Limping Phillies batter deGrom, then fall into open manhole

No one expected the hobbled Phillies to do much against Jacob deGrom; everyone would have predicted the game’s end, however.

How do you know you’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy? If you’re fighting for a spot in the MLB playoffs, you wake up Sept. 16 and find, perhaps, that you’re only scraping into the pandemic dance despite having a better winning percentage than the team ahead of you. This marks not only the late Summer of Weirdness but also your team, the Philadelphia Phillies.

Since they had played fewer games, the St. Louis Cardinals were running sixth in the MLB playoff race the morning of the 16th at 21-22 (.488), while the Phillies had the seventh seed at 24-23 (.511).

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This ranking was both arguable and meaningless because it wasn’t final. For the Phillies, what wasn’t meaningless was their seemingly new path to a collapse in September.

For the past two seasons, the Phillies managed collapses largely based on good old-fashioned, losing play. In 2020, the Fates apparently decided the Fightin’s would not only go down fightin’, but they’d also go down limpin’.

The night of Sept. 15 Jake Arrieta injured his right hamstring while hitting a Mets batter with a pitch in a game he won. He will surely join another Phillies starter, Spencer Howard, on the 10-day injured list.

Another case in point? On the evening of the 16th, the Phillies were going to send out a starter with the nail coming off the middle finger of his throwing hand to face Jacob deGrom. This, of course, was Zack Wheeler, who had suffered a freak accident a week earlier.

No one expected this game to go well for Philadelphia.

This was because, beyond the Wheeler issue, Rhys Hoskins and J.T. Realmuto were not expected to face deGrom. Secretly, one or both of those players were probably perfectly fine with that circumstance, but Hoskins may have been more focused on the possibility of Tommy John surgery on his non-throwing arm.

(Of course, as a right-handed batter, Hoskins’ non-throwing arm, his left, is his power arm when batting.)

But that’s why they play the games, right? Stranger things than deGrom losing to a greatly depleted team happen at the MLB level.

About four hours before game time on the 16th, for amusement’s sake, it was reported that Phillies reserve outfielder Kyle Garlick was also injured the night before. It was rumored he would be replaced on the bench by Mickey Moniak, the 2016 first overall MLB draft pick.

Moniak, 22, has accumulated a .256 MiLB batting average, most recently posting .186 for Scottsdale in 17 Arizona Fall League games.

Naturally, then, once the Phillies and Mets took the field Wednesday night, Wheeler’s fingernail held up just fine, and his team pushed deGrom around somewhat easily. (Moniak entered the game late as a pinch runner to no effect whatsoever.)

Uber-ace deGrom was gone after two innings with a hamstring “spasm,” having surrendered three earned runs, and the Phillies led 4-3 after seven innings. However, as has been the case too many times this season, the two relief pitchers who followed Wheeler could not hold the lead.

It doesn’t matter who they were. Everyone in the Phillies bullpen has failed miserably at one time or another in 2020, even fidgety Blake Parker, whose ERA is 1.93.

Worse perhaps, three of the four batters from the top of the Phillies lineup who went to the plate in the bottom of the ninth struck out.

After the game, Joe Girardi praised Wheeler’s toughness, but one has to wonder how Realmuto, still benched with a minor hip problem, saw the field. Could he have been thinking, “Do I actually want to re-sign with this team?”