Not the throwback uniforms. Not the gloves and bats being packed for Thursday night’s Field of Dreams Game in Iowa. Something considerably heavier followed them out of Busch Stadium on Wednesday afternoon.
Six losses in eight games. Back-to-back series defeats. One run over the final 18 innings in St. Louis. And, perhaps most unsettling of all, the realization that a postseason position that once appeared to be Philadelphia’s to control has become a fight simply to stay above the cut line.
The Cardinals beat the Phillies, 7-1, Wednesday.
That was the score.
The bigger story is what has happened around it.
Philadelphia is 64-58 with 40 games remaining. San Diego is 65-57, while Arizona owns the same 64-58 record as the Phillies. The National League Wild Card race that spent much of the summer existing somewhere in the background is now directly in front of them.
“Nobody here is happy with the brand of baseball we’re playing right now,” J.T. Realmuto told MLB.com afterward.
That assessment was difficult to dispute Wednesday.
The Phillies arrived in St. Louis with Cristopher Sánchez and Zack Wheeler lined up for the final two games of the series. Sánchez delivered six scoreless innings Tuesday and the Phillies lost, 2-0. Wheeler looked dominant for much of Wednesday afternoon before everything unraveled in a four-run fifth. Philadelphia lost both games and scored once between them.
That is how a rough stretch starts becoming something more important.
For most of Wednesday afternoon, the Phillies had opportunities to keep the game under control. St. Louis took a 1-0 lead in the second after Alec Bohm misplayed Jordan Walker’s ground ball at first, allowing Walker to reach before he stole second and scored on Nathan Church’s double. Philadelphia answered in the fourth when Bryce Harper doubled and Luis Arraez followed with an RBI ground-rule double.
Then the offense disappeared.
Kyle Leahy held Philadelphia to one run on six hits over five innings, and the Cardinals bullpen took it from there. The Phillies never produced the sustained pressure necessary to turn the afternoon back in their favor.
That has become the more troubling element of this skid.
There will be days when Wheeler gets hit. There will be nights when Sánchez can dominate for six innings and still leave without a win. That is baseball. But the Phillies were built with enough veteran offense to survive games when their pitching is merely ordinary, and lately too many innings have ended without anything resembling a threat.
Wednesday eventually became a Wheeler story because St. Louis forced it to.
He needed only 49 pitches to navigate the first four innings and struck out the side in the first. But the fifth became a different game entirely. César Prieto, who entered the afternoon 0-for-27 this season, singled. With two outs, JJ Wetherholt singled, Iván Herrera brought home a run with another single, Alec Burleson ripped a two-run double and Walker followed with another RBI double. Four consecutive two-out hits transformed a 1-1 game into a 5-1 deficit.
Wheeler needed 35 pitches for the inning. His final line: five innings, six hits, five runs — four earned — one walk and five strikeouts.
“It’s a frustrating day just in general,” Wheeler told reporters afterward.
More significant is that the frustration has started to form a pattern. Wednesday marked the third time in Wheeler’s last four starts that he allowed at least four earned runs, with the exception being a two-inning outing in Baltimore shortened by weather. He has failed to reach the sixth inning in three of those four starts.
For most clubs, that would be the primary concern.
For these Phillies, it is merely one of them.
St. Louis added two runs in the seventh, with Burleson contributing another RBI single, and the Cardinals cruised from there. Burleson finished the series 5-for-10 with five RBIs as St. Louis took two of three and climbed to 61-60.
The Phillies, meanwhile, departed with their second consecutive series loss and a 2-6 record over their last eight games. Interim manager Don Mattingly’s message afterward was essentially that there is no value in relitigating what has already happened; the Phillies cannot reclaim the games and series they have allowed to slip away.
That is true.
But the standings remember all of them.
This is what makes the next stretch different. The Phillies are no longer playing with the cushion that once allowed an ugly loss to be dismissed as one ugly loss. Arizona is level with them. San Diego is a game ahead. Miami is only 2½ games behind Philadelphia in the NL East standings. Every quiet offensive night now carries a little more weight.
And that makes Thursday’s setting almost comically appropriate.
The Phillies will travel to Dyersville, Iowa, for MLB’s Field of Dreams Game against Minnesota, with Aaron Nola scheduled to face Taj Bradley. There will be cornfields, nostalgia and enough baseball history to fill a television broadcast.
For one night, Major League Baseball will sell the dream.
The Phillies need to deal with their reality.
They have 40 games left, two months of evidence that says they are good enough to remain in this race, and eight recent games suggesting nothing about October should be assumed.
The corn can wait.
The Phillies need to start winning again.
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