Welcome to Phillies Town, Twinkie Town’s Philadelphia Phillies playoff coverage because I like watching Jhoan Duran play baseball and don’t handle change well. Let’s go Phillies!
While I didn’t anticipate
this going into this feckless experiment, it turns out that rooting for the Phillies was fairly similar to rooting for the Twins. Maybe there’s some lesson here about how baseball is difficult and how we, as a collective humanity, are all more alike than we realize if we set our differences aside and accept that our collective suffering comes at the hands of the top 1% (Dodgers/Yankees), but that’s probably not it. I’m sure I’m just cursed.
This game was scoreless until the seventh as Cristopher Sanchez and Tyler Glasnow threw dueling gems. The Phillies struck first in the top half of the inning after Dodgers manager Dave Roberts pulled Glasnow early in favor of Emmet Sheehan. JT Realmuto led off with a single, was replaced by Max Kepler on a groundout, and then scored on a Nick Castellanos double to scratch across a crucial run as the pitching staffs battled. Castellanos was stuck there and the Phillies took their lead into the bottom half of the inning.
Sanchez was cruising and came back out for the seventh, where the umps helped LA get started. After getting Will Smith out to start the frame, Alex Call walked when the ump missed a crucial 2-2 pitch that would have ended the at-bat (of note: Sanchez said the ump apologized to him after the game for missing the call). Enrique Hernandez followed with a single to put two men on for lefty killer Andy Pages before the lineup would flip back over to the superstars.
With the Phillies struggling to score runs, Phillies manager Rob Thomson turned to his closer Jhoan Duran early. His high strikeouts and elite ground ball rates mad him the best candidate to get Philadelphia out of the pickle. He was able to get Pages to ground out to first base, but Bryce Harper took the safe out rather than trying to turn two against the speedy Pages. With first base open, the Phillies intentionally walked Ohtani to get to Betts. Duran had Mookie on the ropes, but ultimately left a 3-2 fastball too high, walking in the tying run.
The game remained knotted at 1 until the 11th inning. It was all-hands-on-deck with the Phillies facing elimination, so Thomson turned to #2 starter Jesus Luzardo as the game went into extras. After cruising through the top brutal top half of LA’s lineup, Tommy Edman and Max Muncy hit soft singles to put the winning run on third with two outs. Duran and lefty Matt Strahm had already gotten the Phillies out of pickles and were unavailable, so Thomson was left with Orion Kerkering as the remaining high-leverage reliever. Kerkering walked Enrique Hernandez to load the bases for Pages, once again coming up in a huge spot.
Kerkering did his job and got Pages to hit a soft ground ball back to the pitcher, but it appeared the pressure got to the Philadelphia reliever. It took him a second to find the ball after he knocked it down, and rather than getting the force out at first to end the inning, Kerkering short-circuited and tried to get the runner at home. He sailed the ball over Realmuto’s head, but even if it was a strike the Dodgers likely would have scored. Game, series, match.
FORMER TWINS WATCH
- Max Kepler: 0-3, 1 R, 1 BB, 1 K
- Harrison Bader: 0-1, 1 K, still dealing with groin injury
- Jhoan Duran: 1.2 IP, 0 ER, 3 K, 2 BB (1 intentional), allowed inherited runner to score in the 7th
After a grueling one (1) week as a Phillies fan, it’s time for Twinkie Town to move back to something way more fun than Philadelphia postseason baseball: offseason speculation.
