Big bats help hot Phillies out-pace bullpen in series-clinching 7-3 win over Dodgers

There are worse places to be than a game under .500 and coming off a series win over one of baseball’s leading contenders. There are also better places to be, and maybe the Phillies are headed there after a 7-3 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sunday afternoon. Seven wins in eight games, Trea Turner heating up, Craig Kimbrel back from the ashes. . . things are looking up.

A turning point? We’ll see. The next four days should offer some clarity as the Phillies head west for a surprisingly pivotal series against the Diamondbacks. Arizona enters the series with a 40-25 record and a 3½ game lead over the Dodgers in the National League West. The Phillies? They’ve once again rolled the boulder to the top of the hill: seven wins in eight games after five losses in five games. Rinse and repeat in reverse all the way back to Opening Day.

“We’ve been playing well for a bit now, so that’s good,” manager Rob Thomson said after the Phillies withstood some tenuous late-game moments to take two out of three from the Dodgers. “Now we’ve got to go play a really good team and win on the road. That’s our next goal.”

This is the sort of series we need to see the Phillies win. Save the proclamations until then. It will require what it has always required: great starts from their rotation aces, shutdown innings from their relief aces, and big at-bats from the biggest batters in the lineup.

The past couple of weeks have brought a mixed bag, and Sunday was no exception. The end result was overwhelmingly positive: five scoreless innings from Taijuan Walker, another home run from Nick Castellanos, a 3-for-5 performance from a rapidly improving Trea Turner. Still, this wasn’t the dominant performance that the scoreboard may have suggested. José Alvarado needed 30 pitches to get out of an eighth inning that ended with the tying run at the plate. Seranthony Domínguez and Gregory Soto each allowed a long home run that kept the Dodgers alive. A couple of baserunning mistakes squandered a chance to tack on several more runs. These are the types of things that have prevented the Phillies from escaping the win-some, lose-some seesaw ride that has characterized the first 63 games of this season.

On Sunday, we saw both the positives and the negatives.

The positives:

1) Trea Turner is suddenly 12-for-37 with five extra-base hits in his last nine games. It’s no coincidence that the Phillies are 7-2 during that stretch.

The Phillies have consistently said that the question with Turner wasn’t if but when. It’s starting to look like we are in the midst of an answer. On Sunday, Turner went 3-for-5 with a double, combining with Nick Castellanos and Bryce Harper to go 7-for-12 out of the 2-3-4 holes. Castellanos hit his eighth home run in the seventh inning, a two-run shot that gave the Phillies some crucial insurance runs. This was an outing that the Phillies’ offense needed after a four-game stretch in which they scored a total of nine runs.

“Much better, I feel good,” Turner said. “When I’m swinging the bat I feel like the things that are happening are what I want to happen, and when I do something wrong, I know immediately and can fix it quick. So yeah, I feel good at the plate, hitting the ball hard, finding some holes.”

2) After blanking the Dodgers for five innings on Sunday, Walker has now given the Phillies 12 scoreless innings in his last two starts.

Really, what we’ve seen from Walker here recently is what he’s been throughout the last few years of his career: a fly-ball pitcher who will give a team a chance to win on whatever days the ball stays in the yard.

The margin was awfully thin on Sunday, as Walker withstood a couple of long outs off the bats of Freddie Freeman and Max Muncy in the third inning that would have changed the outcome of the game had they traveled a few feet further or a few degrees to the left. Muncy’s shot to the deepest part of left-center would have been a two-run double if not for an excellent route and jump by center fielder Brandon Marsh, who tracked down the fly ball in the shadow of the 387-foot sign in the left-center cut-out at Citizens Bank Park.

“A game-saving play,” was how Castellanos referred to Marsh’s robbery of Muncy.

Walker’s an interesting case. When the Phillies signed him to a four-year, $72 million contract in the offseason, the price they paid suggested that they were acquiring a pitcher they thought could be a difference-maker. And maybe they did. But what they really needed was a No. 4 starter they could depend on take the ball and compete every five days. At the very least, Walker has done that, especially recently: his five scoreless innings against the Dodgers on Sunday came on the heels of seven scoreless innings against the Tigers.

The Phillies have now won nine of his 14 starts this season. That includes wins in four of his last five, a stretch in which he has limited opponents to six runs in 28 innings. He’s allowed just two home runs in those 28 innings after giving up eight in his first 32⅔ innings of the season.

“He’s just been attacking,” said Castellanos, who went 2-for-5. “Every single pitch he throws, he’s throwing with intent, he’s throwing in the strike zone. As a defense behind him, when you have that tempo, it makes it easy to stay engaged, because there’s no downtime.”

3) Craig Kimbrel looks much closer to the guy he was in his prime than the guy the Dodgers left off their postseason roster last October.

His performance on Sunday may not have officially counted as a save, but it felt like one. The Phillies were coming off an eighth inning in which Alvarado had loaded the bases with nobody out, allowed one run to score, and then struck out his last two batters while both were at the plate as the tying run. The sixth and seventh innings had seen Domínguez and Soto both allow home runs. Things felt . . . precarious.

Enter Kimbrel. He struck out Miguel Vargas, got Jason Heyward to pop out, and then struck out James Outman looking to seal the win with authority. In his last 13 outings, Kimbrel has allowed three runs and 10 baserunners while striking out 22 in 13 innings. He has recorded a win or a save in nine of those outings, without blowing a loss or blown save.

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The Phillies still have plenty things to tighten up as they head to Arizona for their showdown with the Diamondbacks. The home run off Domínguez was just the second he’d allowed all season, and it counted as just his second earned run in his last 20 innings. But he’s allowed 25 baserunners during that stretch with a strikeout rate that is down from last season. He’s been very good here lately. Can he become dominant? The lapses in focus on the basepaths may be just the cost of doing business, but on Sunday they may have cost the Phillies several runs. Marsh getting caught between second and third after a successful safety squeeze, Harper watching a long fly ball for a little too long and being forced to hold up for a single — they didn’t end up mattering. But they could have.

In the end, it was a good weekend. Now, the Phillies need to follow it with a great week.