There’s a scene in The Way of the Gun where Ryan Phillippe’s character is torturing some dude — the details are unimportant but gruesome — and he’s leaning over his poor victim, describing all the horrible things he’s going to do if he doesn’t talk. One line has always stuck with me: “Whatever I do after that, I’ll pour gasoline in your eyes from time to time just to keep you from passing out.”
Baseball can be like this. You can check out of a blowout, but a failed comeback only makes defeat hurt worse. No hope isn’t as bad as false hope. Is your team showing signs of life, or are you about to get another splash of gasoline in your eyes?
Either the Mets or Phillies could’ve gotten the splash on Sunday, as Nick Castellanos and Mark Vientos, among others, traded clutch hits, and both teams watched their high-leverage relievers get torched. In the end, the Phillies bounced back one more time than the Mets, salvaging a home split with a 7-6 walk-off win in Game 2 of the National League Division Series. It was an instant classic in its own right, and a victory of immense import for a team that looked dead on its feet.
Saturday’s Game 1 was the latest installment in the story of a resilient and unpredictable Mets team, but narratively it was pretty straightforward. Kyle Schwarber led off the bottom of the first with a home run, Zack Wheeler kept the Mets off the scoreboard for seven innings, and the instant Wheeler came out of the game, the Mets jumped all over the Phillies bullpen. A comeback, yes, but not a see-saw affair.
Game 2 followed a familiar pattern for five and a half innings. The Phillies offense, which had looked totally lost in playoff action since about Game 2 of last year’s NLCS, let Mets starter Luis Severino have his way. Phillies lefty Cristopher Sánchez pitched well enough to win, but only if he got reasonable run support; he was by no means perfect. Sánchez, who had the highest groundball rate by a Phillies starter in more than 20 years, allowed nine batted balls in the air.
One of those was a third-inning home run by Vientos. That two-run opposite-field wallscraper was nevertheless the difference when Sánchez left the game after five innings. Pete Alonso followed with a solo shot off José Ruiz in the top of the sixth.
In early June 2022, the Phillies fired manager Joe Girardi and gave the reins to Rob Thomson, a longtime Yankees coach who’d followed Girardi south for the 2020 season. The unassuming Canadian baseball lifer immediately clicked with a veteran roster that had been built to win now but had struggled to eke out so much as a Wild Card spot since Bryce Harper arrived in 2019. Thomson is now the Phillies’ modern-era leader in winning percentage, and his first three seasons have been marked by a pennant, an NLCS appearance, and the team’s first division title since 2011, in that order.
And most of all, chill vibes. Thomson is an emotional metronome, and panic is not in his nature. On the rare occasions he’s drawn criticism, it’s been because he’s too steady a hand on the tiller. He urged calm as the Phillies blew a 2-0 lead in last year’s NLCS, and while the team didn’t freak out, it also didn’t hit much in the second half of the series.
That trend continued in Game 1 against the Mets, right down to Schwarber and Harper providing the only licks of offense. In Game 2, the Mets had just extended their lead against Sánchez, a pitcher who was only in a close game because the high-leverage guys — management of whom had been a strength for Thomson in the past — had collapsed the night before.
Meanwhile, Severino was getting the Phillies to swing at whatever he wanted, and the crowd was fed up. Phillies fans are like chihuahuas: Loud, mean, and really bad at masking their anxiety. When Castellanos swung at two uncompetitive breaking balls in the bottom of the fourth, the Citizens Bank Park crowd gave him a sarcastic cheer when he managed to lay off a third breaker that bounced in the opposite batter’s box.
The Alonso homer was the nadir of the Thomson era. The Phillies looked sure to go down 2-0 in the series to the Mets, and if that happened they were surely bound for a first-round exit. If that happened, the course could no longer be stayed. Thomson himself would almost certainly be safe, but his team could not head into the 2025 postseason — if it made it that far — with the same offensive approach that had failed the previous two years.
Not so fast.
It all happened with two outs in the sixth. Trea Turner, who’d hit the cages after a mortifying Saturday night 0-for-4, turned around a sweeper for his second single of the afternoon. That brought Harper to the plate to face a 99-mph 2-2 fastball, and he bounced it off the batter’s eye, 431 feet from home plate.
BRYCE HARPER BRINGS LIFE TO PHILLY
It’s a one run ballgame!!
