How can Phillies overcome the Game 3 test and make this a series?
The Phillies cannot tie the NLDS on Wednesday night, they can’t wash away the disappointment of losing two in a row at home to begin their biggest series in a year.
What they can do is focus strictly on the task at hand in Game 3, and if they’re able to eke it out, the test in Game 4 wouldn’t be quite as stiff.
The Dodgers will start their right-handed ace, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Wednesday night opposite Aaron Nola. It’s not a great matchup for the Phillies. Yamamoto did not give up an earned run over six innings at Citizens Bank Park in April, allowing just singles to Bryce Harper and J.T. Realmuto and a double to Trea Turner.
Lefties have feeble numbers off the 27-year-old, a .180/.244/.255 slash-line in 510 career plate appearances. It’s just not a conducive setup for a Phillies offense that has struggled to find a rhythm in the series and is built around two lefty sluggers. Impossible? No. Challenging? Yes.
Yamamoto will throw six pitches to righties: a four-seam fastball and sinker that average 95 mph, his signature splitter, a curveball, cutter and slider. He doesn’t throw the sinker or slider to lefties. When he’s ahead in the count, especially against a lefty, he features the splitter and it’s generated a .132 batting average to hitters from both sides. It’s certainly not the pitch to hit in most at-bats against him.
If the Phillies can somehow win Game 3 with the Dodgers’ home-field and starting pitching advantage, Tyler Glasnow in Game 4 isn’t quite as big a burden. Glasnow is another top-of-the-rotation arm who might have started Game 1 for other contenders but he hasn’t been nearly as effective against the Phillies as Yamamoto, Blake Snell or Shohei Ohtani. The Phils have reached base in seven of 13 plate appearances against Glasnow this season, showing a knack in two different games for grinding out plate appearances and making him work.
Plus, the Phillies could have their best arm, Cristopher Sanchez, back for a theoretical Game 4. The Dodgers might still be favored in a Game 4 but not to the degree they are in Game 3 (-180).
So … how can the Phillies pull it off Wednesday? How can they extend their season by at least one more night? A first-inning tally would be nice, and they’ll need at least two or three strong innings to start from Nola. Nola does not figure to go too deep into this game. Ranger Suárez or a lefty reliever like Tanner Banks might be on the mound by the time Ohtani and Freddie Freeman bat for the second time. Expect manager Rob Thomson to be even more proactive with his starter than usual in the postseason as the Phillies have seen Nola quickly unravel on many occasions. Even if he were to strike out five over two scoreless innings to begin the night, it would still be worth having a lefty loose in the bottom of the third.
From an offensive perspective, the Phillies do not need an explosive night, 3-2 would count the same as 13-2. It would go a long way if Harper let things come to him more. The version of Harper that is over-aggressive and expands the zone is not the best version of himself, which he knows as well as anyone. The Dodgers have thrown him nine pitches outside the strike zone, he’s swung at seven and whiffed at six of them. Nearly 40% of the Dodgers’ pitches to Harper through two games in the series have been low and away.
They’ve gotten Kyle Schwarber out everywhere. He’s swung-and-missed at 10 of the 13 pitches he’s seen inside the strike zone and is 0-for-21 with 13 strikeouts dating back to the regular season. Schwarber seems caught in between. In Game 2, he swung at the first pitch he saw from Snell, an up-and-away fastball just above the zone. It was a borderline pitch, not a chase, but that wasn’t exactly Schwarber’s nitro zone this year. He hit .194 on pitches in that zone with three of his 56 homers. He’s struck out so much lately and Snell has such devastating stuff that it might have been an example of Schwarber deciding he was going to attack the first pitch that looked good to him rather than get into a two-strike count.
It’s almost unnecessary to go through the list of Phillies who must step up Wednesday night because they’ll need everyone. They need Schwarber and Harper to be selective, powerful or both, and they need a good game from multiple right-handed hitters. Realmuto is the only one who’s had solid at-bats through two games.
Elimination has almost arrived for the Phillies, but the way a team stays composed in these moments is to block out the importance of the night and treat it as going out and trying to win a baseball game. Inside the clubhouse, Phillies coaches and players are likely considering that they’ve had 14 separate win streaks this season of at least three games. None, though, with this degree of difficulty.