Zack Wheeler didn’t have his stuff in Game 2, but Phillies remain confident in both of their aces

HOUSTON — The slider that Zack Wheeler threw to Alex Bregman in the bottom of the fifth inning wouldn’t have been more alarming if it was flashing red and blue. It did not dart, or dive, or act in any other way like a pitch that normally comes from Wheeler’s right hand. It was just kind of there.

Bregman, a third baseman who has been one of the primary constants during the Astros’ half-decade of dominance, did exactly what anyone would have expected him to do with such a pitch. He mashed it: so high and so hard that all anybody could do was crane their neck and watch.

The big questions to emerge from the Phillies’ 5-2 loss to the Astros in Game 2 of the World Series were not the sort that a team with championship aspirations can afford to be asking itself with three wins remaining against an opponent this good. Is five days enough time for Wheeler to get himself right? Were there any deeper implications to his diminished velocity and flat stuff? Or were his Game 2 struggles just one of those nights?

This much we know: The Phillies are going to need their aces. At least one of them. Probably both. They had neither in the first two games of this best-of-seven series. One night after Aaron Nola allowed five runs in 4⅓ innings of a come-from-behind victory in Game 1, Wheeler gave up five in five on a lot of loud swings of the bat. Nola will be back in Game 5. If needed, Wheeler will be there in Game 6.

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“I think everybody deserves a poor start every once in a while,” manager Rob Thomson said. “Those guys have been so good for us for so long, and I fully expect them to come back and be ready to go and pitch well for us.”

He’s absolutely right. Let’s make that clear. One crooked outing does not erase a six-week stretch like the one Wheeler carried into Minute Maid Park on Saturday. The five runs that he allowed — two of them on Bregman’s homer, another two within his first four pitches of the game — were as many as he had given up in his first four postseason starts combined. The Phillies won three of those outings, the last of which clinched the National League championship and gave them their first World Series berth in 13 years. One bad start is no reason to panic.

At the same time, there is context.

The day before the Phillies departed for Houston, Thomson said he was considering postponing Wheeler’s first World Series start until Game 2. On the one hand, this made some sense. The Phillies’ early clinch in the NLCS meant that Aaron Nola would go 10 days between starts if he waited until Game 2. Wheeler would be operating on normal rest if he pitched in Game 1. One guy needed work. The other guy could use a blow.

But by the end of Game 2, you couldn’t help but wonder. The Astros came out swinging, early and often. Their first three hitters all doubled — Jose Altuve and Jeremy Peña on the first pitches they saw, Yordan Alvarez on the second. Four pitches into the game, the Astros held a 2-0 lead that would grow to 3-0 before the first inning was done.

“They were just aggressive,” Wheeler said. “I left those first two balls over the heart of the plate, and that’s what a good team does with it. "

Wheeler made it through the next three frames unscathed, but he did so with a fastball that was topping out at 96 instead of his usual 99, and a slider that was missing its usual bite. In the fifth inning, the Astros finally capitalized. Wheeler finished the frame after Bregman’s home run, but it was evident to anybody that he was nothing close to himself. The final line: six hits, three walks, five runs, and a mere three strikeouts.

Afterward, Wheeler acknowledged the diminished velocity.

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“It’s just late in the season,” he said. “It’s a bad time for it to happen. But yeah, it is what it is.”

It’s worth noting that the Phillies have managed Wheeler extremely carefully since the bout of forearm tendinitis that shut him down for a stretch in September. The 96 pitches he threw in his first postseason start were 19 more than he’d thrown in the previous seven weeks. Since then, Thomson has pulled him after 79, 83, and 87 pitches, the last with one out in the seventh inning of the NLCS clincher.

Health is a relative thing this time of year. If you can pitch, you pitch. You do your best with what you’ve got.

This postseason has underscored the impact of that pitching, as well as the limits of it. In Game 1 of the World Series, the Phillies won despite Nola’s struggles. In Game 2, Wheeler could have been brilliant and it may not have mattered. The Phillies scored only a run each in the seventh and ninth innings. It was neither what they needed nor what they have come to expect. The Phillies have scored their runs in bunches this season. In Game 1, they blitzed their way back from a 5-0 deficit. In Game 2, the big inning never came.

Yet the Phillies are who they are. Wheeler and Nola are two fundamental parts of that identity. At the beginning of this magical month, they were the two biggest reasons to believe. That remains the case now that they are three wins away.

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