After listless, boo-filled loss to Marlins, Phillies say ‘it’s going to come down to us’ to emerge from slide

Leave it to Taijuan Walker to bring the boobirds back out.

OK, so it wasn’t only Walker. Hardly. He set the discordant tone Tuesday night with a first-inning grind-a-thon in his first start in 53 days. But the Phillies came home from 10 games out West and appeared listless from the top of their $260 million roster to the bottom.

That’s how it tends to look when you scratch four hits and get shut out by a soft-tossing rookie on a last-place team that sent away one-third of its roster at the trade deadline. But for as wretched as the Phillies have played lately, they haven’t ever been so flat as during a 5-0 pancaking by the no-name Marlins.

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“You just watch that game and see how everything unfolded,” said Kyle Schwarber, almost disbelieving what happened over 142 minutes at Citizens Bank Park, “and you kind of remove yourself and sit back and smile and say it’s frustrating. Right?”

Uh, right.

The Phillies have lost four consecutive games — by a 31-8 margin. They have dropped 11 of 15 and 16 of 23 since the All-Star break. At 8-18, they are stuck in the worst 26-game stretch of the Bryce Harper era.

Not since a 6-20 stretch in 2018 have they played this poorly for this long.

By all means, then, cue the boos from the 23rd consecutive sellout crowd in South Philly.

“Guys are frustrated because they know we’re better than that,” manager Rob Thomson said. “Our fans know we’re better than that. We have very knowledgeable fans, and they let you know when you’re not playing well. I think it is what it is. That’s the game.”

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The question now is what the Phillies will do about it. Because they no longer have the best record in the National League. And although their lead in the division is still 6½ games, they are vying with the Dodgers and Brewers to merely finish with a top-two record in the NL and get the accompanying first-round bye.

If all of the winning that the Phillies did en route to a 45-19 start was intoxicating, the recent losing has become epidemic. They showed little energy against the Marlins, save for a hustle double in the third inning from Johan Rojas, who promptly was left standing on second base.

Thomson’s trademark since taking over as manager in June 2022 has been his even keel, an essential quality in a sport that plays almost every day for six months.

But is it time for a lineup shake-up?

“Getting close,” he said. “I am.”

How about a team meeting?

“Yeah, I’ll think about it,” Thomson said. “I think about it all the time. There’s a time to do it. It depends on a lot of things. It depends on the attitude and where I think the guys’ minds are at. I think overall they’re very solid right now.

“There’s more frustration, for sure. We’ve got to turn around and play better.”

After slow-playing Walker’s return from a blister on his right index finger to put him on a program designed to regain diminished velocity and recover the feel for his signature splitter, they welcomed him back to the rotation to help provide respite to their top four starting pitchers.

They aren’t asking much. In time, maybe he will deliver.

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But Walker’s command wavered at the outset of a laborious first inning. He walked Jake Burger and Jesús Sánchez before allowing RBI singles on sinkers to Jonah Bride and Otto Lopez.

Burger, who leads the majors with 16 homers since July 2, opened a 3-0 edge by banging a 92 mph fastball for a leadoff homer in the third inning. And after getting around a two-out walk in the fourth, Walker was finished at 76 pitches, only 44 strikes.

A three-run deficit hardly seemed insurmountable against Marlins rookie righty Valente Bellozo. But he was valiant, all right, muting the Phillies offense for seven innings. And when he struck out Brandon Marsh (32 whiffs in his last 77 at-bats) to end the seventh, he pumped his fist and yelled triumphantly.

Two innings later, the Phillies trudged back into the clubhouse, having been shut out for only the fourth time in 119 games. Clearly, they’re better than this. And they have seven weeks to get out of the quicksand before Red October becomes merely a flicker.

Worried yet?

“Not worry. Frustration,” Schwarber said. “It’s frustration just because we know what kind of team we can be. Worry is the wrong kind of word. If you’re worried about where you’re at, it’s not a good thing to be. You can have frustration. That’s a natural thing to have when you feel like you can be going through a skid. Everyone would be frustrated.

“It’s going to come down to us. Right? Really digging right back into the hole and fighting our way out of it. We’ve done this before. We’ve gone through similar things in the past, and we’ve found our way to come out on the other side. That’s what we’re going to have to be able to do.”