Phillies 2, Diamondbacks 1. An Alec Bohm bolt to left-center in the second. A Bryson Stott double into the right-center gap in the fourth. ESPN’s win-probability graph arcing to roughly 82% for the home team by the time the inning exhaled.
You could feel October clearing its throat for another World Series appearance by the Phillies. Then everything you think you know about momentum got rewritten in real time.
It was October 24, 2023. Game 7 of the NLCS. Citizens Bank Park — the place that had reinvented home-field advantage — staged for a coronation after a month of thunder. This core had bulldozed Miami, de-fang’d Atlanta, and opened this series by outscoring Arizona 15–3 in Games 1 and 2. Up 2–1 in the fourth of Game 7? That wasn’t just a score; it was a confirmation email. Until it wasn’t.
If you want to know when this era hit the snag in its World Series chase, don’t overthink it.
It’s not a trend line or a trope. It’s five pitches in the fifth. Ranger Suárez had maneuvered through traffic most of the night, but with two on, Corbin Carroll — 23 years old and playing like no one told him about Philly’s postseason aura — punched a game-tying single. Two batters later, Gabriel Moreno lasered the go-ahead knock. The scoreboard flipped to 3–2, Arizona.
The sound wasn’t a roar anymore. It was a gulp.
From there, every Phillies at-bat felt like a coin flip in a wind tunnel. The inning that should have broken the game open never arrived. The two swings everyone in the city waited for never landed.
On the night they needed their stars to play to the back row, Bryce Harper and Trea Turner combined to go 0-for-8, the series tightening around every empty march back to the dugout.
As the seventh inning’s best chance flickered — two on, one out — they produced back-to-back flyouts that died in a ballpark that begged for another chance to roar.
Arizona, meanwhile, wrote the postseason’s rudest little poem: six pitchers, five scoreless bullpen innings, one rookie comet in Carroll who reached base four times, drove in two, scored two, and ran like a rumor you couldn’t catch. Add his seventh-inning sacrifice fly to make it 4–2, and all that was left was the image of a 45,397-seat cathedral realizing the miracle wasn’t coming this time.
Final: Diamondbacks 4, Phillies 2. In their house. In Game 7.
You can put numbers to the ache. The Phillies went 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position in Game 7, stranding seven. That’s not a theme — that’s a verdict. Stack it on top of Game 6, a 5–1 loss that forced the decider, and you get the rarest October parlay: a team losing Games 6 and 7 in its own building after holding a 3–2 series lead.
You don’t need metaphors to explain what that does to belief; you can see it in the postgame eyes and read it in the next October’s at-bats.
But the hinge of this entire core’s narrative is still that fourth-to-fifth-inning swing in Game 7. Because that’s where the math and the moment parted ways.
The graph said ~84 percent. The game said not tonight.
And once a team watches the sure-thing evaporate at home — after a month of feeling inevitable — the aftershocks don’t stay politely in 2023. They hitch a ride into every future October. They change how a crowd sounds when a ball goes up to the warning track (Harper’s eighth-inning drive, caught by Alek Thomas). They change how a dugout breathes when traffic builds and the at-bat tilts to two strikes. They turn swagger into second-guessing.
This is why the ghosts of that night still wander through South Philly. Not because the roster isn’t good enough — it is — but because the identity this club built was forged around finishing people in that park. Once the fortress cracks, every creak sounds louder.
Since that night, even the national conversation has framed Citizens Bank Park as something less than automatic in October. The Phillies themselves said it best afterward: they had chances; they didn’t finish the job; Arizona played better over the last two days. That’s not fatalism. That’s scar tissue talking.
If you’re looking for a blueprint to exorcise it, it isn’t complicated — just unforgiving.
They have to win an October game like that in that building. They have to flip the same levers that failed them — the seventh-inning at-bat with two on, the two-strike pitch with the inning hanging by a thread, the high fastball that needs to carry one row deeper — and they have to make the park believe again. That’s how you replace a ghost: with a bigger memory in the same room.
Until then, the snag remains the hinge. Ask anyone who was there what they remember. They’ll mention Bohm’s no-doubt swing. Stott’s gapper and the city tilting on its axis. The win-probability mountain peaking like a heart monitor. And then they’ll tell you about the five pitches in the fifth, the quiet that came after, and the cold walk up the concourses, where October air never felt so still.
That’s how eras collect baggage. That’s how a core learns the hardest truth in baseball: sometimes the loudest night ends in silence — and the silence can echo for years.
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