Tag Archives: Philadelphia Phillies

NLCS Game Seven: Don’t worry. Be happy.

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Arizona Diamondbacks

The Snakes start the pennant party after Phillies pinch-hitter Jake Cave flied out to end NLCS Game Seven.

So this is what the World Series will hoist. One team who got there with a bang—or several. One team who got there with whispers, almost, belying the pre-strike warning of the reptile that gives them their name.

It’s not that the Diamondbacks really intended to get to the World Series on the quiet side. But if the Rangers bludgeoned their way to the Series with back-to-back demolitions of the Astros in Houston, the Diamondbacks pried their way to the Series with four wins that could be called cool, calm, collected by comparison.

“We were silent, and we made damage,” said their shortstop Geraldo Perdomo, after the Snakes more or less nudged the Phillies home for the winter with a 4-2 National League Championship Series Game Seven win. “Be happy and enjoy what you do. That’s all. That was the message.”

Go ahead. Cue that ancient Bobby McFerrin hit. Don’t worry. Be happy. It wouldn’t be the worst theme song you could attach to a pennant winner.

The biggest lead by which the Diamondbacks beat the Phillies this set was a four-game margin in Game Six in Philadelphia. They won the National League pennant Tuesday night with a win in which it was harder to determine which was more profound, a small pack of squandered Phillies chances or a thick enough pack of quiet Diamondbacks opportunity seizings.

It was almost as though the smiling Snakes snuck their way to the World Series in the end. From their first Game Seven run scoring on a soft grounder the Phillies couldn’t turn into an inning-ending double play in the first to three of the least noisy fly outs finisher Paul Sewald got the Phillies to hit to end it.

Come to think of it, it was as though the underestimated Arizona gang wasn’t even fazed when Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm hit Diamondbacks starter Brandon Pfaadt’s first pitch of the second inning into the left center field seats. Pfaadt certainly wasn’t. He got second baseman Bryson Stott to fly out to the center field track, then struck catcher J.T. Realmuto and right fielder Nick Castellanos out swinging to prove it.

Pfaadt only looked shaky two innings later, when Bohm wrung him for a one-out walk, and Stott doubled him home to give the Phillies what proved a very short-lived 2-1 lead. Realmuto followed with a line single to left sending Stott to third which brought Castellanos to the plate.

The guy who began looking like Mr. October during the Phillies’s division series dispatch of the Braves and continued when he homered during his first plate appearance of this NLCS had gone 0-for-21 entering this plate appearance. Pfaadt struck him out swinging. Then the righthander shook off a four-pitch walk to left fielder Brandon Marsh to strike spaghetti-bat center field sweeper Johan Rojas out on three pitches.

And again the Diamondbacks didn’t resemble a team of no-names whose postseason days were going to be numbered by Philadelphia’s comparative star power.

Third baseman Emmanuel Rivera started unfurling that evidence with a leadoff line single up the pipe in the top of the fifth. Shortstop Geraldo Perdomo bunted him to second, perhaps ill-advised considering the wasted out and second baseman Ketel Marte’s swinging strikeout to follow.

Enter Corbin Carroll, the rookie about whom it’s very fair to say the Diamondbacks world revolves these days. After scoring that first run in the first, and in the middle of a 3-for-4 night, Carroll shot a base hit into center to send Rivera home to re-tie the game and push Phillies starter Ranger Suárez out of it.

Then catcher Gabriel Moreno greeted reliever Jeff Hoffman with a base hit after Carroll stole second, enabling the rook to be run number three before Moreno was caught trying to stretch to second. Meanwhile, Carroll also spent his evening tying a postseason rookie record for hits in a winner-take-all contest.

Most teams run out of an inning when they could do more damage might go into mourning at that point. Not these Diamondbacks. Their reliever Joe (Be Fruitful and) Mantiply shook off Kyle Schwarber’s bottom of the fifth-opening double to get Phillies shortstop Trea Turner to ground out to third and Bryce Harper, the dangerous convert to first base, to fly out to the track in left.

That was enough to prompt Snakes manager Torey Lovullo to get Mantiply the hell out of there and bring Ryan Thompson in to lure Bohm into a pop out Marte caught at the back of the infield for the side.

You could almost hear the still-underestimated Diamondbacks—who swept their way to this set in the first place by pushing the Brewers out of the wild card series and the oh-so-superior Dodgers out of a division series—thinking, if not whispering, “We do this kind of stuff to them all through the pictures.”

Don’t worry. Be happy.

Two innings later, the Snakes delivered what proved to have been one of the least dramatic knockout punches of the entire postseason. After José Alvarado relieved Hoffman for the Phillies with one out, Perdomo singled to left and Marte doubled him to third—making Marte owner of the longest postseason-career-opening hitting streak at sixteen.

