Phillies head home still looking to clinch NL East title after dropping series to the Mets

NEW YORK — When the Phillies trudged back to the visiting clubhouse here Sunday night, they found neither plastic over their lockers nor icy-cold beer ready to be sprayed. There were only instructions jotted on a dry-erase board.

Bags: 10:30.

Bus: 10:50.

And that, as they say, was that. Despite having a first-inning run on the scoreboard and their ace on the mound, the Phillies lost again to the surging Mets, 2-1 in a nationally televised cuticle-cutter to postpone their division-clinching celebration for a second night in a row.

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It seems they prefer a house party.

“I mean, it’s disappointing,” Zack Wheeler said after making one bad pitch out of 94. “But at the end of the day, we can go home and win this thing in front of our home fans and start playing a little better once we get home and go into the playoffs hot, I guess you could say.”

There’s a lot to unpack. But let’s start here: After leaving the tying run on third base in the eighth and ninth innings against Mets closer Edwin Díaz, the Phillies bused home, where they will begin a three-game series Monday night against the Cubs.

Win even one of the final six games, and the Phillies, who locked up a playoff spot Friday night, will clinch their first division title since 2011. They’re still in good shape for a first-round bye, too, with a three-game lead and the tiebreaker over the Brewers.

But anyone who says they didn’t expect the Phillies to have clinched by now is fibbing. The Phillies went 2-5 on a weeklong visit to Milwaukee and New York in large part because the offense came up small.

They scored 30 runs on the trip, 12 in one game. They batted .245 and struck out a whopping 81 times, with the Brewers and Mets pitchers adhering to the well-known scouting report that the Phillies will swing at breaking pitches out of the strike zone. In the last two games against the Mets, they went 9-for-63 with 20 whiffs.

It’s no wonder they haven’t broken out the bubbly.

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“We’ve experienced a lot of really good pitching, obviously throughout this year but in postseasons past, where we faced really good staffs,” Kyle Schwarber said. “It’s going to come down to us finding a way to get guys on base and manufacturing those runs to get in. It’s not always going to be a home run or whatever. A run’s a run.”

Said manager Rob Thomson: “We’re going to expand [the strike zone] at times. Just got to rein it in.”

The Phillies tried to push across the tying run against Díaz by exploiting his struggles to control the running game.

Trea Turner singled and stole second and third in the eighth inning, but Bryce Harper fanned and Alec Bohm grounded out. In the ninth, Bryson Stott walked, then stole second and third. On the latter, Mets catcher Francisco Alvarez’s throw hit the bag and kicked straight up in the air. If it gets away, Stott likely scores.

“Not sure if I’ve ever seen that,” Thomson said after Kody Clemens struck out to strand Stott and end the game. “But hey, that’s baseball.”

And so, Brandon Nimmo’s leadoff homer against Wheeler on the first pitch of the sixth inning held up as the game-winner.

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The Phillies squeezed a drop of juice out of supercharged Citi Field in the Mets’ final regular-season game there with a first-inning run on Turner’s single and a two-out hit by Bohm. But they left the pulp — and let Mets starter Tylor Megill off the ropes in a 28-pitch inning — when J.T. Realmuto lined to center field with the bases loaded.

Schwarber thought he gave the Phillies a lead in the second inning. Off the bat, the ball was clocked at 107.4 mph with a 29-degree angle, metrics that typically result in a homer. Instead, Tyrone Taylor reeled it in on the warning track in center field.

If anyone could push the Phillies over the top, it figured to be Wheeler, who came in with a 1.71 ERA in his last nine starts. And he did his part, holding the Mets to a two-out RBI single by Taylor in the second inning and Nimmo’s homer.

Wheeler is making a closing argument for the Cy Young Award. And he was as convincing as ever.

“Overall I thought we played well,” Thomson said. “Wheels was fantastic.”

And yet, the party would wait another night.

Again.

“We’re still in the playoffs. That’s all we really care about,” Wheeler said. “Obviously we want to win the division and win these games. But at the end of the day, we didn’t and can’t do anything about it. Just move forward, go home, try to do it in front of our fans.”