For three games to open the season, the Phillies presented the very best version of themselves. Best lineup. Three best starting pitchers. Best and, thanks to the customary day off after opening day, most rested bullpen.
And their best, it turns out, can go toe-to-toe with the best team in the National League East three years running.
The Phillies completed a three-game, season-opening sweep of the Atlanta Braves with a 2-1 victory on a sun-splashed Easter Sunday at Citizens Bank Park. Zach Eflin sparkled on the mound for seven innings, and Alec Bohm delivered a tiebreaking RBI single in the eighth against Braves reliever Chris Martin.
It marked the second time in three years that the Phillies began a season by sweeping three games from the Braves. In 2019, though, Atlanta’s three starters in the season-opening series were Julio Teheran, Bryse Wilson, and Kyle Wright. None was in the team’s rotation by season’s end, and the Braves wound up winning the NL East by 16 games over the fourth-place Phillies.
In turning the hat trick again this season, the Phillies seem to have made a louder statement. For one thing, they beat the Braves’ three top starters -- Max Fried on Thursday, Charlie Morton on Saturday, and Ian Anderson on Sunday.
And then there was this: Ronald Acuña Jr., Ozzie Albies, Freddie Freeman, and Marcell Ozuna -- the top four hitters in one of the league’s most feared lineups -- went 2-for-44 with one extra-base hit and 14 strikeouts against Phillies pitching.
The Braves scored in only two of 28 innings in the series. Phillies pitchers allowed 12 hits, three runs, and five walks while piling up 35 strikeouts.
It can’t get much better.
Then again, neither can the Phillies’ roster. They have the fourth-highest payroll in baseball, $191 million and roughly $202 million for luxury-tax purposes. They’re full healthy. And they were able to line up their best starting pitching -- Aaron Nola, Zack Wheeler, and Eflin -- to face the Braves.
Bohm, fast emerging as the Phillies’ best situational hitter, came to the plate with two on and one out in the eighth inning after Rhys Hoskins and Bryce Harper lined consecutive singles to left field. Bohm took a strike, fouled off a 1-1 pitch, then stayed with a slider and hit it to center field for a 2-1 lead.
The Phillies made Anderson throw 70 pitches through three innings. But for as hard as he worked, he allowed only two balls out of the infield: a two-out single by Bohm in the first inning and Andrew Knapp’s solo homer off his own face on the scoreboard on the facing of the second deck in right field.
Anderson breezed through the fourth and fifth innings, and the Phillies nursed their one-run lead until there were two outs in the top of the seventh.
Eflin had been brilliant to that point, allowing only three hits and one walk, facing two batters more than the minimum, and retiring 12 of his last 13. But then Travis d’Arnaud stepped to the plate, Eflin hung a first-pitch curveball, and it landed in the left-field seats for a game-tying home run.
