Nola, pitching at Citizens Bank Park for the first time since May 14, finally earned his first win since May 3. He wasn’t flawless. He wasn’t overpowering. But in a week when this rotation was thrown into chaos, he was steady enough. Six innings, three runs, six strikeouts. And maybe most encouraging of all: his fastball had a pulse again.
His very first pitch came in at 92.9 mph, harder than nearly everything he threw in his last outing. By the end of the first inning, he touched 94.1 mph — something he had done only twice all season. The four-seamer averaged 92.6 mph on the night, his best mark of the year.
“He looked really good tonight,” said manager Rob Thomson. “The command of his fastball was really good.”
That uptick in velocity made his trademark curveball play up again, too. It became his most-used pitch, and the Nationals swung and missed at it 11 times in 25 tries — a 44 percent whiff rate that tilted the game his way.
“The other stuff plays up,” Thomson said. “It makes everything else a little bit better.”
The offense made sure his night wouldn’t go to waste. Nationals starter Mitchell Parker was perfect through three innings before everything unraveled in the fourth. J.T. Realmuto and Alec Bohm ripped RBI doubles. And then Edmundo Sosa, who has a flair for these moments, launched a three-run homer to blow the game open. Five runs in all, and the Phillies had their cushion.
Turner added on in the fifth with a solo shot — just his second homer at Citizens Bank Park all season, both coming this week — to make it 6–1.
From there, Nola held it together. He pitched out of a fifth-inning mess after a defensive miscue put two runners in scoring position with nobody out, limiting the damage to a single run. He allowed back-to-back solo homers in the sixth — CJ Abrams and Luis García Jr. — before bowing out on his 97th pitch.
It was enough. The Phillies bullpen did the rest. One night after his first blown save as a Phillie, Jhoan Duran got the ball again in the ninth with the tying runs aboard. He struck out James Wood, then coaxed Abrams into a lineout to left to lock down his 23rd save of the season.
Along the way, there were the kinds of oddities Stark would underline in red ink: Bohm was thrown out at home in the eighth, Daylen Lile was plunked by a Matt Strahm pitch in the same inning, and García Jr. kept the Nationals afloat with three hits of his own. But the last-place Nationals saw their three-game winning streak snapped anyway. Parker, who had been unhittable for three innings, left after five innings charged with six runs.
So the final was Phillies 6, Nationals 4. But the story was Nola — his velocity, his resolve, his first win in more than three months. On the night Wheeler’s diagnosis shook the clubhouse, the Phillies saw the right-hander they’ll need to help carry them into October.
On Saturday night, with his team reeling, he was.
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