They came to Busch Stadium hoping to salvage a .500 road trip with their ace on the mound. Instead, the Phillies walked out with a seven-run shutout, a pair of slumping bats in freefall, and a lineup that might as well have missed the team bus.
Zack Wheeler took the ball Sunday with a chance to steady the ship. But his command wavered, and the Cardinals didn’t miss. He gave up a two-run homer in the fourth, a pair of ground-rule doubles in the sixth, and finished his day with six innings, seven hits, and four earned runs. Not vintage Wheeler. Not even close. Matt Strahm and Carlos Hernandez followed—and gave up three more runs, just in case the offense needed an even steeper hill to climb.
But the real story? The Phillies’ bats. Or rather, the total absence of them.
They put four of their first 11 hitters on base against lefty Matthew Liberatore. Then came Bryce Harper’s third-inning single. And that was it. That was the end of the traffic. The Phillies didn’t put another man on base for the rest of the afternoon. Twenty in a row went down to close it out.
That’s not a dry spell. That’s a desert.
They’ve now been shut out twice in their last three games and held without an extra-base hit both times. Across the final four games of their swing through Atlanta and St. Louis, they scored a grand total of six runs. They lost both series. They went 2-4 on the trip. And they left behind some batting averages that are starting to look like spring ERA’s.
Brandon Marsh? Hitless in his last 26 at-bats. Alec Bohm? Five for his last 45 since the team packed up in Washington on March 30. That's the heart of the lineup, not the back end. And it’s beating with all the pulse of a lullaby right now.
The Phillies return to Citizens Bank Park with questions swirling. The rotation has done enough. The bullpen has held the line. But the bats? Somewhere between D.C. and now, they vanished.