? Watch in 4K on the FOX Sports App pic.twitter.com/ztWH5GXl3C
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) October 6, 2024
That’s all well and good, but Harper has never stopped hitting — he had a double and two walks on Saturday, after all — and the Phillies live and die with the bottom of their lineup.
Before the game, Thomson did something uncharacteristic: He pushed a lever, benching struggling cleanup hitter Alec Bohm, elevating Edmundo Sosa to the starting lineup and Castellanos to the spot behind Harper.
The last time we saw Castellanos before the sixth, he was an object of derision, a symbol of the team’s fatal flaws. But this time, instead of burying his sweeper low and away, Severino left it up, and Castellanos hit it 425 feet to tie the game.
“He doesn’t let anything bother him, really,” Thomson said of his new cleanup hitter. “If he’s struggling, it doesn’t really bother him; he just keeps working. He’s an experienced guy. He knows he’s going to come out of it at some point. And that stays with that end game, as well. He just keeps fighting.”
Through 5 2/3 innings, Severino was cruising, but Turner’s single brought him to 77 pitches. And by that point, Severino was seeing Harper and Castellanos for the third time. With a three-run lead and two outs, a runner on first is hardly worth getting excited about, no matter who’s up. And the back-to-back home runs came so quickly that there was no time to get a reliever up once trouble started.
Nevertheless, Mets manager Carlos Mendoza did not have a new pitcher warming up just in case, even though Severino was closer to the end of his stint than the beginning.
Mendoza explained that he was working with a shorthanded bullpen after Saturday’s piggyback effort — Reed Garrett, Ryne Stanek, and Phil Maton all threw more than 20 pitches, and David Peterson threw 50 — so he didn’t have the luxury of pulling his starter early.
“[Severino]’s our guy. Especially when you have a short ‘pen, I’m not going to be as aggressive,” Mendoza said. “The way he was throwing the baseball, I don’t care about third time through, he’s pitching really well.”
Thomson had no such limitations, and went to Orion Kerkering in the top of the seventh. Kerkering was the last pitcher to participate in the previous evening’s disastrous top of the eighth, but he hadn’t been charged with a run. He has the best stuff in the Phillies bullpen, and Francisco Lindor and Vientos could do nothing with it. But with two outs, Kerkering fell behind Brandon Nimmo, left a fastball low and over the plate — Nimmo’s red zone — and found out there are worse things than a walk.
4-3, Mets. More gas in the eyes.
But the Phillies, having opened the offensive taps for the first time, kept the pressure on. They put two men on base with two outs in the seventh against José Buttó, and Mendoza sent for his relief ace. The manager said after the game that Edwin Díaz was never going to stay in for a seven-out save. Rather, he’d identified — correctly, to that point — the most important at-bat of the game, and called on his best pitcher to handle it.
A matchup like this, with the game on the line, is why you come to the ballpark. Victory for Schwarber would at the very least tie the game and likely put the Phillies on top. Victory for Díaz would get the Mets out of the inning with a clear path to a surprising 2-0 lead in the series. A draw — a walk, in other words — would load the bases for Turner and Harper. Díaz had to win.
And he did, enticing the Phillies’ most disciplined hitter to chase a 3-2 slider at his ankles. Schwarber knew immediately that he’d made a mistake and cranked the bat back, but third base umpire Carlos Torres ruled that he’d gone around.
Splash.
But Díaz, Mendoza’s most trusted reliever, has gotten heavy use. He threw 26 pitches last Sunday, 40 on Monday, and 39 on Thursday in a five-out appearance to wrap up the Wild Card Series.
Díaz struck out Turner to start the bottom of the eighth, and wisely stayed away from Harper. He threw four pitches outside the zone and sent the two-time MVP to first. Which, in previous playoff games, would’ve meant he was safe until Schwarber came up again. But now, the back six of Philadelphia’s lineup was awake. Castellanos got a fastball up in the zone and inside-outed it to right.
The next batter, Bryson Stott, took the first five pitches Díaz threw him. He liked the sixth, a belt-high slider, and lined it into the corner for a two-run triple. Nimmo’s home run counted for nothing. More false hope.
Even after Stott came home to score on an error by Vientos, a two-run lead was not safe. Matt Strahm, one of the architects of the previous night’s bullpen calamity, had Lindor on his heels with one out in the ninth, but allowed him to reach on a single.
