Tag Archives: J.T. Realmuto

Now they have to do the impossible

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Kyle Tucker, Chas McCormick

With Kyle Tucker backing him, Chas McCormick—who grew up a Phillies fan 35 miles away from Citizens Bank Park—made the possible catch of the Series off J.T. Realmuto’s eighth-inning drive to the right center field scoreboard wall in World Series Game Five Thursday night. 

This year’s Phillies, meet the 2019 Nationals. Sort of. Those Nats won every World Series game against that edition of Astros on the road including four in Houston. These Phillies split in Houston, then could win only once in their own cozy, stop-sign-shaped, noisy playpen. Now they have to do the kind of impossible those Nats did. If they can.

They have to win Game Six Saturday and then Game Seven Sunday. And if Game Five is evidence, they won’t get it without putting up a terrific battle. Better than the battle between the two that ended in a squeaker of a 3-2 Astros win Thursday night. Better than they were built to be.

Better than just half a collection of sluggers and a bullpen that can hang with any bullpen in the business. And enough to keep the Astros from saving themselves—until a forgotten Astro at first base and an Astro outfielder who grew up a Phillies fan saved the Astros’ lives in the bottom of the Game Five eighth and ninth, respectively.

Trey Mancini was a trade deadline acquisition from the Orioles but an 0-for-18 afterthought this postseason. Chas McCormick grew up 35 miles from Citizens Bank Park and never forgot the bloody nose then-Phillies outfielder Aaron Rowand incurred making a similar catch against the center field fence.

Mancini now found himself at first base after Astros veteran Yuli Gurriel had to come out a half inning after a collision resulting in a rundown out as he got trapped between third and the plate also resulted in a woozy head. With two out and Astros closer Ryan Pressly asked for an almost unheard-of-for-him five-out save, Kyle Schwarber loomed at the plate.

Schwarber electrified the ballpark in the bottom of the first when, with the Astros up 1-0 already, he drilled an 0-1 pitch from starter Justin Verlander into the right field seats to tie it. Now, with two out, first and third, and the Phillies back to within a run in the bottom of the eighth, Schwarber drilled one up the first base line on a single hop. The shot had extra bases down the line and the tying run home at least stamped on it.

Until it didn’t. Playing practically on the line as it was, Mancini hit his knees like a supplicant in prayer and the ball shot right into his mitt. While he was there, Mancini stepped on the pad. Side retired. In one flash Mancini went from self-made afterthought to the Astros’ man of the hour.

It’d take something even more stupefying to rob Mancini of that status. “That ball gets by him,” Pressly said postgame, “we’re looking at a different game.”

Something even more stupefying came along in the bottom of the ninth. When Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto sent Pressly’s 1-1 slider high and far toward the right center field scoreboard wall, with at least a double and likely more the likely result, the wall notorious for creating odd rebounds.

Until it wasn’t. Until McCormick ran to his left, took a flying leap, and snapped the ball into his glove a second before he hit the wall and landed on the track, the ball still securely in his glove, and by his own postgame admission stared up at whatever he could see of the Bank crowd he’d just snapped silent.

“I wanted to lay there longer,” he admitted postgame. “If it were the last out, I would have laid there all night.”

Pressly’s jaw fell as he saw McCormick nail the catch. As he remembered after the game, the only thing he could think as his hands clutched his head in wonder was, “Holy [you-know-what].”

Until that moment, the Astros and the Phillies wrestled and tussled like alley cats all Game Five long. The bad news was that the Phillies, the Show’s best on the season with runners in scoring position, extended to a third-longest World Series string of 0-for-20 with men in such position.

“[S]ometimes you go through times when you don’t hit with runners in scoring position,” said Phillies manager Rob Thomson postgame. “Then, three days later, everybody’s getting hits. So we just got to keep battling, that’s all.”

The Phillies can’t wait three days for hits. They have two days before it might be curtains. Three days maximum, after squandering what half the world thought would be the remarkable and ear-splitting home field advantage they’d stolen with a Series-opening split in Houston.

The worse news Thursday began when Astros’ rookie shortstop Jeremy Peña started the scoring when he singled up the pipe to send Jose Altuve (leadoff double, taking third on Phillies center fielder Brandon Marsh’s carom bobble) home in the top of the first.

After Schwarber’s ballpark-jolting bomb leading off the bottom, both sides wrestled each other’s starting pitchers, Verlander and Noah Syndergaard, into and out of a few more dicey jams—especially the Phillies loading the bases on Verlander with two out in the second before the future Hall of Fame righthander struck Rhys Hoskins out swinging rather violently.

