The Phillies won their ninth straight game on Sunday. Cristopher Sánchez started and Kyle Schwarber hit a game-winning home run.
There are home runs and then there are home runs, and even by Schwarber’s standards, this one was a tank: straight out to dead center, over the batter’s eye.
Twelve days ago, when the Phillies headed out to Iowa for the Field of Dreams game, they were 9.5 games out of first place in the NL East. If the season had ended then, they would’ve lost out to the Diamondbacks on a tiebreaker for the final Wild Card spot.
Since then, they’ve cut the gap between themselves and the Braves by two thirds. With seven games remaining between those two teams in the final month of the season, the division title is truly up for grabs now:
Even if the Phillies fall short in their pursuit of the Braves, they could still host a Wild Card series; they’ve gone from fourth place in the Wild Card race and 7.5 games behind the Cubs to second place and two games back.
With Sánchez on the mound and Schwarber providing the offense, you could be forgiven for thinking the Phillies are performing as designed.
That design: There are 23 pitchers in the league who are either currently on contracts worth $100 million or more, or who have a pending nine-figure extension coming. The Phillies have four of them— Sánchez, Zack Wheeler, Jesús Luzardo, and Aaron Nola. In addition to that quartet, the Phillies also have a former no. 1 global pitching prospect, Andrew Painter, and perhaps the best non-Mason Miller closer in the league in Jhoan Duran.
The hope is that those six pitchers, plus maybe Orion Kerkering and Jonathan Bowlan, throw as many of the Phillies’ high-leverage innings as possible and never give up a run. Ideally, considering that the team’s defensive apparatus can be charitably described as “ramshackle,” they wouldn’t even allow a batted ball.
If the pitching staff literally never gives up a run, a solo home run by either Schwarber or Bryce Harper would be enough to carry the day. (We can’t expect both Schwarber and Harper to homer every single game; that just wouldn’t be realistic.)
That’s a treacherous tightrope to walk. Especially because Painter’s first trip through the majors has been awful, and Nola’s annus horribilis in 2025 looks more like the new normal than an aberration. It’s easy to see how such a team could end up on the wrong side of the playoff bubble. At the same time, a team with mostly the same makeup nearly white-knuckled past the Dodgers, even without Wheeler, in last year’s NLDS. The variance for a ballclub with this construction is, in short, considerable.
When the Phillies went to Iowa, their fans were starting to give up not just on this season, but on the entire Harper-Wheeler-Schwarber-led competitive window. I joked that the team could please its supporters most by leaving certain players on the farm in Dyersville; responses were split on whether Nola, Alec Bohm, or Trea Turner would best serve the team by disappearing into the cornfield with Burt Lancaster.
Since then, Nola has ripped off two terrific starts; in Iowa, he allowed one run in five innings while striking out a season-high nine Twins. Last Wednesday against the Marlins, Nola struck out another eight batters in seven innings of one-run ball.
Most important, the single-inning blowups that have haunted Nola for most of the 2020s — even when he was a consistent Cy Young also-ran — have dried up. Nola remains the most homer-prone pitcher in the league, with 31 in 137 innings, but that’s all he’s given up over the past two months.
On June 29, the Pirates scalded Nola for eight runs in 4 1/3 innings. It was the fourth straight start in which he allowed multiple home runs. His ERA after that start, 6.04, matched his season high.
In nine starts since, Nola has a 3.63 ERA. He’s allowed 12 home runs—which is a huge total for a 52-inning span—but nine of those were solo shots and the other three came with only a single runner on base. And apart from those 15 runs directly from the long ball, Nola has only given up six runs in all other circumstances since the end of June.
It’s not Game 1 of a playoff series stuff, but it’s better than what came before.
Painter, banished to the minors in mid-June with an ERA over 7.00, has returned to the big league rotation over the past month, mostly for lack of a better option. But he, too, has been good: a 3.62 ERA and 3.93 FIP in five starts, culminating in a seven-inning, eight-strikeout, no-walk gem against the Cardinals on Saturday. Painter, whose stuff has been maddeningly inconsistent this year, hit 99.6 mph on his 100th pitch of the night.
But the most astonishing turnaround has been Bohm’s. A one-time All-Star and occasional contact machine, Bohm has been exposed hitting behind Harper over the past few years. It tells you everything you need to know about his Phillies career that Bohm has occasionally drawn (and deserved, which is worse) comparisons to Ben Simmons.
During this nine-game winning streak, however, Bohm is hitting .457/.472/.743, with a team-high 12 RBI. The Phillies’ best hitter on this run has not been Harper or Schwarber, or Brandon Marsh, or new acquisition Luis Arraez. It hasn’t been Bryson Stott, who’s 10th in position player WAR since the break. It’s Bohm, who seemed determined to end his Phillies career with a whimper.
And it’s not just a good week and change. Since the break, Bohm is hitting .336/.378/.488 with a strikeout rate of just 9.6%. He has more multi-hit games in that stretch (13) than hitless ones (nine, including two in which he entered the game as an eighth-inning defensive replacement).
The Phillies need Sánchez, Wheeler, Luzardo, Harper, Schwarber, and Duran to perform if they want to stay above water. Once Nola, Painter, and Bohm started pitching in, everything started to click.
