The Braves mess around and find out the Phillies aren’t them

You don’t tug on superman’s cape.

You don’t spit into the wind.

You don’t mockingly say attaboy to Bryce Harper.

Because Bryce Harper is Him.

» READ MORE: Hayes: Attaboy, indeed! Bryce Harper redeems himself with two stare-down homers

What was Orlando Arcia thinking? The most obvious answer is that he wasn’t. He had no reason to. No reason to think. No reason to fear. No reason to know that a player has something in him that is better left untapped. You can forgive Arcia for his ignorance of this breed of competitor. He is, after all, a Brave.

That’s the difference between these two teams, isn’t it? One of them has that thing, and one of them doesn’t. We saw it last postseason. We saw it in Game 1. We sure as heck saw it at Citizens Bank Park on Wednesday. Harper and the Phillies spent nine innings showing the Braves exactly how a real team responds when it gets punched in the mouth.

We’ll find out for sure in Game 4. On Thursday, the Phillies can seal the fate of these vaunted Braves for a second straight disastrous postseason. The current evidence suggests that only one serious team will be there. If you thought you couldn’t possibly like the swagger of this team anymore, well, you certainly couldn’t have envisioned the humiliation they inflicted on the Braves in a 10-2 win in Game 3.

» READ MORE: Orlando Arcia said Bryce Harper can stare ‘wherever he wants’ and didn’t intend for him to hear his mockery

This was bigger than Harper. It was bigger than the home run that he nearly knocked onto Hartranft Street in the third inning. It was bigger than the one he parked in the center field bushes to lead off the fourth. It was bigger even than the stare-downs he delivered to Arcia after both of those blasts.

To be clear, Harper was the story. Two days earlier, Arcia made the curious decision to snicker at baseball’s most dangerous postseason hitter for his base-running out that ended Game 2. In Game 3, Harper responded to the slight by turning the batter’s box at Citizens Bank Park into his own personal woodshed. His three-run home run in the third inning was an overwhelming display of force. He followed it up with a solo shot in the fifth, his third of the series and ninth since the start of last postseason.

“I mean, anytime anybody says something, right?” Harper said. “I mean that’s what it’s all about.”

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But there was also something bigger here. Harper was Him. There is no doubt. But the rest of the Phillies were also Them.

Everywhere you looked on Wednesday night, you saw a player in red pinstripes rising to the moment. You saw Aaron Nola saying “not today” to the God of Free Agent Departures. You saw Trea Turner hit a home run and score another run two days after his botched cutoff allowed a run in Game 2. You saw Nick Castellanos, who delivered that bouncing cutoff throw, hit two homers of his own. You saw J.T. Realmuto shake off the memory of his pitchers’ implosion in Game 2 as he guided Nola and the bullpen through Atlanta’s gauntlet and chipped in a two-run double on his own.

You saw a lot of homers, come to think of it. Six of them, to be exact.

The thing that you saw throughout all of these events was the thing that continues to separate these Phillies from their opponent in this National League Division Series. There is something deeper inside of them than raw athletic ability. Part of it is the chemistry between them. Part of it is the unshakeable resilience that each of them independently possesses. Mix it together and it makes for a heck of potent cocktail.

They arrived in Philadelphia early Tuesday morning facing some very real questions about where the series would turn. For all that we’ve learned about this team over the last two Octobers, for all those times that we’ve seen them answer the bell, we’ve never seen them encounter the sort of psychological challenge that awaited them in Game 3.

The word “deflating” doesn’t even begin to capture the potential effect of the type of loss they endured in Game 2. They had a 4-0 lead and were seven outs away from taking an all-but-insurmountable 2-0 lead in this best-of-five series. They had their best pitcher on the mound and a rested bullpen behind him. They had a visiting stadium planning the rest of the autumn in silence.

It can hurt awfully bad when you tumble from those heights.

» READ MORE: The Phillies have the best home-field advantage in baseball. Here’s the real secret to it.

That pressure only increased in the third inning of Game 3, when Ronald Acuna and Ozzie Albies had back-to-back one-out hits to put the Braves up 1-0. It was the first time in five postseason games that the Phillies faced a deficit in the first seven innings of a game. The only other time they’d gone to the plate while trailing was the top of the ninth inning of Game 2, after Austin Riley’s two-run home run in the bottom of the eighth completed the Braves’ stunning five-run comeback.

Castellanos made sure the stress was short-lived, leading off the bottom of the third with a towering home run to left field on a 1-0 sinker off of Bryce Elder. From there, the floodgates opened. Harper’s three-run home run in the third inning narrowly missed the third deck, a loud, towering shot that was part of a six-run inning that all but ended the Braves’ hopes.

» READ MORE: Bryce Harper’s Phillies teammates felt before Game 3 that he ‘was going to do something big’

I suppose you can’t really separate the thing that makes the Phillies different from the most different cat amongst them. This was some Michael Jordan stuff. It was Tom Brady with two minutes left. There aren’t a ton of other examples to give. Competitors like Harper are incredibly rare.

Arcia sure learned the hard way. In his defense, he did not think he was saying anything that Harper would hear when microphones caught him cackling, “Attaboy, Harper” in the wake of the Braves’ dramatic Game 2 victory.

“When you are in the clubhouse, I was under the impression you can say whatever you want,” Arcia said. “He wasn’t supposed to hear. We were talking in the clubhouse.”

Thing is, the great ones hear everything. They don’t need it. But they want it. And when they get it, they thrive.

That’s the lesson Arcia and the Braves learned. It doesn’t take much of a push for great ones like Harper to push themselves to a higher level.

Themselves, and everyone else.