PHILADELPHIA — It was billed as Zack Wheeler against Paul Skenes, the kind of midsummer matchup that should have made Citizens Bank Park feel like October for a night.
One ace with a long track record. One ace with generational stuff. One of baseball’s best veteran right-handers against the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner. On paper, it had the shape of a duel.
Then the Phillies turned it into something else entirely.
Behind three home runs, a five-run second inning and enough late bullpen work to survive a Pittsburgh push, the Phillies beat the Pirates, 10-6, on Wednesday night in a game that began with the promise of dominance and ended with heat, hard feelings and another reminder that this Phillies offense has started to look different.
Trea Turner hit a three-run homer off Skenes in the second inning, Brandon Marsh added a solo shot in the third, Bryce Harper drove in two with a fourth-inning double, and Alec Bohm provided the final separation with a two-run homer in the eighth.
By the end, the Phillies had tagged Skenes for eight runs, seven earned, over four innings. It was the most runs he had allowed in a major-league start. The Pirates have now lost nine straight games started by Skenes, whose season has drifted into strange territory after he entered the year as one of the sport’s most automatic arms.
The night was not clean for Wheeler, either.
He struck out 10 and still failed to complete five innings. He allowed nine hits, four runs and one walk over 4 2/3 innings, throwing 104 pitches on a night when the first-pitch temperature was 96 degrees. He was one out away from qualifying for the win when interim manager Don Mattingly came to get him in the fifth.
Wheeler did not hide his frustration.
“I was upset,” Wheeler told reporters afterward.
Asked why, Wheeler was direct.
“Getting taken out of the game,” he said. “I feel like I’ve earned that.”
That line became the postgame heartbeat of a game the Phillies won but did not neatly close. Wheeler had retired the first two batters in the fifth before allowing three straight singles. The last, by Nick Gonzales, made it 8-3. Mattingly then turned to left-hander Kyle Backhus, who hit the first two batters he faced, forcing in another run and charging it to Wheeler.
So Wheeler was left with an odd line: 10 strikeouts, no win, and his shortest outing since June 2024.
“I thought Wheels hung in there,” Mattingly said. “Obviously, it was one of those nights that his pitch count got extended early in the game, didn’t get ahead in the count as much as I’m sure he would like. Gave up some soft contact for hits that just kind of extended his innings and extended his pitch count.”
The Phillies had built enough of a cushion before that tension surfaced.
In the second, they loaded the bases against Skenes before Justin Crawford hit a grounder to third. Gonzales had a force play at the plate, but his throw struck Bohm’s hand and skipped away, allowing two runs to score. One pitch later, Turner turned on a sweeper and sent it into the left-field seats.
Just like that, it was 5-0.
The duel was gone.
Turner’s homer was his third in as many games, another loud swing in what has become one of the more encouraging offensive developments of the Phillies’ summer. After spending much of the season trying to find rhythm, Turner has begun to look like a table-setter and run-producer again, the kind of hitter who can change an inning before the opposing pitcher has time to reset.
The Pirates answered in the third, when Henry Davis homered and Pittsburgh pushed across two runs. But Marsh answered in the bottom half with his 15th homer, continuing his own push toward All-Star consideration and giving the Phillies a 6-2 lead.
In the fourth, Skenes unraveled further. Harper lined a ball to left that Tyler Callihan misjudged, allowing two more runs to score. That made it 8-2 and chased Skenes after four innings, ending what was supposed to be one of the marquee pitching matchups of the series with the Phillies instead turning it into another offensive statement.
Still, the night never became comfortable.
Pittsburgh cut the deficit to 8-4 in the fifth after Wheeler’s exit, then made it 8-6 in the seventh when Jared Triolo delivered a two-run double off Seth Johnson. That forced Mattingly to go to Orion Kerkering, who delivered the most important relief appearance of the night.
Kerkering recorded five outs on just 15 pitches. He got the Phillies out of the seventh, worked a clean eighth and handed the ninth to Jhoan Duran with the lead restored to four after Bohm’s two-run homer.
“This was the kind of game where you never really felt you had enough,” Mattingly said. “So to continue to score was huge.”
That was the part the Phillies could feel good about. They knocked out Skenes. They scored 10 runs. They won for the second time in three games against Pittsburgh and moved to a season-high 11 games over .500.
But the final scene belonged to Wheeler’s frustration.
For most teams, a 10-6 win over Skenes would be simple enough. For the Phillies, it became something more layered. They beat one of baseball’s premier arms, survived a messy middle inning, got meaningful bullpen outs from Kerkering and still left the ballpark with their ace unhappy.
That is baseball in July for a team trying to push toward something bigger.
The Phillies won the game. Wheeler wanted one more out. And the night that was supposed to belong to two aces instead became a reminder that even when the Phillies are rolling, nothing about this season has been entirely clean.
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