Syndergaard settled admirably after the first inning run and retired nine straight from that score forward. Verlander escaped another jam in the third, which might have been another bases-loaded escape but for Peña leaping to steal a base hit off Nick Castellanos’s hard liner, but after Alec Bohm spanked a single past shortstop to follow, Verlander got Phillies shortstop Bryson Stott to pop out to right for the side.

But Syndergaard—no longer the bullet-throwing Thor of old thanks to injuries, illnesses, and finally Tommy John surgery—ran out of luck in the top of the fourth, when Peña sent a 1-2 service into the left field seats. Connor Brogdon relieved him and shook off Alex Bregman’s one-out double while striking out the side.

Verlander pitched as clean a fourth as you could ask of a 39-year-old righthander with or without his particular career resume, then had to perform another escape act in the fifth after striking two out to open. Bryce Harper lined one to deep right that Astros right fielder Kyle Tucker bobbled toward the corner, ensuring Harper’s double. Castellanos wrestled Verlander to a full count before popping out to left center for the side.

From there, the bullpens wrestled each other. Then, top of the seventh, came Gurriel’s leadoff double. One out and a wild pitch later came McCormick with Gurriel on third. McCormick bounced one to third, with the infield in, and beginning with Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm they had Gurriel trapped like the top man on the FBI’s old ten most wanted list.

Bohm threw to Realmuto. Realmuto threw to Stott. Stott threw to first baseman Hoskins joining the party just in case, and Hoskins reached to tag Gurriel while tumbling over the veteran Astro. Gurriel landed awkwardly on his right knee as it was, but Hoskins’s knee on the tumble also jolted Gurriel’s head.

The elder first baseman—whose string of 48 straight postseason plate appearances without striking out ended at Brogdon’s hands in the fourth—managed to play his position in the top of the eighth but that was all he had left after the collision. “A little pain,” the sleepy-eyed first baseman tweeted postgame, A little pain but the win made my knee feel better fast . . . I will get some treatment to get ready for Saturday, thank you for the well wishes.”

But Altuve and Peña partnered on building the third Astro run in the top of the eighth, Altuve with a leadoff walk off Phillies reliever Seranthony Dominguez, and Peña shooting a base hit through the infield the other way to right, Altuve running on the pitch and helping himself to third easily. David Robertson relieved Dominguez but could only watch helplessly as Hoskins knocked Alvarez’s grounder up the line down and tag the Astro left fielder out while Altuve scampered home.

The best Robertston could do in the inning was keep the damage to a single run. He couldn’t stop the Astros’ defensive acrobatics in the bottom of the eighth and ninth. Nobody could. And even after McCormick’s robbery of Realmuto in the bottom of the ninth, the Phillies weren’t dead yet.

Pressly hit Harper in the foot on a 2-1 pitch. Up stepped Castellanos, who’d spent much of the game keeping his free-swinging in check and timing himself to a few hard hit outs and, then, the eighth-inning walk that turned into him scoring the second Phillies run on Jean Segura’s opposite-field base hit.

Now he wrestled Pressly to a full count with the Bank crowd as loud as conceivable. Then he bounced one to shortstop. Peña picked it clean, threw to first even more clean, and the Astros had it in the Bank. And Verlander—whom the Phillies abused in Game One—got credit for his first World Series win. Ever.

He’d sported an 0-6 won-lost record in the Series lifetime until Thursday night. And he  admitted postgame that Schwarber’s leadoff launch—the first such homer ever by a Phillie in postseason play—woke him up post haste.

“[A]s a starting pitcher, been there, done that,” Verlander told reporters after shaking off a particularly profound rookie-style celebratory shower in the clubhouse and savouring every moment of it. “It just sucks because of the moment and obviously all the questions and weight.

“You have to rely on the hundreds of starts and thousands of pitches I’ve thrown before and just kind of say, OK, I’ve given up leadoff home runs before,” the righthander continued. “It’s not going to be indicative of what’s going to happen the rest of this game, by any means. Let’s see what happens.”

What happened from there handed Verlander a win as moral as it was baseball and the Astros a Series return ticket home. And the Phillies—who’d gotten thatclose to fully avenging their having been no-hit in Game Four—another challenge to meet and conquer. If they can.

“What’s a better storybook ending than if we can go there and win this in Game Seven?” Castellanos asked postgame, well aware that the Phillies need to win Game Six first. So did the 2019 Nationals, in a Series in which neither team won at home but the Nats had to win the four they won in the Astros’ noisy-enough cape.

“We’re here, I think, because we trusted ourselves this far,” said Hoskins thoughtfully enough. “I don’t see why there is any reason to change that.”