Up stepped Carroll. Proving he could do things the quiet way as well as any other way, he lofted a sacrifice fly to left for the fourth Diamondbacks run and the final run of the game. Don’t worry. Be happy.

Then came Zack Wheeler, the Phillies’s Game Five starter who pitched like an ace when they needed it most to take a 3-2 NLCS lead, to pitch an inning and a third’s spotless relief. During which Harper lost the grandest opportunity to overthrow the Diamondbacks for good when he batted in the bottom of the seventh.

Cristian Pache pinch hit for Rojas with one out and walked off Diamondbacks reliever Andrew Saalfrank. Schwarber worked out a full count walk. Exit Saalfrank, enter Kevin Ginkel for the Snakes, and Turner flied out to bring Harper to the plate. The guy who sent the Phillies to the World Series last year with that eighth-inning homer in the mud hit one out to center field this time, but with not enough to avoid landing in center fielder Alek Thomas’s glove for the side.

“Just missed it,” Harper lamented postgame. “Not being able to come through in that moment, just devastation for me. I feel like I let my team down and let the city of Philadelphia down, as well. That’s a moment I feel like I need to come through.”

He was hardly alone. These Phillies who’d bombed the Diamondbacks in a 10-0 Game Two blowout scored a grand total of four runs in three of their NLCS losses and went 1-for-7 with men in scoring position in Game Seven alone.

“I would say frustrated is the correct word,” said Castellanos, maybe slightly less for himself than for his team. “Just because the potential of this team is so much greater than going home before the World Series. Last year, when we lost Game Six, there was a lot of, ‘All right, we got here. Now we can build off that.’ Knowing how we feel about this team and coming up short from the year previous, it’s a disgusting feeling, honestly.”

When pinch hitter Jake Cave flied out to right against Sewald to end Game Seven, the Phillies may have been more voluminous in their self-criticisms than the Diamondbacks were celebrating their first pennant since 2001. And the clubhouse celebration has been described politely as mayhem, from drenching general manager Mike Hazen to first baseman Christian Walker passing out the cigars.

Don’t worry. Be happy.

It doesn’t mean you have to stay silent in the end. It also doesn’t mean the Snakes will count themselves out no matter how monstrous the Rangers might look. Maybe they figure that, if they could finally dismantle the big bad Phillie phloggers there’s no reason to fear the Texas wrecking crew. Yet.

“We were coming here to play our best baseball,” Lovullo said postgame about his and his team’s pre-game thinking, “and that’s been the messaging, and it’s been very consistent throughout the course of the year. Today is going to be our finest hour, and I just wanted to make sure that they knew that’s how I felt.”

“The Brewers were supposed to beat us,” Thompson said. “The Dodgers were supposed to beat us. The Phillies were supposed to beat us. They’re gonna say that the Rangers are supposed to beat us, too. We’ll see how it goes.” He could afford to be sanguine, since the Rays released him earlier this season but the Diamondbacks took a flyer and he rewarded them by becoming one of their key bullpen bulls.

And Lovullo could afford to be just a little self-congratulatory. Knowing that famed sports talking head Chris (Mad Dog) Russo swore to retire from radio if the Diamondbacks got to the World Series, Lovullo couldn’t resist. “I would love to see him quit if we won today,” the manager said before Game Seven began. “There’s nothing better than a wise guy New Yorker saying something and then having to chomp on those words.”

Except maybe a manager who shepherds the guys the world doubted to baseball’s biggest dance. Or, a team that finally doesn’t let the insane asylum known as a Citizen’s Bank Park crowd intimidate them out. Just don’t ask the Snakes to explain how they pulled it off. “I don’t even know if there is an explanation,” Carroll said. “It’s just magic.”

But you might ask Harper. “Watching them prior to this series, I don’t think anything scared that team,” he said graciously. “I don’t think they had any doubts in their minds of coming back here and playing in Philadelphia. I don’t think that team is scared of any situation or any spot.”

Don’t worry. Be happy.

If that’s what got the Diamondbacks to the forthcoming World Series, don’t knock it. Baseball has enough too-serious-for-their-own-good teams as it is. Just try to picture most of this postseason’s vanquished (the Phillies aren’t exactly a gang of mopes, after all) approaching things that Diamondbacks way. Not to mention a lot of the teams who couldn’t make the postseason in the first place.

They’d sooner toast each other with castor oil martinis than be caught thinking, Don’t worry. Be happy. And where are those guys now?

