PHILADELPHIA – The numbers in play were large. The margins ended up small.
With two on and one out for the Phillies in their half of the sixth inning Monday night, it was $330 million man Bryce Harper against $182 million pitcher Blake Snell.
With the tying run 90 feet away and the potential winning run on base in the ninth, Trea Turner and his $300 million salary stepped in.
They were moments that the Phillies’ front office would dream of: Big players in big spots with a chance for big postseason ramifications.
And both times, the Phillies’ stars came up small.
Harper struck out to kill a potential rally in sixth inning of a scoreless game. He flew out to end the eighth with a man on after the Phillies had finally gotten on the board. Dodgers fill-in closer Roki Sasaki got the better of Turner in the ninth, with runners on the corners, inducing a groundout to second that Freddie Freeman picked at first to end a 4-3 game in the Dodgers favor.
With it, the Dodgers take a 2-0 lead back to Los Angeles.
And the Phillies top three hitters – Harper, Kyle Schwarber and Turner – head to Dodger Stadium off two ghastly games at the plate that look increasingly like the death throes of an era of Phillies baseball.
“Their starters have been good,” Harper said. “I think we’re missing pitches over the plate, haven’t done a very good job getting on base.”
The margins all around Monday were slight, from the millimeters that made the difference on Turner’s throw to the plate that didn’t get Teoscar Hernandez in the seventh to the margin by which Max Muncy and the Dodgers outexecuted Bryson Stott’s ninth-inning sacrifice to retire Nick Castellanos at third base. The role players in this melodrama – from Jesus Luzardo providing six sterling innings to Max Kepler sparking a lifeless team to a hobbled Harrison Bader coming through in a pinch – set the stage.
But when the stars stepped onto it, they flubbed their lines badly.
In the first two games, Harper, Schwarber and Turner are a combined 2-for-21 with 11 strikeouts. Turner has an RBI, the only hit in five attempts with runners in scoring position.
“I wouldn’t say we’re pressing,” Harper said. “I think we’re missing pitches over the plate. They make big pitches when they need to. We’ve got to do a better job.”
“We’ve got a great team,” Turner said. “We’ve won three games in a row before. We’ve swept good teams. We’ve played good baseball. We’ve got to find that. We’ve got to find it quick.”
The moments in which they’ve faltered couldn’t be bigger.
The final line may not look it, but through six innings, Luzardo outpitched Snell. Snell allowed just one hit and four walks, but traffic piled up in the sixth. One-out walks to Turner and Schwarber presented a dream situation: Two on, one out, Harper vs. a tiring Snell, game even at 0s.
Snell started the at-bat with a ball in the dirt. He followed it with the only pitch of six he’d throw in the zone, a high slider that Harper fouled off.
Harper swung over a low slider, then fought another. A curve in the dirt changed his eye line enough to draw a swing-and-miss, the last of Snell’s 23 on the night, with a tantalizing slider two ball-widths outside of the box.
“Came up short right there,” Harper said. “Obviously got to do a better job with guys on base as well. Didn’t get it done.”
There still remained a man to get, in the form of Bohm, whom Snell fell behind 2-0. Bohm pounded a changeup below the zone into the ground at third, Miguel Rojas diving to the bag ahead of Turner’s headfirst slide.
Snell needed 99 pitches to get 18 outs, but he allowed just one hit to a team he had held to a .189 average lifetime coming in.
“Feels like everything hits the edge of the box,” Turner said. “Off him, for me personally – and I was talking Kyle a little bit, he felt the same way – but I feel like the first pitch of the game was a good one to hit, and then after that, everything was kind of perfect from him.”
Whatever momentum was left in the building exited, making what came next almost feel inevitable. Luzardo had been magnificent, working around a hit and a walk in the first by retiring 17 straight batters.
But he allowed Game 1 hero Hernandez to single and Freeman to bloop in a double. The combination of Orion Kerkering and Matt Strahm turned it into a deluge, with four runs scoring, the first on a Kike Hernandez broken-bat nubber to short that went 27 feet in the air at 35.4 miles per hour, Teoscar Hernandez sliding a moment ahead of J.T. Realmuto’s tag. Will Smith followed with a two-run single, and Shohei Ohtani’s first hit of the series provided the game-winning run.
Only at 4-0 did the Phillies’ bats awaken, starting with Kepler’s triple into the right-field corner. Turner scored him with a single, but the rally stopped there with a Schwarber punch out and Harper’s fly out to center.
The ninth started with a single by Bohm and a double by Realmuto. They scored on Castellanos’ bloop double, the tying run 180 feet away. But Muncy made the infield throw to get Castellanos at third that Turner couldn’t at the plate earlier. Bader put two on when he singled, then hobbled to first, his tight groin requiring a pinch-runner. Kepler, forced to face lefty Alex Vesia, hit a fielder’s choice to first, then in came the electric rookie Sasaki.
To that point, the scales between the teams were unexpectedly even. Both team’s starters had gone deep. Both team’s bullpens had faltered. Both team’s nine-hole hitters had sparked rallies.
But the difference was at the top. Where Teoscar Hernandez and Ohtani came through, for a second straight night, Turner, Harper and Schwarber had no answer.
“I think we’re missing pitches over the plate,” Harper said. “They make big pitches when they need to. We’ve got to do a better job.”
Contact Matthew De George at mdegeorge@delcotimes.com