They’re going to need that if they want just to come out of Game Six alive enough to play one more day. These Astros won’t exactly let them have it without making them work shields up, phasers on stun, for every degree of it.

We’re in for one hell of a World Series ride

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J.T. Realmuto

Realmuto’s leadoff launch in the top of the tenth held up for the Phillies to win opening this World Series. But he almost didn’t make it that far . . .

Listen up, you sore-losing Met, Dodger, and Yankee fans. At least, those among you who think that there’s nothing more worth watching until hot stove season since your heroes (anti-heroes?) got pushed, shoved, and slugged out of the postseason.

Yours aren’t the only heroes (anti-heroes?) who got turned aside. So you can just boil yourselves alive in your harrumphing that the World Series means nothing to you. Because if Game One was any indication, the rest of us—including this Met fan since the day they were born—are in for one hell of a Series ride.

For those of us who put aside our personal rooting disappointments and watched, we got to see a script flipped Friday night.

We went in knowing that assorted polls pretty much sketched the Phillies as America’s team this time around. We also went in knowing numerous oddsmakings sketched the Astros as liable to grind the brave little Philsies into hamburger, one way or the other.

But we came away from the Phillies’s 6-5 Game One upending knowing we’d seen a dogfight turned strategic bombing turned bullfight all in the space of ten must-see innings. And, with just a few little shruggings un-shrugged along the way.

Until Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto hit an opposite-field home run leading off the top of the tenth, and Phillies reliever David Robertson shook off a one-out double and a two-out walk to make it stick, that is. And that’s when it might have hit, good and hard:

The ogres of the American League might have swept their way here in the first place, but they’re not exactly impenetrable or invincible. Last year’s Braves sure proved it, but some things need proving all over again. Come Friday night, the Phillies finally proved it. But it did take a little early survival to do so.

Astros right fielder Kyle Tucker got to within about a foot above several fans of pulling Realmuto’s drive back for what would have been a jaw-dropping out. He leaped, reached back, extended, everything short of a net springing from his gloves’ fingertips, but the ball eluded his reach by about a full visible foot.

“Honestly, I thought I got enough of it, but I kind of had flashbacks of the play that Tucker made on (Aaron) Judge’s ball [in the American League Championship Series],” Realmuto said postgame. “And once I saw him running back to the wall, I was thinking in my head, oh, please just don’t catch it, just don’t catch it. I knew it was going to be close.”

Nobody going in expected Game One itself to be that close.

I mean, admit it. Didn’t we think it was all but game over when Tucker took it upon himself to provide four-fifths of the Astros’ early scoring, staking future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander to a 5-0 lead after three innings?

Didn’t we think the Phillies might be a little demoralised after Aaron Nola—who’d pitched six and two-thirds perfect innings against the Astros to pull the Phillies towards their postseason berth clinch in the first place—got thumped by Tucker’s solo bomb halfway up the lower right field seats in the second and, when the game was still a manageable 2-0 Astro lead an inning later, his three-run blast a little further up those seatxs in the third?

Sure we did. We thought that, no matter how strong and deep would be the bullpen bulls for whom Phillies manager Rob Thomson would reach soon enough, the Astro machinery would either make that five-zip lead hold or pile another couple more on before the game was finally over.

We might even have thought Rhys Hoskins and Bryce Harper singling to set first and third up in the fourth, Nick Castellanos singling Harper home, then Alec Bohm lining a two-run double to left was just Verlander’s and the Astros’ way of toying with the Phillies, tossing them a couple of cookies before burying them alive.

Right?

We just didn’t quite bargain for Realmuto sending a two-run double of his own to the back of left center to tie it at five the very next inning. (For those to whom such things matter, in Minute Maid Park’s dimensions Realmuto’s double traveled 42 feet more than his tenth-inning bomb would.)

“No excuses,” Verlander said postgame. “I felt like I had some guys in good situations and just wasn’t able to quite make the pitches that I wanted to. A lot of credit to them as a lineup. They laid off some good pitches, and they were able to, when I did execute pitches, they were able to foul it off or put it in play and find a couple hits that way. Then when I did make a mistake, they hit it hard.”

“We knew they could hit when they came in here,” said Astros manager Dusty Baker. “They’re known for that. They just took it from us tonight.”

We didn’t quite bargain for five Phillies relief pitchers—including their scheduled Game Three starter Ranger Suarez—and four Astros relief pitchers keeping both sides scoreless, with a few hiccups along the way on both side.

We sure didn’t bargain for Castellanos, defying the Phillies’ season-long reputation as a defense-challenged team, running for his life in from deep right—where he’d positioned respecting Astros rookie Jeremy Peña’s power—to send the game to extras in the first place, taking it from Peña and the Astros with a past-textbook sliding, one-handed catch just short of the line.

