Phillies prevail over St. Louis Cardinals in rematch of 2022 wild-card series

Friday night marked the first meeting of Phillies and the St. Louis Cardinals since last Red October, and it ended in the same fashion as both 2022 NL Wild Card games: with a Phillies win.

After falling behind in the first inning, the Phillies bats came alive to clobber the Cardinals, 7-2. The Phillies had 11 hits to the Cardinals’ five.

“I feel like the whole team is in a pretty good spot right now. We’ve been swinging bats well, taking good at bats, and working counts and getting rewarded for it,” Kyle Schwarber said.

With the win, the Phillies gained some distance with the first National League Wild Card spot, standing three games ahead of the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Chicago Cubs.

The Phillies (70-58) knocked around a Cardinals rotation that has been struggling all year, and seven Phillies recorded at least one hit. They had six doubles, Bryce Harper tripled, and Alec Bohm and Schwarber homered. With 45 total home runs through the month of August, the Phillies are one away from tying their franchise record for homers in a month, last set in September 2019.

Bohm’s solo home run in the sixth inning was his 14th of the season, a new career high.

“That’s how the lineup’s constructed, you know, one through nine is gonna slap in a bat on you,” Schwarber said. “And we don’t want to feel like we’re giving the pitcher a breather.”

Miles Mikolas, who also took the loss for the Cardinals in Game 2 of the 2022 wild-card series, got the start on Friday. After the Cardinals (56-73) took a 2-0 lead in the first inning on reigning NL MVP Paul Goldschmidt’s two-run homer, the Phillies strung together a double from Bohm and a single from Brandon Marsh in the second. Marsh went 2-for-4 with a double to extend his hitting streak to eight games.

Garrett Stubbs, starting at catcher on Friday night to give J.T. Realmuto a rest, battled Mikolas to a seven-pitch at bat. Stubbs poked Mikolas’ curveball down the third-base line into no-man’s land for a stand-up double that scored Marsh and Bohm. Stubbs then scored thanks to a ground-rule double by Schwarber to put the Phillies ahead, 3-2, a lead they never surrendered.

“There was two strikes, I was just trying to hit the ball,” Stubbs said. “And it just so happened to dink into left field there. But you know, I’ll take a hit any time I can with runners in scoring position. ... And being on second base with Kyle Schwarber up is a pretty good feeling.”

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The Phillies tacked on another run in the third, when Harper singled, moved up to second on a wild pitch, went to third on a Nick Castellanos flyout, and scored on a Bryson Stott sacrifice fly. Three more insurance runs came across in the sixth and seventh innings, ultimately icing the win.

“Coming from last year to this year, I think that it’s a lot of the same story, as far as our lineup just being strong all the way through,” Stubbs said.

Harper remained in the DH spot for the third straight game with back tightness, a move that Phillies manager Rob Thomson has maintained is mainly “precautionary.” With two hits and two runs on Friday, Harper has now reached base safely eight games in a row.

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Since June, Cristopher Sánchez has emerged as a dependable arm in the the fifth spot of the Phillies rotation. A key component of that stability has been his command. Sánchez’s walk rate of 4.7% ranks in the 94th percentile of MLB pitchers. That control was on display Friday, with the left-hander not issuing a single walk.

“I noticed that [the Cardinals were] looking for the sinker, and so after studying the hitters and knowing what they wanted, I was able to make that adjustment,” Sánchez said via an interpreter.

While the Cardinals jumped on Sánchez early with Goldschmidt’s homer, the Phillies starter was able to rebound and shut out the Cardinals for the next five innings. He finished with five hits, two runs, and six strikeouts through six innings.

“His numbers the second time through, the third time through, are better than the first time through,” Thomson said. “I think that’s just due to the fact that he just finds his changeup. Keeps throwing it until he gets it, because it’s a weapon.”

José Alvarado, Andrew Bellatti, and Jeff Hoffman split the job in relief, throwing one scoreless inning apiece. After Tyler O’Neill’s double leading off the third inning, Phillies pitching retired the final 21 Cardinal batters.