NLCS Game Five: All things small and big

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Zack Wheeler

Zack Wheeler pitching almost spotlessly in NLCS Game Five did as much to save the Phillies season as their early running and mid-game bombing did.

Ask, and you shall receive. The Phillies asked Zack Wheeler to pitch like an ace in National League Championship Series Game Five—and he did. They asked their hitters to step up and swing when it mattered—and they did. They asked their bullpen to hold fort—and they did.

Their reward for doing those things was a handy 6-1 win in Chase Field and a trip back to Philadelphia with not one but two chances to punch their World Series tickets. The Phillies, of course, not to mention the throng liable to greet them in Citizens Bank Park come Monday, would prefer it not take that long.

All it took otherwise was for the Phillies to put Games Three and Four behind them, the ones in which their overtaxed bullpen let the Diamondbacks waste a grand start by Ranger Suárez in the former and their overtaxed bull Craig Kimbrel implode them toward a come-from-ahead loss in the latter.

Not to mention Kyle Schwarber starting the Game Five ball rolling in a way you don’t expect of the bombardier who showed up nuclear in the sixth inning, beating one into the ground to take a slow enough roll toward third, a region left open with the Diamondbacks in a slight shift toward second, that he beat out for a leadoff hit.

Not to mention Bryce Harper sending him to third with a one-out single shot right back up the pipe, Bryson Stott lining him home with a single. And, Harper coming home on a double steal while inadvertently colliding with a momentarily-stunned Diamondbacks catcher Gabriel Moreno as the throw from Snakes second baseman Ketel Marte to the plate went off it. It was the first time any Phillie stole home in any postseason.

Not to mention Wheeler and his Diamondbacks counterpart Zac Gallen engaging a pitcher’s duel that was noiseless, generally, until Schwarber opened the top of the sixth by turning Gallen’s 2-0 hanging breaking ball into a satellite flying over the Chase Field pool and several rows into the seats behind it. Giving Schwarber the all-time National League Championship Series home run lead with eleven.

Not to mention Harper, one out later, wrestling back from 1-2 into a full count before driving a fastball slightly over the middle of the zone and a little further into the same general real estate where Schwarber’s leadoff bomb landed.

Not to mention J.T. Realmuto abusing the Diamondbacks’ third reliever of the evening, Luis Frias, for a two-out two-run homer in the top of the eighth, which could have been considered repayment for Diamondbacks center fielder Alek Thomas—the hero of the Snakes’ Game Four win with his unlikely eighth-inning, game-tying two-run homer—hitting Wheeler’s first pitch of the seventh over the right center field fence for the only score of the evening for his team.

Not to mention the Phillies bullpen keeping the Diamondbacks off the board the final two innings despite a couple of dicey moments in the ninth, when Evan Longoria drew a two-out walk off Seranthony Domínguez and took second on defensive indifference before Perdomo landed on first after his bouncer hit Domínguez’s leg and deflected to shortstop.

Manager Rob Thomson reached for Matt Strahm. Strahm landed a swinging strikeout on Diamondbacks rookie Corbin Carroll to finish off. The Phillies reached for ways to express how it felt to shake off such a heartbreaker as the Game Four loss.

“I just want to win. That’s it,” said Harper, whose evening included a grand first inning play when he speared Diamondbacks DH Pavin Smith’s hard grounder lunging right and onto a knee before taking it to the pad himself. “Whatever that takes, whatever that’s going to be, whatever that’s going to look like. That was a big game for us. Coming in here and getting one is huge. That’s a good team over there. We took advantage of everything we could.”

Harper also tended Moreno at once after the double-steal collision, perhaps mindful that Perdomo has been under concussion watch before in his career and was caught in the head on a backswing during the D-Backs’s wild card set. “The way he went down,” Harper said postgame, “I was making sure he was good and stable.”

(Memo to: Social media idiots. It wasn’t a dirty play. Harper came straight down the base line without trying to collide with Moreno. Moreno moving from in front of the plate to reach for the throw crossed into Harper’s path, unintentionally but technically blocking the plate without the ball in his mitt, illegally, leaving Harper nowhere to go at that moment.)

The collision to one side, Realmuto seemed less impressed by his own home run than by the double steal that made Harper the second-oldest (at 31) ever to steal home in a postseason game. (Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson at 37 remains the oldest; he did it in the 1955 World Series.) “After what [the Snakes] did to us the last two games, they had all the momentum in the world,” the Phillies catcher said postgame. “So we had to try to do something early in the game to get it back. That was a great call by [Thomson] putting that on.”

