Categories: Phillies Beat with Destiny Lugardo

Let’s take a moment to bask in Mets’ misery

Chase Utley would have been proud of the Phillies’ 7-6 win over the Mets on Sunday. (Rich Kane/Icon Sportswire)

If you feel bad about where the Phillies are, you can take comfort in knowing that they are not the New York Mets.

The Phillies were poor all weekend, but they were gifted two valuable wins thanks to the sloppy and fraudulent team from Queens.

Philadelphia entered the eighth inning down by three runs. A comeback didn’t seem likely given how poor the offense has been. J.T. Realmuto, Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber all had three hits or fewer during the five-game homestand. Trea Turner’s first inning home run against Carlos Carrasco was only the second ball the Phillies hit out of the ballpark over the last five games.

Despite all that, the Phillies always had a chance on Sunday because the Mets had a short bullpen. Right-hander Adam Ottavino and left-hander Brooks Raley, two valuable late-inning guys for New York, were not available. The team was operating with only 12 pitchers thanks to right-hander Drew Smith’s 10-game suspension for foreign substance use.

The dark clouds were starting to roll in. If the Phillies were going to pull another win out of their butts, they had to do it in the bottom of the eighth before the nasty storms hit South Philadelphia.

Thankfully, the Mets did all the pulling. The Phillies barely had to lift the bat off their shoulders to stage a four-run eighth inning comeback. The runs scored on a fielder’s choice, walk and two hit batsman. According to Sports Info Solutions, it’s the first time ever a team scored the game-tying and go-ahead runs in the same frame on two hit-by-pitches in the eighth inning or later.

“It didn’t look good,” Rob Thomson said. “We had some really good at-bats in the eighth inning. We got fortunate too, again.”

Left-hander Josh Walker loaded the bases with two walks and a single. Jeff Brigham thought he had two outs when he induced a ground ball to third base against Alec Bohm on the second pitch he threw. Shaded to his left, young Mets third baseman Brett Baty fielded the ball, but could not get it out of his glove and missed the throw to second.

Baty, 23, took full accountability for his mistake after the game.

“There’s really no excuse. That play needs to be made 10 times out of 10,” Baty told reporters. “That cost us the game, cost us the series and cost us a lot of momentum that we had coming in from yesterday. It was bad.”

The loss on Sunday was on him, but this sham of a season isn’t. Baty, along with stud rookie catcher Francisco Alvarez, represent the hope for the future that the Mets are striving for.

Really, you can say this Mets loss was on general manager Billy Eppler and his front office’s inability to build a competent bullpen behind injured superstar closer Edwin Diaz and backend arm David Robertson, who was only available to pitch in the ninth inning, according to manager Buck Showalter.

Say what you want about the lack of right-handed options in the Phillies bullpen with Seranthony Domínguez out (I did), but Jeff Hoffman, an under-the-radar minor league signing who went to Triple A to refine his command, easily retired the top of the Mets order in the eighth. That’s good scouting and player development at work.

“That was the big spot of the game,” Bryson Stott said. “To kind of get the momentum back for us and just to have a shutdown inning out of him was good.”

For some reason, the Mets have struggled to identify intriguing middle relievers who can handle the occasional high leverage outing. It’s a competitive advantage that the Phillies, and many other contenders in baseball, have over the Mets.

“You can’t pitch the same people every night,” Showalter said after the game. “Physically, they can’t do it.”

The loss is also on Showalter and his bizarre management of his short bullpen. Starter Carlos Carrasco was effective, but he is limited to four or five innings at a time. The Phillies did enough to work counts to get Carrasco out after four. Showalter got two innings out of Grant Hartwig to set up a combination of Walker and Brigham to get the next six outs. He waited until Brigham, the second pitcher in the inning, walked Brandon Marsh to score the Phillies’ fifth run to finally get former Phillie Vinny Nittoli up and throwing. By then, the tying and go-ahead runs for the Phillies were in scoring position.

It’s one thing to want to stay away from the 38-year-old Robertson after getting five outs on Saturday, but it’s another thing to treat Nittoli, who last pitched on June 23, like an emergency valve and that’s what Showalter, the 2022 NL Manager of the Year despite blowing a significant lead in the division, did. Nittoli was used anyway and retired the two batters he faced.

Showalter punted this game and it looks like the Mets, who are 35-42 and eight games out of a playoff spot, will punt this season. Steve Cohen’s masterplan to build a team almost entirely through free agency and wait patiently for the farm system to come around isn’t exactly the brilliant plan everyone thought it would be. Francisco Lindor, Jeff McNeil, Starling Marte, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer are all underperforming. It’s an old team with no pitching depth and all the pressure in the world to succeed. It’s not a good combination.

Don’t be mistaken. The Phillies have problems. They are just three games over .500, the same record they had through the first 77 games of last season, and find themselves three games out of a playoff spot. If the Phillies are going to contend, they’ll need more power out of the lineup, continued excellence from the pitching staff and another savvy trade deadline from Dave Dombrowski.

They are a flawed and expensive team, but they are not the most flawed and expensive team.

The Mets have won 18 of 25 against the Phillies since the beginning of 2022. From a combined no-hitter to a generational ninth-inning collapse, the Phillies know all too well what it’s like to completely blow it against a bitter rival.

“It doesn’t matter who we’re playing,” former Met Zack Wheeler said after the game.

Except it does sometimes.