“I felt like I read the swing pretty well,” Castellanos said postgame, “and as soon as I saw the direction of the ball I felt like I got a good jump on it. I just thought he had a better chance of trying to bloop something in there than torching something over my head. So that was kind of my thought process there, just thought of it on the fly.” Good thinking.

We didn’t quite bargain for Realmuto, either, squaring up Luis (Rock-a-Bye*) Garcia, usually a starter but pressed into relief duty this postseason—and a man Realmuto had never before faced in his life.

The count ran full. Then Garcia threw Realmuto a fastball reaching the outer edge of the strike zone. Realmuto reached, connected, and sent it on its way. Yet, for a few brief, shuddering moments four innings earlier, it was lucky for the Phillies he got that far in the first place.

Astros center fielder Chas McCormick foul-tipped a hard one straight back and straight into blasting Realmuto’s old school-style catcher’s mask right off his head. It also knocked the husky catcher backward and down. Those watching on the Fox Sports 1 telecast could hear plate umpire James Hoye say, “You all right? Stay there a minute.”

“Honestly, my head wasn’t the problem,” Realmuto said. “It just smoked my jaw pretty good. It’s probably not going to be very easy for me to eat dinner tonight, but as long as my head’s OK, I’ll be good to go.”

“I didn’t move,” said Phillies backup catcher Garrett Stubbs postgame. “That guy’s not coming out for anything.” He was right. He didn’t even move his pinkie as Thomson and Phillies trainer Paul Buchheit tended the temporarily fallen Realmuto.

These Phillies won’t come out for anything, either. Unless it’s for Game Two. And, maybe, another few steps toward their own October/November surprise. Listen up one more time, sore-losing Met/Dodger/Yankee fans. (Maybe even you, too, Padres fans.) You may end up missin’ a great Series.

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* Just why is Luis Garcia’s rocking-the-baby motion while he does that little back-and-forth, samba-like step before delivering home just fine, while the Guardians’ Josh Naylor’s rocking-the-baby routine as he rounds the bases after hitting a home run is a capital crime? 

I don’t have an issue with either one, frankly. I’m still a big believer in letting the kids play and, if you want to see baseball played like Serious Business, find yourself a league where they play the game in three-piece suits.

But why isn’t Garcia accused of taunting the batters he faces with it while Naylor took heat for doing it to pitchers against whom he’s just gone the distance?

The phlinging, phlying, phlogging Phillies

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Brandon Marsh

The Ides of Marsh—the Phillies’ center fielder launching the three-run homer that launched the Phillies toward burying the Braves and going to the NLCS Saturday afternoon.

“You’ve got to beat the champs to be the champs,” said Bryce Harper just minutes after the game ended. The Phillies aren’t exactly the champs just yet. But the way they dispatched the Braves once their National League division series shifted to Citizens Banks Park, it won’t be simple to bet against them now.

These are not the uncohesive, porous Phillies who were down 22-29 and threw out the first manager as June got underway. Since executing Joe Girardi and installing his bench coach Rob Thomson on the bridge, the Phillies were the third-winningest team in the National League, behind the Braves they just vanquished and the Mets who became 101 game-winning also-rans last weekend.

They ground their way to the postseason despite a key element or two missing significant injury time, a just-enough pitching reshuffle, and prognosticators who assumed the almighty Braves—who had to grind their own way back to snatch the National League East in the first place—would do to them what they just finished doing.

They flattened the Braves 8-3 Saturday afternoon. It’s rather amazing what a team who’d spent seventeen straight days for fourteen straight games on the road can do once they get to come home at last. By the time Phillies relief ace Seranthony Domínguez blew Travis d’Arnaud away with a wind-generating swinging strikeout to end the game, they’d outscored the Braves 17-4 in division series Games Three and Four.

The defending world champions who were second in the league in runs scored on the regular season couldn’t rent, buy, embezzle, or forge runs once they left their own playpen in this set. Their starting pitching, usually considered one of their deepest contingencies this year, had only Kyle Wright’s magnificent Game Two performance to show for it.

Once they got to playing Saturday afternoon, almost everything a Brave threw was found by a Phillie bat when it hurt the most, sometimes for measured-doses mischief and sometimes for long-distance landings. And, unless the Braves were hitting solo home runs, whatever they hit when not striking out to the tune of fifteen batters found a Phillie  glove.

This wasn’t exactly what the Braves planned to happen once they managed to overthrow the Mets and steal a division over half the world thought the Mets had in the safe deposit box.