The plot was simple. Stott would take off for second and draw Moreno’s throw while stopping just short of the pad. It looked like Stott getting himself caught in a rundown, but Marte winged his throw home almost immediately after Stott stopped with Harper, instructed to “be aggressive” by Phillies third base coach Dusty Wathan, gunning it home.

“It just shows you,” said Phillies shortstop Trea Turner, “how being aggressive and putting pressure on those guys — not just them but everybody in general, to put pressure on the other side is good and it makes things happen.” Make things happen? The Phillies opened by taking a page out of the Diamondbacks’ grinding book and shoving right back before even thinking about the long ball side of their own game.

For all the Phillies’s basepath daring and bomb launching, though, Wheeler had to have been the player of the game for them when all was said and done. “He gave us exactly what we needed with where our pen was at,” said Thomson. “It’s incredible what he does,” said Harper of Wheeler, who threw 21 first-pitch strikes facing 28 batters. “It’s so much fun to watch. I love playing behind him, and it’s incredible. He’s legit, man.”

Now it’ll be up to Aaron Nola to pick up in Game Six where Wheeler left off in Game Five. As for the rest of the Phillies? Who knows what surprises they might bring? Another double steal including a theft of the plate? Another evening of acrobat defense? Another bomb or three?

You almost hope the set goes the full distance, if only to give the Diamondbacks more chances to show the talent might overcome this edition’s general lack of postseason experience. They’re a young team with a lot of upside and a lot of dynamism in their own right. They showed they, too, can exploit mistakes or misfirings in pushing this NLCS to a two-all tie in the first place.

But if they want to hang around a little longer, they’ll have to find a way to beat the Phillies in the Phillies’ own playpen, where the audience never sleeps and the noise rarely lets up before the final out. The Phillies just won their first NLCS road game. Going home, however, means a lot more to them than just scoring a run.

NLCS Game Four: Second verse, worse than the first?

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Craig Kimbrel, Alek Thomas

Diamondbacks pinch hitter Alek Thomas hitting the game re-tying home run off Phillies reliever Craig Kimbrel in the bottom of the Game Four eighth.

“He’ll be available tomorrow,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said of his just-chastened reliever Craig Kimbrel after National League Championship Series Game Three ended with Kimbrel surrendering a game-ending, game-losing RBI single, “and he’ll be ready to go.” Those may yet prove to be the nine most frightening words in the Phillies’ or their fans’ vocabularies. This week, this weekend, and maybe this year.

They may not necessarily bring Kimbrel himself much comfort in his heart of hearts, either.

Let’s be absolutely fair and say what we still can’t bring ourselves to say while we’re busy booing, hissing, and dreaming up new and snarkier insults to spread all over social media. There isn’t a professional baseball player alive who doesn’t go onto the field knowing that one mistake, one errant swing, one misstep, one missed pitch, could turn him into a fan piñata for life, or close enough to it.

Let’s also be absolutely fair and say Cardiac Craig didn’t cost his team the pennant yet. The game he allowed the Diamondbacks to tie so late, before his successor reliever José Alvarado served the RBI hit that broke the tie to stay, did nothing worse than tie this NLCS at two games each. Neither team’s season is over just yet.

But is Thomson just as willing to say after Game Four what he said of Kimbrel after he surrendered the Game Three-losing hit?

All Kimbrel had to do going out for the bottom of the eighth inning Friday night was keep the frisky young Diamondbacks from doing anything about a late and hard-earned 5-3 Philadelphia lead. He wasn’t even asked to finish the game. Just keep it there before Thomson could hand off to, say, José Alvarado for the ninth.

Groucho Marx would say it was “so simple a child of five could do it. Now, somebody send for a child of five.” It’s not impossible that a child of five could have come away with only a little singe. Kimbrel came away deep fried.

For all the gags about his high wire relief style, nobody pretends it’s fun to surrender a late, game-turning home run at all. There isn’t a child alive who dreams of going out to the mound in one of The Big Ones and getting his brains blown out. But it really becomes a microcosmic season in hell when it’s pinch hit by a spaghetti bat whose major league value over two seasons is plus defense in center field, enough to atone for the weak bat with nineteen defensive runs saved above the league average.

The fair supposition was that Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo sent Alek Thomas out to pinch hit for third baseman Emmanuel Rivera hoping only that a lefthanded bat against the righthanded Kimbrel might pick up enough of a hit to push Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. from second to third.

Kimbrel had opened by feeding Gurriel—who’d robbed J.T. Realmuto of at least extra bases with a leaping catch at the fence in the second—a 2-2 fastball to hit into left for a leadoff double. Then, after designated hitter Evan Longoria lined out to left, Kimbrel started behind Thomas, 3-1. It became 3-2 after Thomas fouled one off.

