Ranger Suárez makes Phillies history in win over San Diego

SAN DIEGO — In the bottom of the eighth inning on Saturday night, Phillies rightfielder Nick Castellanos jogged up to Ranger Suárez as he was walking from right field. He put his arm around him. Suárez had just allowed a solo home run to snap his scoreless innings streak at 32. Castellanos gave him a pat on the chest.

“You should finish the game,” Castellanos said.

Suárez laughed.

“No way,” he said. “Let’s give one inning to the bullpen.”

The Phillies left-hander didn’t need another complete game. He had already pitched one of those on April 16. His manager joked that he might not have even been aware that he had a scoreless streak going. Not much if anything fazes Suárez, especially not personal accolades.

Suarez became one of seven Phillies pitchers to throw 30 straight scoreless innings or more, joining Cliff Lee (who did it twice), Ken Heintzelman, Larry Andersen and Hall of Famers Grover Cleveland Alexander (twice), Steve Carlton, and Robin Roberts.

“Happy, happy to achieve it,” he said. “But my mentality was to pitch as deep as I could and help the team win.”

Suárez pitched in his free-and-easy way in the Phillies’ 5-1 win on Saturday. He didn’t throw a ball harder than 93 mph but managed to keep the Padres off-balance with his six-pitch mix. He induced mostly weak contact and a ton of groundouts and allowed only one earned run on three hits with eight strikeouts over eight innings.

He now has a 1.32 ERA over his six starts (41 innings) with 40 strikeouts and just five walks.

His teammates were happy to see Suárez get the recognition they believed he deserved. Because he doesn’t light up a radar gun and has a nonchalant demeanor, he can make the remarkable seem unremarkable. Teammate Spencer Turnbull remembers seeing it in spring training. They were doing pitcher fielding practice, or PFPs, and Suárez was flipping balls to first base as if he had all the time in the world.

Turnbull assumed it was something that Suárez only did in drills, but quickly realized that this is how he operates all the time.

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“Ranger is out there doing that in games, too,” Turnbull said. “And I’m like, ‘This kid is crazy.’ Just nonchalantly throwing no-look passes to first base.”

He was no different against the Padres. In the fifth inning, Eguy Rosario hit a hard ground ball right back to Suárez, who fielded it on one bounce, paused, spun around on the mound, and threw it to Bryce Harper at first base.

Three innings later, Luis Campusano hit a soft dribbler toward the lefty. He crouched down, slowly scooped it up with two hands, and delivered it to Harper.

“There’s no situation that can get him to spike his heart rate, and if you’ve played the game at this level, you know that that’s such a big deal,” said reliever Jeff Hoffman. “That’s why he’s so good in October and why he’s able to pitch well in these situations.”

Hoffman pitched the ninth to finish the game. The Phillies did a lot of things right in this one. They hit well against a tough pitcher in Dylan Cease. Alec Bohm hit a two-run homer in the first inning and finished his day with two hits and four RBIs, and Trea Turner went 3-for-5.

They played good defense, too. Castellanos made a great running catch at the wall in the sixth with one runner on and one out, which probably saved a run from scoring. Bohm threw up his hand and snapped it from third base, to congratulate his teammate.

“Nobody thought that ball was probably going to travel as far as it did, so you could kind of see him going into an extra gear to track it down,” Bohm said. “I think he’s faster than people think he is, he’s a better outfielder than people think he is. And anytime a ball goes up out there we feel like he’s going to run it down. It was another really good play by Casty.”

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There were also little things that the Phillies did, that might not jump off the box score, that changed the scope of the game. With two outs in the fifth inning, Whit Merrifield hit a grounder to short and beat out Ha-Seong Kim’s throw to first base. Kyle Schwarber walked, Turner singled to load the bases, and Harper walked to plate a run.

Bohm’s second hit of the day, a two-RBI single, came in the next at-bat. It gave the Phillies a comfortable 5-0 lead.

“That’s who he is, he’s a baseball player,” manager Rob Thomson said of Merrifield, “and when I call a guy a baseball player that’s a real compliment. And that’s what he is.”

The Phillies are now 18-10 and will go for the series sweep in San Diego on Sunday. That was what Suárez was most excited about.

“If the streak had continued, that would’ve been good, but I wasn’t focused on that,” he said. “I was focusing on throwing good innings and helping the team win.”