Phillies-Padres Game 3: How a meeting in St. Louis and an electric home park set the stage for a wild win

The bounce-back began two weeks earlier, in a meeting in St. Louis, when they gathered to talk about what it would take. This was before the blown lead in San Diego, before the five-hour flight across the country, before the errors and the miscues and the double-play balls that left the Phillies flirting with disaster right up until the final outs of a 4-2 victory that left them two wins away from baseball’s ultimate stage. This was before they had even played a postseason game.

“We said, ‘Listen, something’s going to go wrong,’” catcher J.T. Realmuto said as he stood by his locker late Friday night. “We’re gonna blow a game, we’re gonna lose a game, we’re gonna make an error, you’re gonna strike out in a big spot — something’s going to go wrong throughout the postseason. It happens to everybody. We just have to put it behind us and trust the guys behind us and know that we are going to win that game that day.”

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These were the words that flashed through their minds as Game 3 of the National League Championship Series devolved into a wild, raucous, white-knuckle affair that later turned the postgame clubhouse into a veritable decompression chamber. Inning after inning, miscue after miscue, baserunner after baserunner, the Phillies looked like a team determined to test just how close they could creep to the edge. Apart from their first at-bat and their first five innings of starting pitching, nothing went the way it had gone the last time they were in town. This time, it wasn’t going to feel easy.

You come out of a game like this too quickly, and you end up with the Bends. Right up until the final out, you found yourself wondering how they could possibly win one this way. Except, maybe this way of winning is uniquely theirs. Jean Segura drops a double-play relay and allows a run to score in the top of the fourth? Look who’s up with two on and two out in the bottom of the frame. Rhys Hoskins drops a routine chopper to set up an unearned run in the fifth? Here comes Alec Bohm in the sixth, with his latest chance to pay it forward.

“We always talk about it — whenever something doesn’t go our way, we can get frustrated about it, but it ends right there,” said Kyle Schwarber, who hit his second home run in three games after struggling through series wins over the Cardinals and Braves. “We’re not going to carry it on with us. When you can end it right there and focus on the next pitch, next play, I feel like we’ve been doing a really good job of that this postseason.”

It is the rarest of qualities, and the fact that the Phillies possess it is as much a reason to believe as any of their constituent parts. It is not something that you can define with numbers. You can’t even know it is there until the situation demands it. But they have it, and they have shown it so many times throughout this season that you have to start counting on it.

On Friday, they arrived at Citizens Bank Park less than 36 hours after the team charter landed in the predawn hours of Thursday morning, the sting of a blown 4-0 lead in Game 2 lingering in the stale cabin air. As was the case in Atlanta the week before, they’d blown a big one, and they’d blown it in a way that left you wondering whether the tide of the series had irrevocably turned. They would be on the wrong side of the starting pitching matchup in Game 3, facing an ace right-hander who’d allowed exactly three earned runs in his last 35 innings. They’d needed four innings from their bullpen on a day that Aaron Nola started, and now they had Ranger Suárez coming off a rough postseason debut. The Game 4 starter was anybody’s guess.

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You cannot discount the crowd, the venue, the beautiful weirdness that is this city: the late broadcaster’s son singing the national anthem, the pinch-hitter-turned-postseason legend throwing out the first pitch, the starting center on the local football team running out onto the field before the sixth inning, dropping to a knee, and chugging a beer. How can they lose?

“It’s easy here, coming home,” Hoskins said. “I think we understood that we had a really good chance to go up 2-0, but also know that we’ve done the exact same things to teams before, especially with them at home. Obviously, going into San Diego, the goal is to win two, but we were extremely happy coming back here with split.”

Now, here they are, two wins from their organization’s first World Series berth in 13 years, two more games to be played amid the home crowd’s bedlam, two more starts by their aces on tap, assuming the second of those starts is even needed. Ryan Howard will throw out the first pitch of Game 4. Bailey Falter will be on the mound. It’s a heck of a formula. But the Phillies have pushed us past the point of doubt.