The Phillies Are Still Alive

Shutting down the Dodgers offense has been one of the toughest assignments in baseball this October. A series of great opposing pitchers, including Cy Young candidates aplenty, surrendered 27 runs in their first four playoff games. Sure, the Los Angeles pitching has been great too, but you can score on the Dodgers. The difficulty has been with stopping their unending procession of base-clearing prowess.

The Phillies seemed to be well suited to stopping the Dodgers, but that was before Los Angeles won the first two games in Philadelphia. Even worse, the Dodgers sent ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the mound, so limiting the offense figured to be even more important than normal. That’s too much work for one starter, so Rob Thomson turned to Aaron Nola and Ranger Suárez looking for a tandem performance. As it turned out, that decision was inspired. Along with two Schwarbombs, the Nola-Suárez piggyback propelled the Phillies to an 8-2 win at Dodger Stadium and postponed elimination for at least one more night.

Nola has had a rough year. He missed three months with injury, and looked much diminished when he did pitch en route to posting the worst single-season ERA (6.01) and FIP (4.58) marks of his long, decorated career. He wasn’t in this game for a long time, but he was in it for a good time. He came out absolutely jacked, with his velocity up two to three ticks and a snapping knuckle-curveball that hearkened back to his form of a few years ago. It didn’t click right away – Shohei Ohtani scorched a line drive for an out and then Mookie Betts tripled – but Nola buckled down, blew away Teoscar Hernández with a beautiful curve, and escaped the inning unscathed. He kept it going through a perfect second, perhaps as far as he was ever expected to go.

While Nola might have gotten the start, Suárez was the linchpin of Philadelphia’s run prevention plan. Like Nola, Suárez didn’t exactly start his appearance strong. The first pitch he threw, to noted lefty killer Tommy Edman, left the park, giving the Dodgers a 1-0 lead in the third inning. But what, you’re going to not give up solo home runs to the Dodgers? That’s not realistic. Suárez wasn’t there to deal with just Edman; he was there to deal with Ohtani, Betts, Hernández, Freddie Freeman, Will Smith… you get the idea — his job was to keep the whole lineup in check. That one blemish wouldn’t be an issue if he made sure it didn’t spread.

After that rude awakening, Suárez locked in quickly. He retired those five guys I just named in order, and he wasn’t afraid to dip into his bag of tricks to do it. Where Nola leaned harder on his two best pitches, Suárez doubled down on what works best for him: variety. He poured sinkers in against lefties, broke out four-seamers and changeups against righties, and generally kept hitters off balance and his infielders on their toes with a steady stream of grounders. He throws a six-pitch mix, with vastly different approaches depending on the batters he’s facing, and he stuck with that plan despite technically being a reliever instead of a starter in this game.

The best Suárez starts don’t always look pretty, but they do look funky. It’s never the same pitch twice, never to the same location twice. He’s twice as likely to make you tap one into the ground than to strike you out. But the Dodgers, who have turned great pitchers into dust all year, couldn’t time him up. They’d hit the ball hard, but not in the air. Or they’d hit the ball in the air, but not hard. They’d come up small in big spots and big in small spots. That’s exactly what Suárez does when he’s at his best. As he cruised through five strong innings of work, it always felt like he was one bad pitch away from it all falling apart, and yet it never did.

Meanwhile, Yamamoto was doing the opposite. Through three innings, he had the ball on a string, and his deep arsenal means that when he’s in command, it feels like no one could possibly score. Splitters in the low 90s? Sure. Cutters approaching that velocity and moving as if gravity didn’t exist? He’s got them. Curveballs that are 20 miles an hour slower than the rest of his pitch mix and seem to take a sharp turn in midair? Absolutely. But he couldn’t sustain his sharp location, and it doesn’t much matter how pretty your fastball is when you leave one middle-middle to Kyle Schwarber, who cranked a ludicrous 450-foot solo shot to tie the game, 1-1, in the fourth inning.

Suddenly, it was like the Phillies had broken a spell. Bryce Harper lashed a sharp single to left. Alec Bohm followed that up with a groundball single up the middle. After some fielding hijinks and a sacrifice fly, J.T. Realmuto sliced a ground rule double to right. Even escaping the inning couldn’t cure Yamamoto’s sudden ineffectiveness. Philadelphia came out to start the fifth and put it on him again. Bryson Stott ripped a 101-mph single. Trea Turner followed with a 104-mph single of his own. The Phillies were hitting the snot out of the ball, and the Dodgers had to go to the bullpen, only three outs after it had looked like their ace was cruising toward another superlative outing. In the end, Yamamoto threw about as many pitches as Suárez did while missing fewer bats, though you’d never have known it from watching them pitch.

