Sosa plays hero as stats finally align
Colorado reliever Hand helps former team earn a one-night reprieve
PHILADELPHIA — It doesn’t make a ton of sense.
Peruse the Phillies’ lineup and it’s tough to understand how a team with batting averages like those populating Rob Thomson’s lineup can point to its offense as a prime culprit in a sub-.500 run through its first 20 games.
There’s a leadoff man hitting
.360 and leading baseball in hits. There’s a .314 hitter in the two-hole.
Excepting the team’s leading home-run hitter, the lineup’s BA column Friday night then read
.289, .356, .269 and .311 through the run-producing four through seven slots. And then there’s a nine-hitter batting .344, one who would supply the game-winning hit.
That doesn’t square with a team that entered Friday 16th in baseball in runs scored, that had been shut out in three of its last six games, that needed an almighty grind to avoid a second straight loss to the dreadful Colorado Rockies.
In finally subduing the Rockies 4-3, thanks in part to some vintage Brad Hand relief coming out of the other bullpen this season, the Phillies showed simultaneously why they’re struggling and how they can turn it around.
The Phillies’ problems amid a 9-12 start point directly toward the offense, one that entered having scored 87 runs. Take out the 15-3 win over Miami and a 14-3 beatdown of Cincy — many of the runs tacked on long after the game was decided — and you get 58 runs in the other 18 games.
Cherry-picking data perhaps a tad, but that puts the Phillies’ output most nights this season at an anemic three runs per game.
“You can’t overreact to that; that’s baseball,” Thomson said of nights like Thursday’s 5-0 whitewashing. “That’s the way the game is, and that’s why it’s so much fun: because you get a different sort of look every day. You’ve got to keep grinding away, stay consistent and don’t overreact, and let these guys go out and keep performing.”
Some stats help make sense. There’s the zero home runs by the cleanup man, Nick Castellanos, among a general dearth of power (Kyle Schwarber’s solo home run in the seventh was the team’s 19th, accounting for just 25 runs). There’s the .048 average with runners in scoring position by Schwarber, a rally-killing figure out of the three-hole. There are the bizarre splits for Trea Turner, hitting .410 in wins, .231 in losses.
If they needed a blueprint for how an opportunistic offense operates, look no further than the Rockies’ first inning.
Kris Bryant broke his bat on a bloop to center. Charlie Blackmon dinked a hit, both knocks leaving the bat slower than they’d come toward the plate out of Aaron
Nola’s hand.
All of which would’ve been fairly innocuous had it not been for Ryan McMahon blasting a four-seam cookie at 92.7 mph above the belt 408 feet to center. That knack for punishing an opponent has been largely absent for the Phillies this year, but it surfaced Friday.
To do that, they had to get the little things right. Margins of error shrink when you’re not seeing pitches consistently, not forcing teams to dig deep into their bullpen and carelessly giving away outs on the bases.
When they halt those habits, it’s amazing how quickly the game changes. Noah Davis, in his third big-league appearance, needed 39 pitches to mow through the Phillies for the first three innings. Then he needed 32 to escape the fourth and didn’t survive the fifth.
The Phillies ended a 17-inning run-scoring drought thanks to an E5, a single, hit by pitch and balk. The HBP, which just grazed J.T. Realmuto’s elbow, occasioned the ejection of Rockies manager Bud Black and electrification of a sellout crowd of 43,261.
The balk was forced by Castellanos, dancing off third base and causing Davis to flinch before throwing over.
“We needed that,” Realmuto said. “Just the way the game’s been going for our offense lately, it feels like we haven’t had a lot of breaks go our way. A lot of that’s on us as well. Just having an inning like that, where we can get some momentum and come back into that game, that was important.”
The winning run in the eighth came when Realmuto led off with a double off the 387 sign in left-center, then stole third on Hand, exploiting his familiarity with the former Phillie who received his National League championship ring before the game.
“I just had him timed up from catching him in the past,” Realmuto said. “I know his inside move. I know kind of how he likes to work things. Once I saw the same delivery a couple of pitches in a row, I thought I’d take a chance at it.”
Edmundo Sosa, in the nine spot after five days out of the lineup with back spasms, got a little lucky with the wretched path Jurickson Profar took to a fast-sinking liner in left. Sosa originally thought Profar would get there, but after seeing what he thought was a home run in the third inning die on the warning track in right-center, he watched Profar slide and only trap the ball, letting Realmuto score.
Call it a break that the Phillies created for themselves. Either way, it allowed Sosa to turn Thomson’s line on its head afterward.
“That’s how baseball is sometimes,” Sosa said via a translator. “Sometimes you’re going to be a villain, sometimes you’re going to be a hero.”