That brought up Vientos, the breakout star of this series. The Mets third baseman has seen 35 pitches in this series, 29 of which were thrown by pitchers who made the All-Star team this year. Against those four All-Stars — Wheeler, Sánchez, Jeff Hoffman, and Strahm — Vientos is 5-for-7 with a walk, two home runs, and five RBI.
Most of that success has come from staying within himself. What’s impressed me most about Vientos in this series is his ability to take what the pitcher gives him. If that’s a walk, he’ll walk. If it’s a dinked single to the opposite field, he’ll dink a single. In an intemperate moment, I thought to myself, “This is a little like Derek Jeter.”
WOW!! MARK VIENTOS HAS DONE IT AGAIN!!
THE COMEBACK METS!! THIS GAME IS TIED!! pic.twitter.com/eIQZ61Fyuh
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) October 6, 2024
Vientos’ second home run of the day was nothing of the sort. He got a fastball, up above the strike zone and on the outside part of the plate, and wrenched it to the pull side at 105.3 mph. Tie ballgame. After another bullpen meltdown, all the Phillies’ offensive rejuvenation had amounted to nothing. And had Castellanos not retired Alonso on one of his signature sliding catches to end the inning, it might’ve come to less than nothing.
Don’t bother hoping. It’ll only hurt more.
If the Mets could get through the meat of the order just one more time, they could win the game in extras.
Tylor Megill retired the first two batters of the ninth. But Turner, who would finish the game 2-for-4 with two stolen bases, walked. Harper, who wanted the game-winning hit so badly you could smell it from the press box, got the money pitch, a curveball middle-in, and pulled it down the line… foul, maybe a foot or two from becoming the game-winning double. He settled for another walk.
Which, once again, summoned Castellanos to the dish.
Harper takes big at-bats with great gravitas. He works through his routine deliberately. He steps out, he paces, he stares meaningfully off into the distance like Hamlet. Castellanos has no time for such ceremony. Megill gave him three pitches that could be described as remotely hittable. Castellanos swung at all of them.
The third was in the zone and low, and Castellanos turned on it. It was only a single, but he hit the hell out of the ball: 110.6 mph off the bat, the hardest-hit ball Castellanos has produced in two months. Nimmo gave up the chase, and Turner scored from second with ease. It was Castellanos’ fifth walk-off hit of the year.
WHAT. A. GAME. 🤯
Nick Castellanos walks it off to even the series!! #RingTheBell pic.twitter.com/7tlFi2Uexp
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) October 6, 2024
“He’s Nick Castellanos, he’s a professional hitter, and he’s hit his whole career,” Stott said. “He came up big for us a lot this year. It feels like every walk-off hit is Nick, and that’s who he is. And his heart rate doesn’t get up, stays the same. And gets the swing off.”
Thomson, as you might expect, thinks the Phillies’ offensive outburst in the second half of the game is the end of a slump, a sign of things to come.
“I think that there’s been a lot of talk, not only publicly but in our clubhouse, about getting back in the strike zone, controlling the strike zone on both sides of the ball,” Thomson said. “If you do that, you’re going to win games. And I think they’re making a conscious effort, for sure.”
After getting their whole lineup rolling, and one-upping the Mets with their own gut-punch comeback win, you’d say the Phillies have the momentum.
After Game 1, Nimmo said he didn’t believe in magic or mojo, but: “I do believe in momentum… Momentum is a big thing. And having confidence is a big thing.”
Momentum is a dirty word around these stat-minded parts. It’s easy to identify after the fact but treacherous in real time. Nevertheless, what Nimmo describes — momentum as confidence — has a real effect.
In physics, momentum is described by Newton’s first law of motion: A body at rest remains at rest, and a body in motion remains in motion, unless it’s acted upon by an outside force.
Those outside actions are the inflection points in games and series. The Phillies offense can look moribund, until Castellanos goes berserk in his last three at-bats. But the Phillies are no more destined to hit going forward than they were to go away meekly before Castellanos showed up. More outside forces are yet to come.
Is this the beginning of the end of the Mets’ miracle run? Have the Phillies resumed course for the championship challenge that’s become customary under Thomson? Or is this the aberration, the false hope that only precedes further heartbreak, like an eyeful of gasoline.