The Phillies didn’t cash in any runs during the inning they chased Yamamoto. They didn’t score in the seventh, either, even after putting their first two runners on. Despite that offensive outburst and Suárez’s great game, it was still only a two-run game as the eighth inning rolled around. But if you’ve followed the Dodgers this year, you know their greatest weakness is their bullpen, and Yamamoto’s weak outing combined with the offense’s quiet night meant that manager Dave Roberts decided to go with the middle of the bullpen instead of the top, which cost him.

First it was Anthony Banda, who got out of the fifth-inning jam for Yamamoto. Then it was Jack Dreyer, an unknown in the postseason perhaps, but he did his job too, pitching a scoreless sixth. Clayton Kershaw was the next man in, though, and to put it mildly, he didn’t have it.

The only reason the Phillies didn’t score in the seventh, Kershaw’s first inning of work, was that Schwarber got turned inside out by a ball that got away from Smith (who was catching for the first time in a month because of a hairline fracture in his right hand), which left Schwarber standing still when Smith recovered the ball and gunned it to first for an easy out. Even then, the other two outs in the inning were line drives that found gloves. The Phillies were all over Kershaw. Realmuto led off the eighth with a solo shot. Turner drove home two more Phillies with a flared single. Schwarber stayed hot with a cloudscraping blast, his second home run of the night, to make it an 8-1 game.

Now that the game was well and truly over, each team went to their token mopup men. The Dodgers added another run in the ninth, and managed to get Ohtani another plate appearance, which drew the incredibly rare two-out, six-run-lead pitching change. But he flied out harmlessly, setting up Game 4 in Los Angeles on Thursday. It wasn’t always pretty, featuring some ugly baserunning and some questionable decision-making, but it ultimately was effective for the Phillies. In a way, maybe that’s just what these Phillies are — the embodiment of a Ranger Suárez start. That look certainly suited them Wednesday night.

Odds and Ends

• This was Kershaw’s first playoff appearance as a reliever since the decisive Game 5 of the 2019 NLDS against the Nationals. After recording the final out of the seventh inning, he came back out for the eighth with the Dodgers clinging to a two-run lead and immediately gave up back-to-back home runs to Juan Soto and Anthony Rendon. The Nats won it in extras and were on their way to a World Series title.

• Brandon Marsh had a rough night. With Harrison Bader too injured to play the field, the Phillies couldn’t platoon Marsh. The Dodgers are absolutely loaded with lefty relievers in their bullpen, so they twice intentionally walked Bohm to pitch to Marsh, who went 0-for-4 and also misplayed Betts’ first-inning hit into a triple. On one of those post-walk opportunities, he was too slow to get into the box, drawing a pitch clock violation, and then promptly took a pitch in the zone and swung at one outside of it to strike out on three demoralizing pitches.

• Ohtani had a rough night, too. He went 0-for-5, bringing him to 1-for-14 for the series. The Los Angeles offense is so deep that it can still score in bunches when its best hitter isn’t clicking, but it definitely puts more pressure on everyone else in the lineup. I don’t think there’s anything predictive about this, to be clear, and he still looks every bit the same Shohei Ohtani as always, but right now, he could use a hit.

• Rob Thomson should buy Schwarber a nice gift, because the manager made some weird decisions in this game that would be drawing a lot more scrutiny if the Phillies hadn’t rolled to an easy win. The announcers made a big point of mentioning that Thomson had extensively scripted out Nola’s outing, deciding in advance which batter would signal his departure, and thus which one Suárez would face first. He picked Edman, who is dangerous batting righty and comparatively punchless batting lefty, and Edman made him pay.

Later in the game, Thomson called for a sacrifice bunt, the second straight game in which he’d done so. This one didn’t lead to a disastrous out on the basepaths, but it did create an easy out, and the Phillies didn’t score in that inning.

Part of the reason that Marsh had such a rough day is that the Dodgers brought in tough lefties to attack the top of the Philadelphia lineup and then just left them in there to face Marsh, who was protected with a platoon partner during the regular season but is getting hung out to dry now. I assume he’s batting fifth because he hit there a lot during the regular season, but Thomson was often pinch-hitting for him in tough matchups then, and that isn’t the case now. It all just felt weird and disjointed – but of course, no one cares when you win 8-2.