PHILADELPHIA _ Roman Quinn made amends.
Six innings after the Phillies center fielder overran a routine fly ball that dropped six feet behind him, Quinn took a wide turn around third base and slid into home ahead of the tag from New York Mets catcher Wilson Ramos to cap a had-to-have-it 6-5 victory Friday night at Citizens Bank Park.
With Quinn on second base and one out, Bryce Harper hit a line drive to right field against Mets reliever Seth Lugo. Right fielder Michael Conforto picked up the ball cleanly and made a strong throw, but Quinn _ the fastest player on the Phillies _ got his hand on the plate.
"The thing about Roman is, when he slid, he didn't decelerate," manager Joe Girardi said. "He accelerated through the bag, and that was probably the difference."
A video review confirmed the call and launched a mini-celebration on the field after closer Hector Neris blew a one-run lead in the top of the ninth on a two-out RBI single by Robinson Cano. The Phillies snapped a three-game losing streak and took the opener of an important series against the Mets.
"I think this was a really important win for us," Girardi said.
J.T. Realmuto gave the Phillies a 5-4 lead in the fifth inning with his eighth home run _ the second-most by a Phillies player through 15 games of a season after only Mike Schmidt (12 in 1976) _ against spot-starting Mets right-hander Walker Lockett. And, for a change, the maligned bullpen held it.
Well, almost.
Jose Alvarez, Blake Parker, Adam Morgan, and Tommy Hunter passed the baton and combined to get 14 outs without allowing a run.
The Phillies snapped a three-game losing streak and won for just the second time in the last seven games. It's probably still too early to classify any series under the "must-win" heading. But with more than a quarter of this 60-game sprint season already complete, and 10 games in a row on the road after Sunday, it's almost imperative that the Phillies take care of business against the Mets this weekend at Citizens Bank Park.
It was fortuitous, then, that the Mets scratched ace Jacob deGrom a few hours before the game because of a stiff neck.
The Phillies countered with Howard, who made his hotly anticipated major league debut five nights earlier. Girardi was eager to watch Howard pitch again, free from the first-start jitters and irregularity of a schedule in which he went nine days between outings.
But when Howard walked off the mound with an athletic trainer after 69 pitches and with one out in the fourth inning, the Mets led 4-2. Howard gave up back-to-back solo home runs on off-speed pitches to lefty-hitting Dom Smith and Cano in the third inning but didn't get much help from his defense either.
The Phillies made five misplays through three innings. Three of them occurred in the outfield, four contributed to a run scoring against Howard.
_ Left fielder Jay Bruce didn't aggressively charge a single in the first inning, allowing Brandon Nimmo to advance from first to third on the play. Nimmo scored two batters later when shortstop Didi Gregorius was unable to make the transfer at second base on a potential double-play grounder.
_ Realmuto made a rare throwing error on Andres Gimenez's steal of second in the second inning before a fly ball fell between Harper and Quinn in right-center field for an RBI single for Luis Guillorme.
_ In the third inning, after the homers by Smith and Cano, Quinn overran Ramos' two-out fly ball to center field.
But Realmuto made it all disappear with one swing in the fifth. Then Morgan got Pete Alonso to fly to the warning track in the sixth, Hunter got a big double play in the seventh.
