A bad week or the start of another September slide? Phillies return home looking to bounce back

The Phillies have dropped six of their last seven games, but there are reasons to think this will end differently than the past four seasons.

Bryce Harper and the struggling Phillies return home with series against the Marlins and Nationals.Read moreJeff Chiu / AP

by Scott Lauber

Published Sept. 5, 2022, 1:24 p.m. ET

Kyle Schwarber searched for the right words. He’s got a knack for that. It’s one reason, along with his light-tower power, that the Phillies agreed to pay him $79 million through 2025.

But what could he say? The Phillies had just lost ... again ... in San Francisco, capping their worst week in three months. And as they return home, having dropped six of seven games, they’re about to be confronted, organizationally and individually, with a question.

Was it one bad week or the start of another September slide?

Times like these call for calm and perspective. Schwarber has both in spades. So, the Phillies’ leadoff hitter drew on his experience of having gone to the playoffs six times and broken a 108-year hex with the Chicago Cubs, and this was what ended up coming out:

”The ebbs and flows of baseball are real,” he said. “You’re going to have stretches where you go through some things like this, and as a group, you have to make them as short as possible.”

Fair. Also true. Even the Los Angeles Dodgers, on pace for 112 wins, lost five of six games in May, including three to the Phillies.

But when a six-month season is down to 28 games, there’s little margin for errors and even less time to correct them. Everything is magnified. It’s more difficult to leave one game behind and move on to the next. The whole thing can spin the head of a player who hasn’t gone through it.

And it can be tougher to distinguish between a few bad games in a row and a developing tailspin.

“I don’t think so. Not for this team,” said reliever David Robertson, who gave up a walk-off homer Sunday to the Giants’ Wilmer Flores. “This team’s way too talented. We just had a bad week.”

Said interim manager Rob Thomson: “It’s been a frustrating week. But it’s just one week.”

Maybe. There are reasons to think this will end differently for the Phillies than the last four seasons. For one thing, they are holding a playoff spot (by 2½ games over the Milwaukee Brewers through Sunday) rather than chasing one. For another, they haven’t lost more than four games in a row since June 3, when Thomson took over for fired Joe Girardi. They have shortened the periods of adversity, as Schwarber noted.

But they also haven’t earned anyone’s trust. Not after an 8-20 free fall in September 2018. Or a 12-16 finish in 2019, 13-17 in 2020, 14-16 last season, and an 0-3 start to this September. And not with a playoff drought that dates to 2011 hanging over Citizens Bank Park.

Fans who have been burned are wary of getting scorched again. Nobody will jump on the bandwagon while it’s idling.

Thomson doesn’t see the sense in linking previous disappointments to skepticism about these Phillies. He noted the turnover in the clubhouse (15 of 33 players on the active roster or the injured list weren’t on the team last season), then drew on his own fandom to hammer home the point.

“The Toronto Maple Leafs have the same thing — ‘They can’t get out of the first round,’” said Thomson, a proud Canadian and lifelong Leafs fan/sufferer. “Well, they couldn’t get out of the first round for 15 years. It’s not the same team. I just don’t believe in all that stuff. Why even go there?”

Especially when there are more tangible reasons to worry about the Phillies.

Relief ace Seranthony Domínguez (triceps tendinitis) hasn’t pitched since Aug. 17 and isn’t likely to return until at least the weekend. Zack Wheeler (elbow inflammation) missed three starts and hasn’t resumed throwing. Nick Castellanos went on the injured list Sunday with a strained oblique muscle in his right side. Phillies starters have made it through the sixth inning in only seven of the last 17 games. The bullpen is thin and taxed.

If the Phillies fumble the last National League playoff spot, it will be for those reasons, not because Bryce Harper, J.T. Realmuto, and all the others who have been here since at least 2019 don’t know how to seal the deal.

”I wouldn’t say that this group is getting tight,” Schwarber said. “I think it’s more about us not trying to do too much or trying to do anything extra. The biggest thing is the trust factor in ourselves. We’re a good team. When things start tipping not in the way that you want them to go, you just have to block that out. Not remember it. You learn from it, but after that, that negative is gone.”

So, the Phillies will accentuate the positive at home this week and try to get back on track against a couple of weaklings. They will host three games apiece against the Miami Marlins and worst-in-baseball Washington Nationals, against whom they are a combined 18-7.

And it may be that the best reason to believe in the Phillies has nothing to do with the Phillies.

The Brewers, the only team on the outside of the playoff picture with a chance of climbing back in, had lost five of seven games and were 13-19 since July 30 entering Monday. As poorly as the Phillies played last week, they lost only 1½ games in the standings to Milwaukee. And they hold the tiebreaker over the Brewers, too.

”Obviously this road trip went nothing like we wanted it to, but we still have a nice lead on the wild-card spot,” Realmuto said. “That’s not who this team is, and that’s not who we’re going to be moving forward. We’re not going to look too much into it.”

That’s fine. Everyone else will do it for them.