Instant Analysis: Phillies 5, Nats 4
For the second straight night, the Nationals were one strike from beating the Phillies, only to lose in crushing fashion
For the second straight night, they were one strike away. And for the second straight night, they suffered an absolute gut-punch of a loss to the Phillies.
In position to bounce back impressively from Tuesday night’s ninth-inning meltdown, the Nationals somehow found a way to do it again, with Richard Lovelady serving up a two-run homer to light-hitting pinch-hitter Derek Hill with two outs and two strikes in the top of the ninth.
Pitching for the third straight day, Lovelady was summoned by manager Blake Butera after Orlando Ribalta lost a 10-pitch battle with Kyle Schwarber, ultimately walking one of the most-feared sluggers in baseball. Lovelady had Hill down in the count, 1-2, then grooved a fastball over the plate, which Hill drove just over the right-field wall for only his 18th homer in 278 career games.
The Nationals tried to preemptively give themselves better late-game matchups tonight by calling up Palmquist from Triple-A Rochester to open for Miles Mikolas, thus saving PJ Poulin for a more-traditional relief role later on. Palmquist responded with 3 1/3 innings of one-run ball on 58 pitches, an impressive debut to say the least.
The Nats staked their pitching staff to a quick 2-0 lead thanks to solo homers by Luis Garcia Jr. and Jorbit Vivas, but they couldn’t do much of anything else against Phillies starter Aaron Nola through the fifth. By the time Nola departed, Philadelphia had taken the lead, scoring three runs with Mikolas on the mound in the fourth, two of them unearned after Nasim Nuñez couldn’t cleanly field a grounder to second.
The Nationals got the lead back, though, when Curtis Mead stepped up to pinch-hit in the bottom of the sixth and immediately crushed Jonathan Bowlan’s first pitch to left for a two-run homer, the latest clutch hit by the Australian third baseman.
The same bullpen that blew Tuesday’s game then tried to get the job done in the rematch, with Poulin recording four big outs across the seventh and eighth innings and Ribalta recording the first two outs of the ninth before his 10-pitch walk of Schwarber. Butera then asked Lovelady to finish the job, only to have his heart ripped out again.
HITTING HIGHLIGHT: We’ve run out of ways to say how clutch Mead is. Though he wasn’t in tonight’s lineup, you knew Blake Butera was waiting for the right moment to call his name off the bench. Sure enough, with a runner on and two out in the sixth, Mead emerged from the dugout to pinch-hit for Vivas. Don Mattingly countered with Bowlan, and that played right into Butera’s hands. Mead whacked the first pitch he saw (a sweeper well above the zone) deep to left for his 13th homer of the season, giving the Nats the lead. In the process, he raised his OPS against right-handers this season to .810, with eight of those 13 homers coming against them.
PITCHING HIGHLIGHT: You can be excused if you knew nothing about Palmquist prior to tonight. The 25-year-old lefty was a third-round pick of the Rockies in 2022 and made only nine big-league appearances for them last season (seven starts). The Nationals acquired him last month in exchange for cash considerations, then sent him to Rochester to work out of the bullpen. They called him up tonight to give them as much as he could … and he went above and beyond with 3 1/3 strong innings, departing without having allowed a run. Using an effective sinker-sweeper combo, Palmquist kept the Phillies’ hitters off-balance, especially the big lefty sluggers. So Butera let him keep pitching until he faced them a second time in the top of the fourth. He departed with a pat on the back from his manager and a nice ovation from the crowd. Whether he sticks around or is sent back down for now remains
NOTABLE: Vivas has now doubled his career home run total (from two to four) in the last two days.
UP NEXT: The four-game series concludes Thursday at 6:45 p.m., with Cade Cavalli returning to the mound and hopefully back to 100 percent after his bout with food poisoning last weekend. The Phillies counter with ace Cristopher Sánchez, owner of a 9-3 record and 1.80 ERA. TV: Nationals TV RADIO: 106.7 FM