Bryson Stott sent a baseball 464 feet into the right-field seats Monday night, the kind of swing that demanded attention in a game that otherwise belonged to the pitchers.
The Phillies did not need much more.
Stott’s second-inning blast and Bryce Harper’s RBI double an inning later supplied all the offense Philadelphia could manage, but Aaron Nola and five relievers made those two runs stand in a 2-1 win over the Diamondbacks at Chase Field.
It was the Phillies’ fifth straight victory, their 14th in 16 games and their 21st win in August, completing a 21-7 month that was the best in the majors. Philadelphia improved to 78-60, remained tied with Chicago atop the National League wild-card standings and moved within four games of Atlanta in the NL East with 24 games remaining. Six of those are against the Braves.
The Phillies spent much of the summer trying to prove they were more than a team hanging around the postseason race. August provided their strongest evidence yet.
Twenty-one wins are one shy of the franchise record for a calendar month. The Phillies have reached 22 six times, most recently in September 1983. Their .750 winning percentage this August nevertheless tied for the 10th-best month in club history.
More important is how dramatically the month changed their season.
Philadelphia entered August having lost four consecutive games and four consecutive series. It leaves August tied for the National League’s best wild-card position and with the division no longer completely out of reach.
Monday showed why.
Nola was not overpowering. He was not particularly efficient, either. He needed 104 pitches to work five-plus innings, and 57 of those pitches were outside the strike zone. But Arizona never produced the inning that could have broken the game open.
Nola allowed one run on five hits with two walks and four strikeouts. The Diamondbacks chased his knuckle-curve out of the strike zone 50 percent of the time, an important weapon on a night when his command was not especially sharp.
Arizona’s lone run came in the third when Gabriel Moreno doubled home Geraldo Perdomo. Otherwise, Nola continued a turnaround that has become one of the Phillies’ most important developments entering September.
His ERA fell to 4.93, below 5.00 for the first time since April 19. After finishing June with a 6.04 ERA, Nola has pitched to a 2.50 ERA over his last seven starts. He has allowed two runs or fewer in five consecutive outings.
For a team expecting to play meaningful baseball for the next four weeks, getting this version of Nola changes the calculation.
So does what happened after he left.
Nola allowed a single and a walk to begin the sixth, putting two runners aboard with nobody out and the Phillies protecting a 2-1 lead. Don Mattingly handed the inning to rookie Alex McFarlane.
McFarlane retired all three hitters.
The biggest out came against Nolan Arenado. With the count full, McFarlane dropped an 86.1 mph sweeper into the zone and froze the eight-time All-Star for strike three. Instead of a game beginning to unravel, the Phillies walked back to the dugout still leading.
Then the bullpen finished the job.
Orion Kerkering worked two-thirds of the seventh before Brooks Raley recorded the final out. José Alvarado handled the eighth. Jhoan Duran took the ninth. Combined with McFarlane, the bullpen delivered four scoreless innings despite allowing four hits and three walks.
Arizona had chances. Plenty of them.
The Diamondbacks collected nine hits, stranded 11 runners and went 0-for-9 with runners in scoring position. Duran allowed two hits in the ninth and eventually faced Moreno with runners at first and third before inducing the game-ending groundout for his 29th save in 31 opportunities.
That is the bullpen Philadelphia will need in September. It does not have to make every inning comfortable. It has to survive the uncomfortable ones.
Stott gave them something to protect with one of the loudest swings of the season.
He jumped a 93.5 mph four-seam fastball from Brandon Pfaadt and launched it at 109.9 mph with a 29-degree angle. Statcast measured the blast at 464 feet — the longest home run of Stott’s career and the eighth-longest homer in the majors this season.
Harper doubled home Garrett Stubbs an inning later and extended his career-best on-base streak to 33 games. Harper finished August batting .333 with a 1.069 OPS and a .496 on-base percentage.
And that was it.
Two runs.
On the final night of August, that was enough.
There will be nights in September when the Phillies do not bludgeon somebody. There will be nights when the lineup leaves opportunities on the bases and a one-run lead has to survive four innings.
Those are the games postseason teams learn to win.
The Phillies just spent a month winning nearly every kind.
Now September gets to decide what August actually meant.
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