Questionable decision on other side leads to incredible Phillies victory
Sometimes, trusting your guy just doesn’t work. Braves manager Brian Snitker, who has worked in baseball for over 40 years, knows that. Still, it hurts when the plan doesn’t go your way.
The Phillies on Thursday night were on the other side of another team’s misfortune in a 5-4 comeback win against the Atlanta Braves that will go down as one of the most satisfying victories of the season.
With two runners on and one out, Brandon Marsh stepped up to the plate. He came into the at-bat 0-for-2 on the night with two strikeouts. Acting Braves pitching coach Erick Abreu went to the mound to visit starting pitcher Charlie Morton, with Snitker sitting still in his dugout chair. Morton was at 100 pitches. He has exceeded 100 pitches in a start only three times this season.
Marsh came into the game 2-for-10 lifetime with seven strikeouts against Morton in the regular season. The biggest swing of his career, however, came off Morton in Game 4 of the 2022 NLDS — a three-run home run on a hanging curve.
There were reasons to like the matchup if you’re the Braves. Marsh whiffed at two curveballs outside of the zone in his previous at-bat, but managers tend to go for the platoon advantage against Marsh, who has struck out 31 times in 74 plate appearances against lefties this season.
Snitker had a lefty, Aaron Bummer, warming up. Bummer, apparently, was only up to face Kyle Schwarber if the lineup turned over that inning.
It did. On a 1-0 pitch, Marsh turned on a hanging curveball and drove it the other way. With an assist from the wind, the Phillies got to within one as the ball carried over the fence for a three-run home run.
So why did Morton face Marsh? Snitker explained his thinking after the game.
“[Morton] was going to go through to Schwarber,” Snitker said. “If I knew he was going to hit a homer, I was probably going to take him out. I don’t have that luxury. And he’s a good matchup for him right there. I like Charlie’s breaking ball on him.
“He popped it up and the wind blew it out.”
Marsh would disagree, though he knows some luck was involved.
“I knew I got barrel. I thought I hit it too high, to be honest,” Marsh said. “The game gave us a bone there.”
Marsh needed it. Thursday marked his first game with multiple extra-base hits since July 11. He came into the game with a .184 batting average and 49 strikeouts in 114 at-bats since then.
He did not want to fall behind Morton for a third time on a breaking pitch, so he did something he claims to rarely do — sit soft.
His second hit, a double over the left fielder’s head in the eighth, has to make him feel good about his swing.
“I feel like that’s been my little honey hole, left center,” Marsh said. “Feel like that’s where a lot of my power is. When my direction is that way, I feel like everything else kind of cleans itself up.”
The crowd of around 40,000 sat on their hands for most of the night. The Phillies, despite taking their walks against Morton, were missing pitches and failing to drive in runs. Two home runs from the scorching hot Matt Olson against Cristopher Sánchez took the air out of the ballpark.
The Phillies have given the Braves every chance to crawl back into the NL East race and before the sixth inning, it appeared Atlanta was on the verge of cutting the Phillies’ lead to four for the first time since May 18.
But then deja vu happened. Nick Castellanos, the man who ended the Braves magical season last year with two fateful swings against Spencer Strider in Game 4 of the NLDS, hit a game winning, two-run home run in the seventh inning against Grant Holmes.
The win lets the Phillies breathe a little easier and puts the Braves in a precarious position. Atlanta can cut the lead down to only three with three straight wins. Three straight wins for the Phillies would essentially decide the division, expanding the lead to nine and technically ten because a sweep would give the season series tiebreaker to the Phillies.
“It’s a tough loss,” Snitker said. “They’re all going to be tough losses now.”
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