier for the Diamondbacks righty, who battled traffic in all five of his innings and surrendered at least one run in four. In the second inning, he caught too much of the plate with yet another fastball, and Nick Castellanos swatted it the other way into the right field seats, not far from where Schwarber’s home run landed after it assaulted the second-level video board. Harper put another ludicrous exit velocity on the board with a 111.6 mph RBI single to score Turner in the third, and the Phillies tacked on yet another run in the fifth. And the Phillies hit into an inning-ending double play and had a runner thrown out at the plate; those five runs could easily have been more.

Gallen, in case you haven’t heard, grew up across the river from Philadelphia in Somerdale, New Jersey. All news being local, both Andy McCullough of The Athletic and Alex Coffey of the Philadelphia Inquirer published stories the morning of Game 1 that got into Gallen’s origins, and publicized the fact that his favorite team growing up was not the Phillies, but the St. Louis Cardinals. This revelation was not well-received on social media. (For the record: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Gallen being a Cardinals fan, as the only thing more South Jersey than rooting for the Phillies is having needlessly tendentious sports opinions that annoy one’s neighbors.)

Nevertheless, it was a bad time for all these things to happen to Gallen; the last time the Citizens Bank Park crowd had assembled, it practiced derisively chanting the two-syllable surname of the opposing pitcher, Spencer Strider. And in the third, 45,000 and change joined in unison to taunt Gallen, which they repeated in the fourth and fifth innings.

In the meantime, Zack Wheeler was cruising. The first batter he faced, Corbin Carroll, broke his bat on a leadoff single, after which Philadelphia’s ace retired the next 15 batters. After the past two postseasons, the atmosphere in Philadelphia is getting talked up like it’s a 10th player, so Longoria got asked about the crowd after the game. He redirected credit for the Phillies win from the seats to the mound.

“Let’s give Wheeler a little bit of credit,” he said. “He threw the ball pretty well, made a lot of good pitches, executed his game plan really well…Sometimes it’s tough to tip your hat to the opposing guy, but he’s been pretty damn good.”

But as indomitable as the Phillies seemed at the time, 5-0 is not, in fact, an insurmountable lead.

While Wheeler was grabbing Diamondbacks batters by the forehead, extending his arm, and daring them to hit him, the Phillies went 2-for-7 with runners in position and left five runners on base. Add in the aforementioned could-have-been-worse moments for Gallen: J.T. Realmuto grounding into a double play with the bases loaded and one out to end the third, Brandon Marsh getting thrown out at home an inning later. In the bottom of the seventh, Turner singled and advanced to second on an error to lead off the inning, and never reached third.

In the meantime, the Diamondbacks kept pulling the string in. They finally got to Wheeler with a two-run home run in the third, then scored another run in the seventh after Seranthony Domínguez fielded a surefire double play ball and threw it into center field. Philadelphia’s only postseason loss of 2023, Game 2 against Atlanta, came after they built a big lead early behind Wheeler, but were unable to deliver the coup de grâce.

The Diamondbacks almost pulled off the same trick, hanging around long enough to turn all that early brouhaha into a meaningless prologue. Castellanos’ second-inning home run put Philadelphia’s win probability over 80%, and it only dropped below that level for only one play thereafter: Domínguez’s throwing error.

Nevertheless, the Diamondbacks, after taking a kick in the solar plexus on the very first pitch and losing with their ace on the mound, made a game of it. They brought the tying run to the plate in each of the final three innings, including on the game’s final pitch, which Lourdes Gurriel Jr. grounded into a double play.

Was it enough to turn a crushing defeat into a moral victory? Phillies manager Rob Thomson took notice.

“Everything is about momentum this time of year, and Arizona is really good at creating momentum and then keeping it,” Thomson said. “So one of the things we need to do is get momentum, keep it, don’t let them back in the game.”

Luvollo was asked if he thought the late comeback could encourage the Diamondbacks for Game 2.

“For sure. I felt like this dugout was engaged. We were just waiting for that one little push, and [Geraldo Perdomo] had that big two-run home run for us and got us right back in it,” he said. “Tomorrow is another day. We’ve got to sleep on it and understand what we did right, what we did wrong, and be ready to play another baseball game tomorrow. We will be.”