You gotta believe: Three miracle wins in D.C., led again by Bryce Harper, recall the 2022 never-say-die Phillies
The core of the club that nearly won it all four seasons ago remains the beating heart of the team that set an MLB record for ninth-inning heroics. For all its warts, this team seems for real.
Maybe someday we will learn.
We will learn to believe in these Phillies. These Bryce Harper Phillies. These Kyle Schwarber Phillies. These Zack Wheeler and Cristopher Sánchez Phillies.
We will learn that, while they might occasionally lose, they are never defeated.
We will learn that, until the last strike of the last out is recorded, they have not yet lost.
» READ MORE: Bryce Harper silences Nationals fans as Phillies mount ‘another crazy ninth inning’ rally for 10-5 win
We came to learn this about the core of these Phillies in the dead of summer in 2022, and perhaps we should relearn it as summer begins in 2026. Then, they sparked a drive to the World Series with a handful of exhilarating victories. Now, after a wild midweek series in Washington, they might be doing the same.
We will come to accept that, as long as Harp and Schwarbs and Wheels and Sanchey are active and competing and leading the charge, the rest will follow until the very end.
That quartet might not be the best players in baseball but they are always the best players they can be, and that’s often all that matters, because it inspires their peers to be the same. That’s how the Phillies manage comeback miracles like they produced in D.C. this past week.
It happened Tuesday. It happened Wednesday. Both nights, the Phillies were down to their last strike; in fact, on Wednesday, they were down to their last strike twice.
Then, incredibly, it happened Thursday night, too, a 10-5 thriller that launched them to Queens for three against the last-place Mets, who, despite the presence of duplicitous error machine Bo Bichette, have lost six in a row.
They won three of four in D.C. Wheeler was scheduled to start Friday in New York.
“We’re coming. Watch out,” Harper told 94-WIP. “Obviously, we have a great ball club.”
Great? Maybe.
The momentum is palpable.
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Why?
Because the Phillies hit go-ahead home runs in each of the ninth innings of those games, the first time that’s happened in Major League history.
Harper, scorching, was in the middle of it all Thursday.
Down 5-0 in the fifth, Harper beat out an infield single and scored the first run on Brandon Marsh’s third home run of the four-game series. Harper drove in the third run in the seventh with a 3-2, bases-loaded walk that began a three-run, game-tying frame. Then Harper drove in the go-ahead runs with a 390-foot blast to left-center, the surest sign Harper’s hot: when he’s going “oppo,” he’s unstoppable.
Harper is 13-for-31 with three homers and seven RBIs in his last eight games. The Phils entered the weekend having won five of six and sit four games behind the idle Braves, the closest they’ve been to the top of the NL East since tax day, when Rob Thomson was still their manager.
» READ MORE: Three Phillies in running to start the All-Star Game after first phase of voting, but not Bryce Harper
They were 9-19 when Thomson was fired 12 days later, and they’re 36-17 since bench coach Don Mattingly took over as interim manager. Maybe it’s been addition by subtraction. More likely, it’s coincidence, since this core group of Phillies has been winning in heart-stopping fashion since it came together in 2022, when the Phils fired Joe Girardi and Thomson took over as interim manager.
The DNA of this club seems independent of its boss.
“Each team is different,” Harper told reporters afterward. “It’s how we are. It’s who we are.”
There were other big moments from big names Thursday, and all week, really. Schwarber, who didn’t start Tuesday or Wednesday, worked a 10-pitch, two-out, pinch-hit walk in the ninth on Wednesday that framed a bigger moment for a lesser player. Trea Turner put his season from hell on hold for the ninth inning Tuesday, when his two-out single began an eight-run inning in which his second two-out single drove in the eighth run.
How could something like this possibly happen again Thursday?
“You’ve got to keep fighting back,” Harper said.
Sánchez stumbled to a 5-0 deficit after 2⅔ innings but stabilized and faced just one batter over the minimum in recording the final seven outs. That preserved the bullpen, as four relievers pitched a scoreless inning apiece. José Alvarado finally looked untouchable in the seventh, but Orion Kerkering, who’d blown a save two days earlier, earned the win when, in the eighth, he stranded a leadoff double at second base and preserved the tie.
It is contagious.
How contagious?
Derek Hill, who was Wednesday’s hero with a pinch-hit, go-ahead, ninth-inning homer, padded the lead Thursday with a two-run shot for a five-run lead. He’s a journeyman outfielder who has been a Phillie for just two weeks, the roster replacement for the Phils’ latest free-agent outfield bust, Adolis García, who had latissimus dorsi repair surgery and is done for the season.
How contagious?
Edmundo Sosa had the first homer, double, and five RBI night of his eight-year career in Tuesday’s 14-9 win, when they erased a two-run deficit in the ninth. Sosa has a knack for the dramatic. He ended May with a two-run homer in the eighth inning to complete a late comeback in Los Angeles.
How contagious?
Bryson Stott’s three-run homer on Tuesday was his first go-ahead homer in the ninth inning of his five-year career.
“We just have that never-quit mentality,” said Brandon Marsh, the team’s most consistent hitter this season.
» READ MORE: Phillies’ Don Mattingly named to National League coaching staff for the All-Star Game
Marsh padded his unlikely All-Star resume with a two-run shot in the ninth inning Tuesday that re-tied the game, 8-8, and set up Stott’s moment. Marsh was 9-for-14 and scored five runs in the three comeback wins.
Marsh knows of what he speaks because he’s lived this life before. It’s all he’s ever known, really.
Marsh landed in Philly as a deadline trade piece in 2022 from the Angels having played just 163 games in the majors. He landed in the middle of the Phillies’ crucial surge.
It began July 25, when Stott’s three-run home run in the eighth inning gave the Phillies a 6-4 lead over the visiting Braves. That was the first of 13 wins in 15 games, which allowed them to play .500 ball the rest of the season and still reach the playoffs for the first time in a decade.
It was the first of five games in that span that crackled with late-game electricity.
On July 29, in the top of the 10th inning, Rhys Hoskins ripped an 0-2 fastball 410 feet over the centerfield wall in Pittsburgh for a 4-2 win. The next night, again in the 10th, Hoskins put a ball in play that the Pirates threw away, and that was the difference. On Aug. 3, the day after Marsh became a Phillie, he was in Atlanta and saw J.T. Realmuto drive in Hoskins with a fielder’s choice grounder to tie it at 1 in the eighth, then saw the next batter, Nick Castellanos, blast a two-run game-winner. A week later the Phils managed six hits and three runs in the bottom of the eighth to win, 4-3, over the visiting Marlins.
Does this recent competence mean that the Phillies will reach the World Series this season? Not necessarily.
What it means is, with this Core Four, the faithful should never forsake the season … and they should watch every game until the very last out.
Ricky Bottalico spouts opinions each day on sports-talk radio and the Phillies' television pre- and postgame show. But before all that, he had a solid career as a relief pitcher, even representing the Phillies in the 1996 All-Star Game at Veterans Stadium. With the baseball world set to descend on Philly again in a few weeks, Ricky Bo joined "Phillies Extra" to re-live his All-Star experience. Watch here.
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