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| Following a crucial error, Harper came through with a clutch solo blast in Game 2. | CREDIT: IMGN Wire |
Bryce Harper stood in right field Wednesday afternoon with perhaps the Phillies’ season sitting somewhere behind him.
He had misread Drake Baldwin’s fly ball in the seventh inning, a play Harper acknowledged afterward he should have made. The ball sailed beyond him, Baldwin reached second, a run scored and, moments later, another followed.
Braves 3, Phillies 1.
Six outs from winter.
And Harper thought about his son.
“I was thinking about Krew, my son, what I would say to him in that situation,” Harper said. “I think it’s a learning situation not for myself but everybody else as well.”
What happened next became the story of Game 2.
Not the mistake. The response.
Kyle Schwarber homered. Harper homered. Alec Bohm homered. Andrew Painter, 23 years old and making his postseason debut, supplied three scoreless innings out of the bullpen.
And somehow, after spending much of Wednesday afternoon teetering between another agonizing October defeat and the end of their season, the Phillies walked away with a 4-3 victory in 10 innings over Atlanta and a Game 3 to play Thursday.
They did not save their season by playing flawlessly.
They saved it by refusing to let their mistakes have the final word.
“Everybody is going to make mistakes at some point,” Harper said, “but it’s how you come through in the next situation.”
That might as well have been the Phillies’ Game 2 mission statement.
Cristopher Sánchez kept giving them chances while the offense did little with them. He worked 6 2/3 innings, allowing three runs on six hits and striking out six over a career-high 116 pitches.
The Phillies gave him a 1-0 lead in the first when Trea Turner doubled and Harper singled him home. Atlanta immediately answered, and Tyler Mahle essentially suffocated the Phillies from there.
By the sixth, Sánchez was pitching with almost no margin for error. Atlanta loaded the bases with one out before Michael Harris II bounced a ball to Bohm, who started a 3-2-3 double play that kept the game tied.
An inning later, the Phillies made Sánchez’s job harder.
Bohm could not convert a bunt into an out. Then Baldwin sent the fly ball toward Harper.
Harper initially read it as a routine play.
“I didn’t think he hit it very hard,” he said. “I thought it was going to be a pop fly just right at me and then it kind of kept traveling. Obviously a ball I should have caught.”
Baldwin’s double put Atlanta ahead. Matt Olson’s sacrifice fly made it 3-1.
The Phillies were six outs from elimination.
Then came the response.
Schwarber led off the eighth against Dylan Lee and launched a home run to right. Harper followed three pitches later and drove another one out to right-center.
It was the Phillies’ first set of back-to-back postseason home runs since Harper and Nick Castellanos did it in Game 2 of the 2024 NLDS against the Mets.
Tie game.
Harper had barely enough time to live with his mistake before he was given an opportunity to answer it.
“You’ve got to flush it as quick as possible,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you did the at-bat before, the inning before. It’s what you do in that moment.”
The Phillies still needed six more outs.
And Jhoan Duran was unavailable.
Mattingly confirmed afterward that Duran could not pitch after working two innings in Tuesday’s Game 1 loss. That left the Phillies searching for another solution in an elimination game.
They found one in Painter.
The rookie had spent part of the season back in Triple-A. He had barely worked as a conventional reliever in his life. His first postseason appearance arrived in the eighth inning of a 3-3 elimination game.
Then he threw six straight balls.
“Nerves getting to me a little bit at first,” Painter said. “I was super amped up. I was just trying to throw everything as hard as I could.”
Again, the response mattered more than the problem.
Painter found the strike zone, induced a double play and escaped the eighth. He worked a scoreless ninth.
Then Bohm came to the plate with two outs in the 10th against Didier Fuentes.
Bohm has spent years experiencing nearly every possible emotion in Philadelphia. He has been booed. He has been embraced. He has been the subject of trade speculation. Now he is approaching free agency with no guarantee that another Phillies season awaits him.
He hit a 1-1 fastball toward right.
Bohm did not know it was gone until he heard the baseball rattle beyond the fence.
Phillies 4, Braves 3.
“I really, really don’t want this year to end,” Bohm said. “I know everybody in that clubhouse is going to show up and do everything we can to win a game tomorrow.”
There were still three outs to collect.
Painter returned for the 10th and put himself in one final mess. Atlanta eventually had the tying and winning runs aboard with two outs.
With Dominic Smith batting and Painter ahead 0-2, his fastball at the bottom of the zone was called a ball.
J.T. Realmuto challenged.
The automated system overturned the call.
Strike three.
Game over.
Painter later admitted he essentially “blacked out in the moment.” Harper noticed something else: the rookie’s ability to slow himself down after things began getting chaotic.
“Just an absolute dawg in that situation,” Harper said.
That description worked for more than Painter.
For one afternoon, the Phillies were imperfect and resilient, occasionally sloppy and eventually spectacular. They stranded opportunities. They made mistakes. They found themselves staring directly at the end of a season they had needed 162 games just to extend this far.
And each time Game 2 seemed prepared to bury them, somebody answered.
Schwarber answered.
Harper answered.
Painter answered.
Bohm answered.
Now there is only one response left to give.
Thursday brings the question one more time: Do the Phillies have another answer?
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