PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Kyle Schwarber mashed the first pitch for the Phillies under their new Canadian manager for a home run and Bryson Stott sent the final pitch of a weekend sweep into the right field seats.
Make it 3-0 for interim manger Rob Thomson.
Philadelphia’s season — with a team loaded with All-Stars, an MVP and the fourth-highest payroll in baseball — just might not be dead yet.
The Phillies put everything together in a three-game sweep of the Los Angeles Angels and showed flashes of why they were a trendy preseason playoff pick following a free-agent spending spree.
The front end of the rotation delivered: Zack Wheeler struck out nine in six innings in Saturday’s win and Zach Eflin tossed eight shutout innings on Friday.
The weekend ended with an impressive comeback capped by Bryce Harper’s tying grand slam in the eighth inning followed by Stott’s winning, three-run homer with two outs in the ninth.
Where were these Phillies during the season’s first two months?
It’s a question president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski surely wondered last week before he fired manager Joe Girardi after two-plus seasons without a whiff of the postseason. The Phillies had lost 12 of 17 and dropped well out of the NL East race when Dombrowski dismissed Girardi, who won a World Series with the Yankees, and promoted Girardi’s long-time bench coach and close friend in Thomson.
Three wins, 26 runs, and a comeback that had kids crying later, and the Phillies entered Monday 4½ games out of the second NL wild card. Yes, the wins came against an Angeles team that left Philly on an 11-game losing streak and Mike Trout in a career-worst slump. But the rest of the schedule might actually break in the Phillies’ favor.
“I hate talking about it’s early, it’s early,” Harper said….