Then, Kimbrel served up a fastball just enough up and off the middle of the plate. It wasn’t a terrible pitch. Nothing on Thomas’s resume through that moment suggested he’d get anything better with it than a line drive base hit the other way, possibly to be stopped before it left the infield.

But the spaghetti bat pulled it, somehow, into the Chase Field pool behind the right field fence. Tying the game at five each. Tying the stomachs of Philadelphia fans in the ballpark and back in the City of Brotherly Love into knots. It wasn’t the game-losing hit by any definition, but those fans could only have thought, second verse, worse than the first.

A called strikeout later, Kimbrel threw Ketel Marte a meatball right down the pipe and Marte rapped it into left for a base hit. Only when Kimbrel plunked Corbin Carroll on the first pitch did Thomson reach for further relief and bring Alvarado in.

Too late. Alvarado fell behind Gabriel Moreno 3-1, then Moreno singled up the pipe to score Marte for the 6-5 Snakes lead the Phillies didn’t overthrow in the ninth. (Yes. It’s more than a little unfair to hang Kimbrel with the “loss” when he wasn’t even on the mound to surrender the hit that plated what proved the winning run.)

Maybe we should say couldn’t. Kyle Schwarber—who’d first put the Phillies on the scoreboard with a leadoff blast in the top of the fourth—hit Diamondbacks finisher Paul Sewald’s first two-out pitch into the right field corner for a double. But Sewald got Trea Turner to strike out swinging for the game.

What happens to Kimbrel in these moments during such postseasons? What happens to any relief pitcher whose line of work includes going into a game tasked with holding a tight lead, escaping a nasty jam, or just finishing off the opposition in the final frame, only to see it blow up in a single pitch?

The best of that profession had to have their moments of doubt. The best of that profession have been broken in the moment, even and especially the biggest moment. Even Mariano Rivera, the Hall of Famer whose closing career postseason statistics would equal a fluke regular season for a lesser talent, suffered the horror of losing a World Series with one pitch to an ancient Diamondback named Luis Gonzalez.

The Mariano shook that one off, picked himself up, and went on with his Hall of Fame career. Kimbrel generally does likewise after an outing, even if he leaves behind a trail of work that tells observers that, even when he comes out alive, it still feels as though his team lost instead of won.

If the moments are too big for Kimbrel, he almost never lets it show. If they’re too big for him, he probably wouldn’t go out there time and again risking a game, his reputation, and maybe his (and his team’s) nervous system. He’s known both off the charts success and off the charts faltering, regular and postseason alike. Since (and especially during) the 2018 postseason, Kimbrel outings leave people feeling often enough as though his teams lose even when they win.

At 35 years old, Kimbrel must wonder to himself how many more such moments (and how many dollars on his contract) are worth the strain. Others, of course, must wonder how many more such moments the Phillies are willing to risk. They’ll have a spiritual advantage getting the set back to Citizens Bank Park, of course. But they’d rather have a series advantage going home, too.

“We’ve got to talk about that,” Thomson said postgame, when the question became changing Kimbrel’s role to come. “Do you put him in a little lower-leverage spot? I don’t know. I’ll talk to him with [pitching coach] Caleb [Cotham], talk through it, and see where we’re at.” That was a far turn from Thomson’s pregame vote of confidence: “I trust [his bullpen]. Has [Kimbrel] scattered the zone at times? Sure. But if you look at our charts, everybody’s had a little bit of a hiccup, but they’ve bounced back. So you’ve got to trust that.”

Some social media mavens raised the name Mitch Williams, the zany and nerve-challenging Phillies lefthander who served up a World Series-losing home run to Joe Carter three decades ago. They thought the Wild Thing got too wild, too crazy, too reckless.

But it turned out that then-manager Jim Fregosi and then-pitching coach Johnny Podres forgot to tell Williams to back away from the slide-step—put on to keep Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson from as much of his usual basepath mischief as possible (a futile hope, of courae)—that altered and rushed his deliveries and his fastballs.

With Podres already having visited the mound, and neither he nor Fregosi finding a sign to send with the order, Williams was doomed when his slide-stepped fastball went into Carter’s wheelhouse instead of up and away where the Wild Thing wanted it and might have thrown it out of his normal delivery.

The three-legged mistake of Fregosi, Podres, and Williams lost the Phillies a World Series. Kimbrel’s high-wire mistake merely tied an NLCS game. “I rolled up in here and cost us two games,” said Kimbrel postgame, clearly not pleased with himself. “The bright side is we’re still tied at 2-2 and we’ve got a game here tomorrow, then we get to Philly.”

