Phillies Played a Playoff Series and Looked Like Their Playoff Selves

While it isn’t October yet, it sure felt like it this weekend in Philadelphia.

Heading into Labor Day weekend, the Phillies had a monumental series with the Atlanta Braves; they stood four games back of Atlanta in the division, with still seven games to play against each other in the regular season, making a run at the NL East a real possibility.

While there were positives, including what many are calling the best start by a Phillies pitcher all season, poor offensive stretches and disastrous bullpen appearances — reminiscent of previous playoff losses — were on display all weekend.

The Phillies split the four-game series, but had opportunities to win all four and realistically should’ve taken at least three. That would’ve put them just two games back instead of still staying four games back heading into the final three weeks of the season and would’ve helped their odds of winning the National League East.

“I just keep going back to the same old thing: you need to win every day,” Don Mattingly said. “Every win is like a notch closer to where we need to go to get ourselves in the dance. This game, obviously, bouncing back from that and getting the W is big in that sense.”

This weekend, the Phillies went 3-for-28 with runners in scoring position, totaling just 11 runs in four games.

In Saturday’s 4-2 victory and Sunday’s 5-4 loss, the Phillies built early leads but struggled to add on. The 4-1 lead on Sunday was blown due to a late-inning fall apart from the Phillies bullpen, more specifically Jhoan Duran and Alex McFarlane. McFarlane has been arguably the best Phillies reliever since his call-up a few weeks ago, but he got a test from Ronald Acuna Jr., who smoked a fastball for a game-tying home run in Sunday’s matchup. An inning later, Duran came on to keep the game tied but just didn’t have stuff, allowing a leadoff double and eventually a go-ahead triple to Austin Riley.

In the closeout game, the Phillies offense looked dead, scoring just one run — a solo home run in the eighth inning off the bat of Kyle Schwarber. One run was enough as Jesus Luzardo tossed a 109-pitch, 12-strikeout complete-game shutout, allowing just two hits all afternoon.

Monday’s finale was essentially a playoff game in Philadelphia, and for Luzardo to go out and put up that type of performance is incredible.

“Everything was pretty efficient all day,” Mattingly said. “Throwing strikes, didn’t lose his stuff. It just seemed like he was the guy. He didn’t get behind very often, but when he was behind the count, he was able to get back in.”

Starting pitching won’t be the issue for this team come the postseason, as it’s the thing keeping them in the race as of now, but we’ve seen in years past that great starters cannot carry this team to the World Series. The bats have to come through and come through efficiently throughout games.

Stacking early runs has been something the Phillies have done often in the playoffs, but early runs are only useful if the offense keeps producing. The Phillies not adding runs throughout a game has caused the majority of their losses as of late and in the playoffs, and once a starting pitcher is done after six or seven innings, the bullpen isn’t 50/50 when it comes to keeping those leads.

One of the two has to come to fruition. Either the bullpen has to be lights out, or the offense has to produce more than a few early runs and not let the bats get cold, and if we’re being honest, it’s more on the stars at the plate to produce.

The Phillies have shown at the plate over the past month that they can work walks, score runs throughout contests, and put up big offensive performances that make their pitchers’ lives easier. It’s not a great sign that they essentially played four playoff games this weekend against Atlanta, and in all four games they struggled to produce runs for 50% or more of the game.

Despite the struggles at the plate in the finale, and the struggles overall in the series, there seems to be no need for panic from the Phillies, as they feel that they’re having good at-bats, but luck just wasn’t going their way.

“I felt like I honestly felt like we swung the bats pretty good [Sunday],” Mattingly said. “There were a lot of balls when I marked my sheet of good at-bats; balls hit hard, there was a ton of them in there. We didn’t get a lot for it, but still, I thought the at-bats were good; the approach was good.”

The hitters echo that statement. Schwarber, who homered in three of the four games, still feels that the group is doing what they can to get themselves to the postseason.

“It’s crunch time, and we want to keep pushing,” Schwarber said. “We want to keep trying to find ways to stack wins. It doesn’t matter who we play. We expect to win a baseball game when we walk out of these doors, and we have to execute our game and do what we need to do, and worry about ourselves.”

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