However rocky those three players’ recent careers have been, they’re all former first-round picks. The Phillies have additionally spent a small fortune in salary to keep Nola and Bohm around over the years. They are, for good or ill, part of the core. When the core performs, you don’t go looking for omens and portents. You don’t start the “team of destiny” chatter, even ironically.
On Sunday, the portents, such as they were, could not have been better. Sánchez was on the mound. Megan Keller, who scored the gold medal-winning goal for the U.S. women’s hockey team at this past Winter Olympics, threw out the first pitch, swapped jerseys with Harper, and joined the local TV broadcast. Keller brought her medal along, which drew appropriately reverent oohs and aahs from Tom McCarthy, Cole Hamels, and John Kruk. (Kruk, apparently unaware that Olympic gold medals are made of silver and covered in gold leaf, asked how much you could get for one if you melted it down.)
The sun was shining, the worst of the oppressive summer-long heat wave had finally broken, and all kids 14 and under were entitled to a Bryce Harper football jersey, courtesy of the local power company. Life was good.
But with two outs in the ninth inning and the Cardinals up 4-0, it seemed like the winning streak had run its course. Sánchez didn’t pitch too badly, but the Cardinals were able to string together enough hits to build a lead. The Phillies had no such luck against Kyle Leahy and the cavalcade of relievers who followed. Stott fouled a ball off his foot and had to leave the game. It happens. Even Phillies fans, testy as they can be, understand that you can’t literally win ‘em all.
All-Star closer Riley O’Brien hadn’t thrown in two days and the Cardinals were heading into an off day, so manager Oliver Marmol called for his relief ace in a non-save situation. O’Brien pitched around a leadoff double from Harper, inducing sedate pop flies from fellow All-Stars Arraez and Marsh, to bring up a punchless bottom half of the order.
Impressive as the Phillies’ winning streak had been to that point, it wasn’t exactly defined by late-game heroics; they’d outscored their opponents 58-26 over that stretch. They’d won six of those eight games by multiple runs and led one of the other two by multiple runs most of the way, before the bullpen let the Marlins back into the game.
But the Phillies found their flair for the dramatic here.
After O’Brien got to two outs, each of the next five Phillies hitters reached and scored, in improbable fashion. The 35-year-old J.T. Realmuto is in the first year of a three-year, $45 million extension that already looks like a disaster. He quickly fell behind 0-2, a count from which he’s hitting .165/.205/.253 this season. He punched a single to center.
Justin Crawford followed with a five-pitch walk, his only free pass since the Phillies’ win streak began, to load the bases. Last year, Edmundo Sosa was one of the best fifth infielders in the league, exhibiting a combination of defensive versatility and right-handed pop that many teams would’ve been happy with from their starting shortstop. A 111 wRC+ last year has turned into a 72 wRC+ this year. He, too, fought back from a two-strike count to clear the bases with a double.
That brought up no. 9 hitter Bryan De La Cruz. A year and a half ago, when De La Cruz signed with the Braves, I wondered why a well-run franchise like that would go into business with the worst everyday player in the league. I honestly wondered, based on De La Cruz’s plate discipline stats, if he needed glasses.
De La Cruz singled in Sosa to tie the game and bring his batting line to .359/.400/.564 in 45 plate appearances with the Phillies. Dave Dombrowski’s front office had spent more than $100 million in salary and countless prospects in trades, all in the fruitless pursuit of the team’s first decent right-handed outfielder since Hunter Pence. None of it has worked out as well as a guy on a minor league deal, who’s four years and more than 1,300 plate appearances removed from his last replacement-level season. The least surprising play of the rally was Schwarber’s 459-foot coup de grace.
The Phillies didn’t even need Mr. High Leverage himself, Derek Hill, to complete their most impressive comeback of the season. When you’re on a roll, stuff like this just seems to happen.
More and better omens and portents were to come. A six-run ninth-inning rally off a star Cardinals reliever brought back memories of the rally that won Game 1 of the 2022 NL Wild Card Series for the Phillies. A team that backed into the playoffs after a 10-season absence was, all of a sudden, not just happy to be there. That win kicked off a 9-2 run through the NL playoff bracket; the Phillies wouldn’t lose consecutive games again until Games 4, 5, and 6 of the World Series. Sunday’s comeback also came on the 17th anniversary of Eric Bruntlett’s unassisted triple play, which sewed up a key game against the Mets in the 2009 pennant race.
Supernatural forces are famously fickle. The Phillies are about to send Wheeler out against a Mariners team that has the vibes of foundering garbage scow, and yet, I know better than to take anything for granted when writing about a winning streak.
But the Phillies have bought themselves some much-needed breathing room in the Wild Card race, and a team with this many load-bearing 30-somethings and overworked relievers is going to want as much of a buffer as it can build. Maybe Hill and De La Cruz aren’t going to keep carrying this team, but flashes of competence from the likes of Bohm and Nola are enough to inspire optimism down the stretch.
You don’t want to bet the house on omens and portents, but when the stars (the metaphysical ones, not Sánchez, Schwarber, Duran, and so on) align to present an opportunity, good teams figure out a way to capitalize.
* This article was originally published here
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