“[T]he goal when we leave spring training is to win the division,” said manager Brian Snitker. “Until you win the division, you don’t have a chance to do anything special because you never know what’s going to happen, you don’t know what team’s going to get hot, what things have to go right for you to go deep into the postseason.”

The new postseason format may be the competition-diluting or compromising mishmash it happens to be, but one of the key reasons is that someone who doesn’t win the division—say, 25 or 6 someones in red or blue-on-red hats with big script Ps on the crowns—can do more than a few special things after they slip in through the second wild card door.

“They’re hitting on all cylinders at the right time,” said Snitker. “It’s a good club. They’ve got really good players, and they’re getting it going at the right time.”

Where to begin delineating the Braves’ engine seizure?

Maybe with poor Charlie Morton, who entered the game with a sub-one ERA in postseason elimination games but exited early with an elbow injury. But not before he was informed rudely that squirming out of one self-inflicted inning-opening jam is a reprieve, but squirming out of a second to follow immediately is not Phillies policy.

Bottom of the first—The wizened old righthander allowed the first two Phillies to reach base, Kyle Schwarber on an unintentional walk and Game Three hero Rhys Hoskins on a base hit, and escaped with his life and no score. Bottom of the second—Alec Bohm’s leadoff liner bounded off Morton’s forearm, then Morton struck Bryson Stott out before Jean Segura shot one past a diving Dansby Swanson at shortstop. First and third again.

No escape this time. Brandon Marsh, the Phillies center fielder whose long enough beard qualifies him well enough to audition for ZZ Top, saw a 2-2 curve ball arrive at the perfect level to send into the right field seats. One day after Hoskins hit a bat-spiking three-run homer to start the Phillie phun, Marsh equaled him for early drama if not for a celebratory gesture.

In the interim, Phillies starter Noah Syndergaard, last seen in postseason action throwing seven shutout innings at the Giants, in the 2016 NL wild card game the Mets ended up losing, didn’t let Orlando Arcia’s solo homer spoil his night. He sliced and diced the Braves  otherwise with a very un-Thor like array of breakers and three innings of shutout, three-strikeout ball.

As if to reward the remade/remodeled Syndergaard, who became a Phillie near the regular season trade deadline after a first half as a struggling free-agent Angel, his catcher J.T. Realmuto let Morton’s relief Collin McHugh—entering after Braves manager Brian Snitker saw Morton just uncomfortable enough warming back up to hook him—feel it where it really hurt.

Realmuto had a little help, admittedly, from Ronald Acuña, Jr. who either didn’t look in that big a hurry or misread the play. Acuña moved almost no muscle when Realmuto’s deep fly eluded Braves center fielder Michael Harris II, taking a carom off the lower portion of the State Farm sign on the center field fence and rolling almost halfway to the right field track.

It let Realmuto—maybe the fastest-running catcher in a game not known for swift-afoot backstops—run himself into an inside-the-park homer and a 4-1 Phillies lead. He also ran himself into becoming the eighteenth player and first catcher to deliver an inside-the-parker in postseason play.

He couldn’t contain himself when he dove home and sprang up whooping it up. “I’m not usually a guy that shows a lot of emotion,” he told reporters postgame. “When I slid into home, I couldn’t help myself. I was so excited. Excited for this city. Excited for this team. It was one of those moments I’ll definitely remember forever.” Him and everyone else including the concessionaires in the Bank.

Matt Olson made a small stand for the Braves in the top of the next inning, when he jerked the first pitch he saw from Phillies reliever Andrew Bellatti over the right field fence with one out, but Bellatti shook it off as if it were just a mildly annoying mosquito, striking both d’Arnaud and Austin Riley out swinging with remarkable aplomb.

The bullpens kept things quiet enough on the field, if not among the Bank crowd itching to see the Phillies take it the distance to the National League Championship Series, until the bottom of the sixth. With A.J Minter—whose fifth inning work was as lights-out as he’d been most of last year’s run to the Braves’ World Series title—taking on a second inning’s work. Uh-oh.

Segura rapped a single to center with one out and stole second almost too handily with Marsh at the plate. Minter caught Marsh looking at a third strike, but then his 2-2 changeup caught the Schwarbinator on the fingers around the bat and, after a review challenge, took his base.

Exit Minter, enter Raisel Igelsias. And enter the Phillies showing they could peck away at you with just as much ease and pleasure as they could detonate the nukes against you.

Hoskins fought one off to dump it into shallow right that fell for a base hit. When Acuña lost track of the ball after it bounded off his glove, Segura came home with the fifth Philadelphia run. Realmuto then bounced one slowly up the third base line, slow enough that Riley playing it in front of the base dirt on the grass couldn’t get a throw to first in time,   while Schwarber scored run number six and Hoskins held at second.

