Four-game sweep caps one forgettable road trip
Philadelphia’s young pitching kept Miami bats quiet all weekend.
PHILADELPHIA — The Marlins headed home Sunday after concluding a road trip to forget with a 5-3 loss to the Phillies.
Asdrubal Cabrera’s two-run homer in the eighth inning off Drew Steckenrider gave the Phillies a sweep of their four-game series with the Marlins at Citizens Bank Park.
The Marlins went 0-6 on a trip that began in Atlanta, marking the first time since April of 2014 that they failed to win a single game on a road trip with at least six games. The six-game losing streak for the Marlins matches their longest of the season.
“It’s been a rough road trip,” said manager DonMattingly. “But I think we’re better than this.”
Dan Straily and Aaron Nola dueled through five scoreless innings before the Phillies broke through with three runs in the sixth after Philadelphia loaded the bases behind three walks,
Marlins
two issued by Straily and the other by Adam Conley. Conley nearly worked out of the bases-loaded jam before giving up run-scoring singles to Odubel Herrera and Maikel Franco.
“Obviously you don’t want to walk people,” said Straily, who walked five to go with seven strikeouts. “At the end of it, I got away with three of them and two of them hurt me.”
But the Marlins bounced back with three runs in the seventh to tie it. Derek Dietrich hit a two-run homer off Nola and Bour followed two outs later with a solo shot off Phillies reliever Seranthony Dominguez. The home run for Dietrich was his 14th, marking a new career high.
It remained tied until the eighth when Nick Williams singled to start the inning and Cabrera followed one out later with a towering fly ball into the second deck in right.
“That pitch was just hung,” Steckenrider said of the slider that Cabrera hit for his 20th home run. “It started in the spot I wanted it to start in. It ran right into his barrel. One bad pitch and it ended up costing us the ballgame.”
The Marlins received good outings from three of their four starters (Straily, Pablo Lopez and Trevor Richards) in the series but totaled only seven extra-base hits in the four games.
“I didn’t think we swung the bats very good here in general,” Mattingly said. “But they’ve got good young arms over there.”
Straily said the Marlins are still grinding through the season.
“We’re still trying to find out what we’ve got,” he said. “I think everyone will look back at this road trip and want to push it behind them as soon as possible and get back home and get things rolling in our direction.”
Said Mattingly: “Really three out of the four in the series, we were in. We just weren’t getting over that edge. You’ve got to make the right play or make the big hit or get the big out. We just didn’t get them this series.”
Rogers’ exit ‘precautionary:’ Trevor Rogers, the Marlins’ first-round pick in the 2017 amateur draft, came out of Saturday’s start with Single A Greensboro for “precautionary” reasons but he is not injured, according to a team source. The lefthander threw 52 pitches over three innings before being taken out. Rogers had been pitching well. In his previous three starts, he had allowed four earned runs while striking out 27 in 192/3 combined innings.
Mattingly likes Phillies in NL East: After playing the top three teams in the National League East over the past 11 games, Mattingly gives the Phillies a slight edge over the Braves to win the division. “(They’re) very similar in terms of they have a nice mixture of youth and experience,” Mattingly said. “(The Phillies’) starting pitching seems to be a little stronger, honestly. They’ve got good young starting pitching. They seem to be more consistent.” Mattingly said the Nationals are “probably the most talented” of the three teams and “most capable of getting on a true run. But it looks like the Phillies and Braves are believing in what they’re doing. They’re in a pennant race for the first time in a while.”