Welcome to mid-August, when baseball’s damp with a sagging middle. The humidity occasionally breaks for hurricanes and everything is covered in spider webs. Children trudge back to school and our cars sit half-melted on the street. With any luck, as the regular season enters its final phase, a hot Phillies team could really lift everyone’s spirits.
Did anyone remember that Brandon Marsh and Alec Bohm are roommates? Ha! Remember that Cristopher Sanchez pitched so well he got a contract extension? Bryce Harper was on his way to another MVP, and Ranger Suarez had the Cy Young locked up. The Braves were about as far from the top of the standings as their own ballpark is from Atlanta. And the Phillies have been good all summer, right? No reason the team wouldn’t be good now!
That’s where you’re wrong. Baseball is a complex sport, created by layers of strategy and waves of intensity. It is also very stupid, and mean. Sometimes a team that was playing really well — better than everyone else — starts looking like they learned about baseball yesterday from watching a movie. And it’s no secret that the once dominant 2024 Phillies have been a tough watch since they lost a series to the A’s in mid-July.
Other teams haven’t been shy about figuring them out, either. In the 96 first innings in which the Phillies pitched up to the all-star break, the team gave up 28 runs — the lowest in the majors. Since then, they’ve given up 17 in 25 first innings.
Alternatively, the Phillies’ bats were jumping on the opposition quickly, too. In the first half, they hit .269 in the first three innings of a game and scored more runs than any other team in the sport (172). Since July 16, that BA has dropped to a much less applause-worthy .250.
People went through their normal processes: playing it cool, slowly unraveling, suddenly having an outburst in public, turning on the players, demanding the manager be fired, suggesting Bryson Stott be demoted, trying to call the Phillies dugout phone just to yell, demanding Dave Dombrowski be fired, and rechanneling all of their energy into the Olympics.
Now, the Paris Games have wrapped and we’re left with just the Phillies until Eagles camp breaks. Fortunately, the Phillies have looked much more tolerable the last two nights. On Thursday, they even made a little history.
Outfielder Weston Wilson hit for the cycle against the Nationals last night at Citizens Bank Park, and the 29-year-old was the first Phillie to do it there since David Bell in 2004.
J.T. Realmuto hit for a cycle in Arizona last June. Wilson struck out in the first inning, but made up for lost hits by tripling and singling in the fourth. Like most cyclists, Wilson went with the triple first. (Bell opted to go for the triple last in 2004. That was a weird day.).
After his big fourth frame, Wilson blasted a solo shot in the seventh as the Phillies piled on in an eventual 13-3 victory. Wilson’s night was one of several promising swings from the recently deadened Phillies lineup: Trea Turner had three hits, Alec Bohm smoked a three-run homer, and Johan Rojas had a couple of RBI.
It was a good sign from an offense that got owned in six of their last seven series and split a pair with the Marlins, one of the few National League teams not in the wild card race.
The Phillies seem to be using the momentum of Kyle Schwarber’s dramatic grand slam against Miami, as well as the fact that they’re playing some lousier teams, to get back on track. Then again, we said that when Schwarber went nuts on the Dodgers with a three-homer game, and when Brandon Marsh accidentally caught a fly ball while staring directly at the sun.
Rough stretches like the one the Phillies have been in since before the all-star break can have very deep bottoms, and as we sink lower and lower, people tend to desperately reach for anything as a sign that things are about to turn around.
But surely this was a sign!
The Phillies have been using the Washington Nationals as a slab of meat for years now, just relentlessly landing blows on them even though they’re long dead. If the Phillies had struggled against the Nationals, it would have been very close to the bottom. Against the Phillies, the Nationals can’t seem to get out of bed. Not since … you know. Washington has paid for its hubris with a 49-19 record vs. the Phillies since that infamous 2020 tweet, including getting no-hit by Michael Lorenzen. Also, none of the players featured in the image play for the Nationals anymore. They could stand to take a lesson from Phillies fans: Never believe in anything.
There’s a phrase in baseball: “A triple shy of the cycle.” It’s not very catchy and pretty cumbersome, and pretty much just means that a player has every hit they need to complete a cycle except for the hardest one: a triple.
People will bemoan a cycle as an accomplishment, as though just having a four-hit night isn’t phenomenal on its own. They’ll say that honoring a cycle is just honoring someone whose second double of the night went under somebody’s glove, and it’s more of an anomalous circumstance than an achievement of batting.
But a phrase that means “successful, except for the hardest part,” is pretty applicable. In college, I used to clean everything in our apartment except for the dishes, and felt like that evened things out.
It’s even more applicable for the Phillies this year. They’re a team that’s provided thrilling regular seasons and fun playoff runs the last two years, but hasn’t gotten through the hardest part of winning the World Series. People said the team was only able to beat the bad teams on its easy schedule to start the year. And the losses are usually because the team was missing one more bit of solid contact that would have delivered them the lead.
So, last night, Weston Wilson broke that cycle by actually completing a different one. A season with the Phillies is a constant search for answers, and we can only hope after beating their favorite dead horse, the Phillies have potentially found one.