Then Bryce Harper—carrying a 1.674 series OPS to the plate with him—broke his bat while sneaking a base hit the other way left to send Hoskins home. Castellanos walked to load them up for Bohm but for the second time in the game the Phillies stranded the ducks on the pond. Not that it mattered. A 7-2 lead after a three-run pick-and-peck sixth was nothing to complain about.

D’Arnaud opened the Atlanta seventh with a first-pitch drive over the center field fence off Phillies reliever José Alvarado, starting a second inning’s work after a 32-minute rest during that bottom of the sixth. He then got two ground outs before yielding to Zack Eflin for the inning-ending swinging strikeout of William Contreras.

Eflin worked a one-two-three top of the eighth. Harper soon faced Kenley Jansen in an unusual-looking, from-far-enough-behind appearance, and had a that’s-what-you-think answer to d’Arnaud’s blast. He sliced Jansen’s fadeaway cutter the other way into the left field seats. Then it was time for Sir Anthony to ride in, dispatch the Braves by striking out the side, and let Philadelphia know the Phillies reached the next plateau.

“This is step two in what we’ve been through,” said Harper, whose regular season absence with a shoulder issue limiting him to the designated hitter role and then a thumb fracture could have deflated the Phillies but didn’t. “Step one being the wild card. This being step two and we’ve got two more (steps).”

Step three: either the Padres or the Dodgers in the NLCS. Step four: You have to ask? Taking things one step at a time works big for these Phillies hanging with the big boys. So far.

Two over the shoulder help tie an NLDS

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Dansby Swanson, Austin Riley

Over the shoulders Wednesday night—Dansby Swanson hits the short left field turf to rob a bloop base hit from J.T. Realmuto; Austin Riley one-hands Bryson Stott’s foul over the tarp roll on which he might have turned his ribs to bone meal.

Well, I can’t decide, either. Atop a well-pitched National League division series Game Two, between the Braves and the Phillies, who put on the better defensive show between Braves shortstop Dansby Swanson and third baseman Austin Riley?

Don’t ask either one.

“I give him the credit,” Riley said, after the Braves banked the 3-0, series-tying win. “Just because running straight out, over the head is pretty tough.”

“I didn’t have to dodge a tarp,” Swanson said. “The guy, once again, a very under-appreciated defender, a lot more athletic than people give him credit for. The guy’s a gamer.”

That was like trying to choose between Lux Guardian and Lux Legacy vacuum cleaners. But come on, gentlemen. Quit being coy.

We might hand Swanson the slight advantage, though. With two out in the top of the sixth, Swanson ran out from shortstop into shallow left field chasing J.T. Realmuto’s bloop with center fielder Michael Harris II and left fielder Eddie Rosario pouring in from their positions. One false step or one body bump might have meant a base hit to a club that  isn’t terrible at turning two outs into a run-scoring chance.

Swanson took a small diving leap to nail it just before his glove hit the grass followed by the rest of him. “Play of the game, so far,” my game notes say. But if you press him on it, he’ll tell you he had a slightly unfair advantage going in.

“I should get my parents in here,” he said, “because they threw me a gajillion balls just like that all the time growing up over my head. I was the epitome of the kid that would throw a tennis ball off a wall and ricochet it and run, try to catch it over my shoulder. Probably threw a lot of tennis balls onto the field, too, to disrupt my brother’s baseball games. But I feel like I’ve been doing that since I was five.”

Two innings later, the Phillies had one out and Jean Segura aboard after a long drive to the left field wall that might have been a double was turned into a long single—thanks to Rosario playing the carom as if according to a script. He’s not the best defensive left fielder overall, but he has a powerful enough throwing arm that that kind of carom play keeps the other guy’s slugging percentage from creeping upward.

Then Phillies shortstop Bryson Stott popped a 1-2 service from Atlanta reliever Raisel Iglesias to the left side, beyond third base. Riley kicked his horse, ran it down, and reached to snap the ball into his glove above the Truist Park tarp roll—about a nanosecond before he would have hit that roll with a rib cage-cracking clank allowing Stott a reprieve.

“Couple of crazy catches,” said Braves first baseman Matt Olson. “Dansby going back, I think Rosario was going to have the play at it first. Rosario was pretty deep.”

“For me, that’s my best friend, is a good defense,” said Braves starter Kyle Wright, who kept the Phillies to a pair of hits and a walk while striking out six and turning his breaking balls loose enough to keep them out of balance. His only serious threat came when Bryce Harper, still in the Phillies’ designated hitter role, led off the second with an opposite-field double to left, took third when Nick Castellanos lined out to third, but was stranded by an unassisted ground out to first and a swinging strikeout.

