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PHILADELPHIA – It took 141 years for the Phillies to play their first home game in a Game 7.
That won’t be a fond memory after they lost for the second night in a row at Citizens Bank Park, falling 4-2 to the Arizona Diamondbacks on Tuesday night in the deciding game of the NLCS.
The Diamondbacks will move on to face the Texas Rangers in the World Series starting Friday. Meanwhile, the Phillies will rue the opportunities they let slip away.
And there were many.
The Phillies grabbed a 2-1 lead in the fourth inning on Bryson Stott’s double scored by Alec Bohm. Then the bats fell silent for the second night in a row. By the late innings, so did the raucous crowd that desperately tried to cheer them on to a World Series championship for the second straight season.
Afterward, Kyle Schwarber described the feeling as “disgusting.” The Phillies lost in the World Series in six games last year. They envision getting back there this season.
“Any time you lose, it doesn’t feel right,” he added. “I was as disgusted last year as I am this year. We were 2 wins away last year. This year, we are 5 wins away. It will never look right.”
Bryce Harper had a chance to repeat his heroics from last season, when a three-run homer in the eighth inning of NLCS Game 5 against the San Diego Padres sent the Phillies to the World Series. He came up with two runners on in the seventh inning, and the Phillies were down by two.
He flew into the middle of the field.
“He threw me the pitch I wanted,” Harper said of Kevin Grenkle. “I was up 2-1 (in the count), and he threw me a heater, and I just stopped, man, and I couldn’t get ahead in that moment, and it was devastating for me personally.
“I feel like I let my team down, and I let down the city of Philadelphia as well. This is the moment where I feel like I might be moving on.”
And he wasn’t the only one.
The Phillies continued to decline after that, and Harper never got another chance. Bohm, Stott, and JT Realmuto all hit on pitches outside the strike zone in the eighth inning.
Baum hit his racket in frustration and broke it.
It was that kind of night. The Phillies were 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position. By the late innings, the Phillies couldn’t even get runners to stay on base.
He’s been up and down in the lineup.
Nick Castellanos returns for his first hit. Then he was hitless in his last 23 at-bats, with 11 strikeouts. Trea Turner has no hits in his last 14 at-bats. Harper, one of the heroes of Game 5, was hitless in Games 6 and 7.
Meanwhile, the Diamondbacks took advantage of their opportunities. They took a 3-2 lead in the fifth inning on RBI singles by Corbin Carroll and Gabriel Moreno, which set up a sacrifice bunt and a stolen base.
They then had another round in the seventh round.
That brought nervous energy to the sold-out crowd.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Not after the Phillies returned home to Citizens Bank Park after winning Game 5 in Arizona, needing just one win in their final two games to advance to the World Series.
But they fell in Game 6 on Monday night, losing 5-1, getting just five hits.
They did it again on Tuesday, only getting five hits again. So when pinch-hitter Jake Cave flied out to right fielder Corbin Carroll, the Diamondbacks rushed to the mound to celebrate, while Phillies fans quietly rushed for the exits.
The tension began before the game when Phillies manager Rob Thompson announced that he was not about to field a lineup that would leave his team one win away from the World Series.
So Thompson was emphatic when asked about the possibility of some lineup changes for Game 7 of the NLCS despite the decline of several players, including Bohm and Stott, the No. 4 and No. 5 hitters, respectively.
“Zero,” Thompson said.
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As if on cue, Bohm put the Phillies on the board with a solo homer to take the lead in the second inning, tying the game at 1-1.
Stott then gave the Phillies the lead in the fourth.
Harper started the inning with a searing drive to right on a ball with an exit velocity of 106.3 mph. Bohm follows with a walk on four pitches. Stott then scored twice into the gap in left center, giving the Phillies a 2-1 lead.
Stott moved to third on Realmuto’s single, but was stranded there when Castellanos and Johan Rojas went out.
“I took a terrible hit,” Castellanos said. “I wanted too much to get the runner involved rather than see what the pitcher was going to give me first. That’s on me.”
That proved costly when Emanuel Rivera led off the fifth with a single and was sacrificed to second, raising the lead. Phillies’ goaltender Suarez stayed in the game and hit right-hander Kittle Marte for the third time.
But he didn’t have the same luck with Carroll’s left-handed hit, who hit a single up the middle, scoring Rivera. Carroll then stole second and scored on Moreno’s single to give Arizona a 3-2 lead.
The Phillies couldn’t get any closer.
Schwarber, Turner and Harper went 1-for-18 in the final two games of the series. There wasn’t much support from below the order either.
“This is the ebb and flow of crime,” Thompson said. “He’s not going to hit people every day of the season. That’s not going to happen. The other guys have got to pick it up. The other guys have got to get it done, and you’ve got to pass the baton and get people up and get people on base and pressure people.”
“We had some people on base tonight. We couldn’t get a big hit.”
Soon after, the expected coronation of the Phillies’ World Series championship did not happen. It was the Diamondbacks who celebrated on the mound at Citizens Bank Park. The Phillies were left wondering how things went so wrong so quickly.
“The potential of this team is so much greater than coming home before the World Series,” Castellanos said. “Knowing how we feel about this team, we’ve fallen short of what we did the year before. It’s obviously a disgusting feeling.”
Contact Martin Frank at [email protected]. Follow on XMfranknfl.
“Travel aficionado. Infuriatingly humble reader. Incurable internet specialist.”
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