PHILADELPHIA — Five batters into Wednesday night’s game, Didi Gregorius gave the Phillies a five-run lead with one of his patented grand slams. And after rounding first base, about 140 feet into his home-run trot, he looked out to the bullpen in right-center field, raised his right arm, and held up two fingers as if to tell a group of mostly overused relievers that they could finally exhale.
Talk about wishful thinking.
The Phillies’ last four wins have been one-run games. The total margin of victory in their last nine wins is 12 runs. They haven’t won a game by more than two runs since April 16. Laughers don’t exist here. Neither will manager Joe Girardi’s fingernails if this keeps up.
True to form, then, the five-run outburst in the first inning was the extent of the Phillies’ offense. Starting pitcher Chase Anderson recorded only 13 outs. And after leaning heavily on his best relievers lately, Girardi was left to put a one-run lead in the hands of a starter-turned-reliever who hadn’t pitched in 18 days and a just-recalled right-hander whom the Phillies tried to use Tuesday night but couldn’t because his name mistakenly didn’t appear on the umpires’ lineup card.
What could go wrong?
But lefty Matt Moore got a big double play in the seventh inning, Enyel De Los Santos stranded the tying run on third base in the eighth, and the Phillies escaped with a 5-4 victory, their third consecutive one-run win over the Milwaukee Brewers, at Citizens Bank Park.
OK, now exhale — at least until Thursday’s matinee series finale.
If this were football and Girardi was handing out game balls, they would go to Moore and De Los Santos, unlikely setup men in a bullpen stretched thin by the frequency of close games and a two-week stretch without the Phillies having a day off.
The Phillies scored five runs before Brewers starter Freddy Peralta could blink — or record an out. Gregorius punctuated the first-inning ambush with his eighth career grand slam, fourth-most among active players and the most by any player in baseball since 2017.
But Peralta struck out six consecutive batters after Gregorius’s drive into the right-field bleachers. The Phillies had only one hit the rest of the game, a two-out single by Odúbel Herrera in the fourth inning.
The Brewers cut the margin to 5-4 in the fifth inning against lefty reliever JoJo Romero. And after Brandon Kintzler stabilized things with a scoreless sixth inning, the bullpen still had nine more outs to get. And neither Sam Coonrod nor closer Héctor Neris was available after recording five-out saves in the previous two games.
Moore began the season in the starting rotation and struggled before being placed on the COVID-19 injury list. He rejoined the team last week but had neither regained his rotation spot from Vince Velasquez nor appeared in a game. His last time on a mound, other than a bullpen session: April 18.
But Girardi liked Moore in the seventh inning because the Brewers had two left-handed hitters due to bat. After issuing a leadoff walk to Lorenzo Cain, Moore got one of the lefties (Daniel Vogelbach) to ground into a double play and struck out the other (Travis Shaw).
From there, it was De Los Santos’ turn. At last. After being denied entry to the game one night earlier because of the lineup-card snafu, the big right-hander came on and allowed a leadoff double to Avisaíl García. He got the next two batters out before wild-pitching García to third and hitting No. 8 batter Luke Maile with a two-strike fastball.
But De Los Santos got out of it by getting Tyrone Taylor to roll a grounder to shortstop for an inning-ending force at second base.
The ninth-inning duties fell to lefty José Alvarado, who returned from serving a two-game suspension earlier in the week to overcome putting the tying run on first base.
Anderson had the best year of his career with the Brewers in 2017, going 12-4 with a 2.74 ERA in 25 starts. Now, though, he was facing them for the first time since they traded him to the Toronto Blue Jays after the 2019 season.
Staked to the big lead, Anderson worked around a leadoff single in the second inning. But he began nibbling around the strike zone in the third. After Cain reached on a one-out infield single, Anderson walked Vogelbach and Shaw to load the bases.
García singled up the middle to easily drive in Cain. Herrera threw a rainbow from center field to the plate, and Vogelbach appeared to slide in safely under J.T. Realmuto’s tag. But home-plate umpire Marvin Hudson’s call was overturned by a replay review, and Anderson got out of the inning with a 5-1 lead.
Anderson gave up a leadoff homer to pinch-hitting Taylor in the fourth inning, then issued a one-out walk to Cain, at which point Girardi went to the bullpen. Romero was the first man up, and he allowed two hits and a walk, as the Brewers drew to within one run.