“I try to get guys to put it on the ground. When they make catches like that, that’s good, too. That’s been one of my biggest weapons this year, I believe, is the defense.”

Phillies starter Zack Wheeler was almost as effective until he had two outs in the bottom of the sixth and perhaps got himself a little taken out of his game after his first pitch to Ronald Acuña, Jr. ran in hit the Braves’ right fielder on the inside part of his right elbow. Wheeler looked ashen on the mound as Braves trainers tended Acuña, who shook it off enough after about seven minutes to stay in the game and take first.

Swanson then worked out a full count walk to provide the Braves’ first man in scoring position all night to that point. Then Olson grounded one that took a tweener hop through Phillies first baseman Rhys Hoskins and sent Acuña home. With both starting pitchers working so stingily to that point, a single run must have felt like a three-run homer to the Braves.

Riley batted next. He hit a slow, small bouncer to the third base side of the mound, slow enough that Wheeler running to his right had no play to make when he speared the ball, but Swanson had a second Braves run to score on it. Then Travis d’Arnaud—the Braves catcher who’d caught Wheeler on days enough when the pair were Mets teammates—shot one sharply up the pipe for the single that sent Olson home with run number three.

A.J. Minter, Iglesias (with a little help from Riley), and Kenley Jansen kept the Phillies quiet to finish off. Andrew Bellotti and another former Met, Noah Syndergaard, kept the Braves quiet likewise to finish off. But their shoulders weren’t quite as burdened as those of the two Braves infielders who had to go over theirs to make plays that could have sent either one to the infirmary.

“[Swanson] had to readjust, get back on it and make an over the shoulder catch,” Olson said. “And then Riley going up against the tarp. Weird angle. Couple of great catches, and that’s the kind of game it was tonight.”

Game Three is set for Citizens Bank Park Friday. The Phillies had just played fourteen straight games on the road including the wild card set in which they swept the Cardinals to one side and future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols, plus ancient catcher Yadier Molina, into retirement well short of a shot at one more World Series ring.

“To leave here with a split,” said Phillies manager Rob Thomson, who had the interim tag removed well before the postseason began, “and go back home in front of a packed house of passionate people . . . I think will give our guys a little shot in the arm.”

Unless the Braves keep up the stingy pitching and luminous leather, of course. Then, that Philadelphia house packed with “passionate people” might want to give the Phillies a little shot in the head.

“Give us better balls”

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J.T. Realmuto, Aaron Nola

J.T. Realmuto with Aaron Nola. The catcher says building a better baseball would be the logical thing. Logical? In the Age of Manfred?

If there’s anyone in baseball who should know pitchers and pitching better than the pitchers and their pitching coaches, it’s the catchers. Fellows like the Phillies’ J.T. Realmuto.

The number one job a catcher has is handling his pitching staff. The pitchers who’ve thrown to Realmuto in eight years major league time have a 4.50 ERA with him behind the plate. That’s 4.16 above the league average over those seasons.

But that was also Realmuto behind the dish Friday night, when Aaron Nola struck ten straight Mets out from the first through the fourth, beginning and ending with Mets outfielder Michael Conforto . . . and tying the record set by the Mets’ late Hall of Famer Tom Seaver.

(How Phillies was this—their man breaks a record like that and they still lose the game? That Philadelphia wedding changed from “You may now boo the bride” to the couple reciting their wedding vows—and the minister handing them their divorce decree.)

So presume that Realmuto might be a little better and smarter than his pitchers’ overall ERA indicates. Could also depend on the pitchers, too. Nola’s an established ace, even if he’s not in the deGrom/Scherzer/Kershaw society.

Thus you might listen when Realmuto—who was rather outspoken before baseball’s government decided to enforce a foreign substances law it hadn’t enforced in a couple of generations—admits he can’t figure out what commissioner Rob Manfred was or wasn’t thinking when he decided it was time to stop, frisk, and dock almost midway through the working season.

“The biggest deal was to get guys to stop using the stuff that increased their spin rate the most,” Realmuto told The Athletic‘s Matt Gelb. “Guys have been using sunscreen and rosin forever. Now they’re not letting you do anything. So I really think the best thing they could possibly do, which obviously can’t happen during the season, is to get a better ball. Find a better ball. That’s the logical thing. It would make everybody happy.”

“He’s kidding, right?” said Sticky Fingers McSpidertack when he rang me too early this morning. I hadn’t even finished my first big mug of coffee, and Sticky was already trying to pick my reawakening brain. Remind me to get even some way.