Forced to a bullpen Game Four in which the bulls ran short, Kimbrel ran out, and a few early defensive mistakes made life tougher for the Phillies than it should have been, they  need Zack Wheeler to pitch an even better Game Five Saturday than he did enabling the Phillies to win Game One.

They also need Aaron Nola to be his Game Two self in Game Six back home. Their bullpen, whose main men have worked 14.3 innings in this set, needs a huge break. They need to quit underestimating this tenacious crew of Diamondbacks, no matter how silly they’ve slapped Snakes starters Merrill Kelly and Zac Gallen, the latter of whom squares off against Wheeler on Saturday.

They can’t afford to risk Kimbrel tearing it even once more, either.

NLCS Game Three: Cardiac arrested

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Craig Kimbrel

“Some days you get them, and some days you don’t.”—Phillies relief pitcher Craig Kimbrel, gotten but good by the Diamondbacks in Game Three.

Two League Championship Series Game Threes, two postseason juggernauts stopped. One night, the Astros slap aging and rusted Max Scherzer silly en route making the ALCS a 2-1 affair. The next afternoon, the Diamondbacks do what Cardiac Craig Kimbrel all but begs them to do and turn the NLCS likewise into a 2-1 affair.

Until both the Phillies and the Diamondbacks more or less snuck single runs home in each half of the seventh, their Game Three was mostly a pitching clinic. In fact, until Diamondbacks reliever Ryan Thompson wild-pitched Bryce Harper home in the top of the seventh, no scoreless postseason game ever ended its scoreless status that way.

Both starters, Ranger Suárez for the Phillies and rookie Brandon Pfaadt for the Diamondbacks, pitched into the sixth without so much as a peep across the plate on either side.

The bullpens took over and, while a few things got a little dicey between them, they held the tie and threatened to send the game to extra innings. Then Phillies manager Rob Thomson made his big mistake. He called upon Kimbrel to hold fort for the bottom of the ninth.

If this game was in Philadelphia, even the Phillies’s loud and loyal fans would have had the crash carts on double red alert. But in Chase Field, the Diamondbacks’s snake pit, the only thing anyone on that crowd wanted to hand Kimbrel was a loaded triple-decker hamburger smothered in heavy sauce.

This was a little too classic Kimbrel. He fell behind Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. leading off, 3-0, pumped two strikes called on the corner, watched Gurriel foul a pair off, then walked him low and away.

He fell behind Pavin Smith, a late game entry pinch hitting for the day’s designated hitter Evan Longoria two innings earlier, 2-0, Gurriel stealing second on the second pitch.

Then, a swinging strike, followed by a grounder up the middle that Phillies third baseman Bryson Stott grabbed on a slide but left himself no play. With Gurriel the potential winning run now on third.

Next was Emmanuel Rivera, playing third for the Diamondbacks. Kimbrel got his first first-pitch strike of the assignment while Smith took second on fielders’ indifference. A foul strike, a ball low, then a grounder toward third speared by Phillies shortstop Trea Turner, who threw home and nailed Gurriel at the plate.

Back in Philadelphia, the sigh of relief probably crossed three state lines—but the crash carts remained online and on double red alert. With good reason.

Kimbrel started Snakes shortstop Geraldo Perdomo with a ball way off the plate before Perdomo fouled the next pitch away and swung for strike two. This was the first time Kimbrel got ahead of a batter in the inning. That’d teach him. Two straight balls, low, to follow. Ball four to load the pillows. A first pitch strike to second baseman Ketel Marte. A second pitch fastball a little up . . .

Bing! It wasn’t up enough for Marte to miss shooting it back up the pipe for a base hit sending Smith home with the game winner.

Yes, it was only Game Three. Yes, the Phillies still have the NLCS advantage. But, yes, they may have to think twice before deciding they can live with the cardiac side of Kimbrel much longer.

“He just couldn’t find the zone consistently,” said Phillies manager Rob Thomson postgame, “and sometimes that happens to Kim,” Thomson said. “But he’ll be available [for Gamr Four], and he’ll be ready to go.”

Hear me out. This guy has been a great pitcher in the past. Somehow, he still holds a lifetime 2.47 fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP), a 0.99 walks/hits per inning pitched rate, and a 3.87-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio, not to mention a 14.2 strikeouts-per-nine rate. But his real greatness may well be behind him, even if he was an All-Star in his first Phillies season this year.