“I don’t think he was kidding, Stick,” I replied. “Bear in mind that I’m still a little groggy. Dogs awakening you prematurely can do that to you.”

“Yeah, I know,” Stick said. “But when he says the best thing to do is to find a better ball, that scares me a little bit.”

“Why?” I asked. “It makes perfect sense, even to my still half-cloudy brain. I’ve said it myself before. Commissioner Nero needs to quit fiddling with the balls the way it’s been done the last few years and get a ball the pitchers can work with and the hitters can still hit.”

“You really need me to tell you?” Stick said. “Look at the past few American generations overall, never mind in baseball. Once upon a time, you built a better mouse trap and got rid of a better class of mice. That was then, this is now. Now, you build a better mouse trap and the cats gang up on you.”

“This is Commissioner Nero we’re talking about,” I said. “When he played the Mouse Trap Game as a kid, the mouse usually escaped.”

“I hear that. Even if you still sound like you’re talking underwater.”

“I still need my second mug of coffee, Stick.”

After I retrieved mug number two, I turned back to Realmuto’s commentary. He knows there were a few guys on the mound using their naughty sauce not to get a grip but to relieve the hitters of their grip—with a spin cycle that could get clothes completely dry as opposed to just damp dry if their pitches were the tumblers inside a front-loading washing machine.

But he also knows that most pitchers, plying their trade like the honest artisans they strive to be, weren’t using that new-fashioned medicated goo just to divide and conquer, either. “[T]hey can’t just not work with pitchers. You can’t throw them out there with these slick balls,” he insisted to Gelb.

It has to be somewhere in between where they can make a ball that has enough grip where guys don’t have to do that to be able to control it, but also a ball that’s not so sticky that it’s increasing spin rate. Which they should be able to do. It’s been different every season for the last four or five years. So it’s like, they can change the ball if they want. They just need to find the ball that works for everyone.

“Sounds so simple a child of five could do it. Now, somebody send the Phillies a child of five,” Stick said, channeling his inner Groucho Marx.

Gelb said, practically, that asking the Phillies themselves about the balls proved to be something like asking Jacques Cousteau about space exploration.

“Hey, I’m sure they’re trying, right? I guess for whatever reason they haven’t been able to find a ball that’s acceptable to everybody, but I know they’re working on it,” said Phillies president of baseball ops Dave Dombrowski. “I’ve been in GM meetings years ago where they passed around the ball with more tack on it, like they use in Japan, and say they were trying to develop something like that. But for whatever reason, we haven’t been able to find it. I hope they do. It would solve a lot.”

The dear boy.

News flash: MLB owns Rawlings, the sporting goods giant charged with making the Show’s balls. And, as Gelb writes, “it has pleaded ignorance to the constant changes in how the ball feels and behaves.”

“That’s the problem,” Stick said. “Commissioner Nero and his minions don’t have to plead ignorance. Their ignorance is the worst kept secret in baseball.”

“It is the single most important element to everything about the sport right now,” Gelb went on. “A consistent baseball. The lower seams and tighter-wound balls, combined with a lax attitude toward how doctoring the ball was policed, compelled pitchers to use sunscreen and stickier substances to better grip it.”

“That’s the other problem,” Stick said. “You don’t need me to tell you that, if you show me twenty pitchers finding solutions to working with these baby-ass-smooth balls, I’ll show you one or two pitchers figuring out they can squat inside hitters’ heads without even signing a lease.”

“I thought your own best pitch was what you called the Irish Spring Slider.”

“It was, until I switched to Ivory. Then every side was the dry side getting clobbered on me.”

Realmuto admitted he’s glad the Nero Regime did “something,” but he also admits he doesn’t know that they did the right thing. “But something had to change.” Something still has to change. If only Realmuto knew something about the art and science of making a baseball. He’d be better running Rawlings than the Nero Regime seems to be.

Since the Nero Regime are that ignorant about how to make baseballs, and that insouciant in their ignorance, how about coming up with a ball gripper both the Show’s government and, you know, the ones who actually go out there and play the game, can live with, without operating the Ball Police or the Stickum Security Service?

“I lost my Internet,” Stick said. “What does Gelb say about that?”

I read the quote back to him: “A mud machine and a rosin swab would be great. Science is amazing, and so is modern technology. Anything is possible — except a more consistent baseball with a transparent process about how it is manufactured.”

Stick pondered that a moment. Then, he said, “How come the country that came up with baseball in the first place can’t build a better baseball?”

“Because,” I said, “the moment someone comes up with that better mouse trap, the cats are liable to gang up on him.”