Now, let’s look at Kimbrel by dividing his career between his final of three regular seasons with the Red Sox and his seasons since:

Craig Kimbrel ERA FIP WHIP BB/9 K/9 K/BB
2010-2018 1.80 1.81 0.91 3.3 14.8 4.44
2019-2023 3.57 3.68 1.16 4.1 13.0 3.15

Yes, he can still strike the other guys out like a virtuoso. But since leaving Boston he’s walking about one more per nine than before and striking one less out. He’s allowing more to reach base in the first place since leaving Boston. His ERA/FIP were about dead even during those great first nine seasons of his career, but they’re two runs higher since that 2010-2018 term. And, from 2019-23, his FIP (kind of your ERA when the defense behind you is taken out of the equation) is eleven points higher than his ERA.

Since somehow earning six saves despite a 6.74 ERA in the 2018 postseason, Kimbrel has been up and down in October. In 2020, he pitched an inning and a third shutdown relief in the National League wild card game for the Cubs. In 2021, he appeared in three American League division series for the White Sox—and surrendered two earned runs in three innings.

Until Thursday afternoon, Kimbrel this postseason looked great if you didn’t look past the surface numbers. In division series Game One he got the side in order to finish the Phillies’ win—without a strikeout. But he needed Johan Rojas’s spectacular running catch in division series Game Four’s seventh to save him in the Phillies’ win.

He got the NLCS Game One save credit with a swinging strikeout and a game-ending double play—after he walked his second batter of the ninth. Entering Game Three, Kimbrel had an ERA of zero . . . but a 3.71 FIP. But after Game Three, they became 2.09/5.07.

A 5.07 FIP is not conducive to late-inning survival.

“Some days you get them, and some days you don’t,” Kimbrel said, too matter-of-factly, after the game ended. “Today just wasn’t my day.”

Remember: It wasn’t Kimbrel’s fault the Phillies’ usually formidable offense was kept to three hits on the day, or scored their only run of the game on a walk, an infield hit, a double play pushing Harper to third, and the wild pitch enabling Harper to score. But given the chance to push Game Three to extras tied at one, Kimbrel went cardiac once too often.

That may not be a thrill or a chill the Phillies can afford much longer. If at all.

He’ll be available tomorrow, and he’ll be ready to go. Which “he’ll”—the guy who can be as tight shutdown as they come, or the guy who can’t stop the high wire act until the cable snaps under his feet? These Phillies deserve to know, because these Diamondbacks won’t be kind if the wrong one’s ready.

NLCS Game Two: Was it loud enough?

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Merrill Kelly

Arizona pitcher Merrill Kelly leaving NLCS Game Two in the sixth inning and hearing it from the Citizens Bank Park crowd whose sound he underestimated. He ended up bearing the least of the Phillies’ destruction on the night.

Maybe nobody gave Diamondbacks pitcher Merrill Kelly the memo. Maybe he missed the sign completely. Wherever Kelly happened to be, if and when he was warned not to poke the Philadelphia bear and his native habitat, he learned the hard way Tuesday night and the Diamondbacks whole were dragged into class.

Maybe the Braves sent him a message he never saw. You remember the Braves. The guys trolling Bryce Harper after their second division series game, when Harper got doubled up on a very close play following an impossible center field catch to end the game. They learned the hard way, too. They’re also on early winter vacation.

Before this National League Championship Series even began, Kelly was asked whether the heavy metal-loud Citizens Bank Park crowd might have a hand in the field proceedings. He practically shrugged it off, though in absolute fairness he wasn’t exactly trying to be mean or nasty.

“I haven’t obviously heard this place on the field, but I would be very surprised if it trumped that Venezuela game down in Miami [in the World Baseball Classic],” said Kelly, a righthander whose countenance bears a resemblance to comedian Chris Elliott and who’s considered a mild-mannered young man otherwise. “When Trea [Turner] hit that grand slam, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced—at least baseball-wise, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced an atmosphere like that so I hope that this isn’t louder than that.”

That grand slam jolted Team USA into the semifinal round. By the same Trea Turner who’d start Kelly’s Tuesday night with a jolt, hitting a one-out, one-strike pitch into the left center field seats in the bottom of the first. 

Kelly may not have been trying to be snarky, but The Bank let him have it early and often, first when he was introduced pre-game time and then when he took the mound for the bottom of the Game Two first. Loud, clear, and unmistakeable.

The only things Kelly faced louder and more clear than that were Turner’s score-starting blast, the one-ball, two-out laser Kyle Schwarber sent off Kelly’s best pitch, a changeup, into the right field seats in the third, and the 2-1 skyrocket Schwarber sent into the right center field seats leading off the bottom of the sixth.

“He’s really effective because he has a plus-plus changeup,” Schwarber said postgame. “He threw it 2-0 and kinda gave me the window. That’s what it looks like coming out of there. I think that was the first strike [on a] changeup I saw. [The home run pitch] was a little bit more down and away. But, I mean, it came out of the same height. So those are things that you look for.”

“They’re good big-league hitters,” Kelly said of the Phlogging Phillies postgame. “That’s what good big-league hitters do. They don’t miss mistakes.” Neither did The Bank’s crowd, serenading him with “Mer-rill! Mer-rill” chants at any available opportunity. But Kelly actually pitched decently despite the bombs. He only surrendered three hits, but walking three didn’t help despite his six strikeouts.

He’d also prove to have been handled mercifully compared to what the Phillies did to the Diamondbacks bullpen in a 10-0 Game Two blowout.

Once they pushed Kelly out of the game, with two out in the sixth and Turner aboard with a walk, they slapped reliever Joe (Be Fruitful and) Mantiply with a base hit (Bryson Stott), a two-run double (J.T. Realmuto), and another RBI double (Brandon Marsh). Just like that, the Phillies had a four-run sixth with six on the board and counting.

Then, Mantiply walked the Schwarbinator to open the Philadelphia seventh. Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo reached for Ryne Nelson. One out later, Harper singled Schwarber to third, Alec Bohm doubled them home with a drive that hit the track, Stott hit a floater that hit the infield grass between Nelson plus Diamondbacks third baseman Evan Longoria and catcher Gabriel Moreno, Realmuto singled Bohm home and Stott to third, and Nick Castellanos sent Stott home with a sacrifice fly.

This time they didn’t need Harper to provide the major dramatics. He’d done enough of that in Game One, hitting a first-inning, first-pitch-to-him, first-NLCS-swing, first-time-ever-on-his-own-birthday nuke one out after Schwarber hit his own first-pitch bomb. That game turned into a 5-3 Phillies win. On Tuesday night, they turned the Diamondbacks into rattlesnake stew.

They made life just as simple for Game Two starter Aaron Nola as for Game One starter Zack Wheeler. Wheeler gave the Phillies six innings of two-run, three-hit, eight-strikeout ball; Nola gave them six innings of three-hit, seven-strikeout, shutout ball. It was as if the Philadelphia Orchestra offered successive evenings of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major—featuring Isaac Stern one night and Itzhak Perlman the next.

“It’s a little more hostile and a little more engaging,” said Turner of the Bank crowd after the Phillies banked Game One. “I think [Kelly] can maybe tell you after tonight what it’s like, but I wouldn’t put anything past our fans. Our fans have been unbelievable. They’ve been great. I don’t know what decibels mean, but I guess we did something cool for AC/DC concert level decibels the other night . . . I would just wait and see and we’ll see what he says after [Game Two]”

“They’re up all game on their feet from pitch number one till the end,” said Nola postgame. “I feel like you don’t really see that too much around the league. That just shows you how passionate and into the game they are. They know what’s going on, and that helps us a lot.”

That was not necessarily what Lovullo wanted to hear before or after the Game Two massacre ended. “Everybody’s talking about coming into this environment,” he said, audibly frustrated, “and I don’t care.”

We’ve got to play better baseball. Start with the manager, and then trickle all the way down through the entire team. We’ve got to play Diamondback baseball . . . Diamondback baseball is grinding out at bats . . . driving up pitch counts, catching pop ups . . . win[ning] a baseball game by just being a really smart, stubborn baseball team in all areas.

That assumes the Phillies will just roll over and let them play it. The wild-card Diamondbacks who steamrolled two division winners in the earlier rounds to get here in the first place looked like anything except an unlikely juggernaut after getting manhandled in Philadelphia. They shouldn’t take the Phillies for granted once the set moves to Chase Field, either.

The Phillies might have been a one-game-over-.500 road team on the regular season, but they beat the Diamondbacks in Chase Field three out of four—a couple of weeks after the Snakes beat them two out of three in The Bank. Until this NLCS it was a little over three months since the two teams tangled. It certainly didn’t phaze the Phillies.

“I still think we’re real confident,” said Kelly. “I think there was a lot to be said about us after the All-Star break about how bad of a slump that we went into. I’ve seen in this clubhouse, I’ve seen from these guys that we haven’t gotten rattled all year. And I don’t want us to hang our heads and pout about it this time.”

But let’s say the Diamondbacks iron up and find ways to neutralise the Phillies’ offensive bludgeons and pitching scythes which, admittedly, might require a kidnapping or three. Let’s say they win all three games at Chase. They might become the only team to be at a disadvantage with a 3-2 series lead.

Because guess where the set would return then. And, unless my prowling has missed something this morning, Kelly didn’t have one word to say about that crowd after Game Two came to its merciful end. It must have been more than loud enough for him.