WASHINGTON – Aaron Nola was buzzing along like a kid who certainly deserved to be among the top 10 picks of a major league draft, and not because he was voted Most Likely to Reach the Majors Leagues The Fastest, but because he looked like a legit top of the rotation pitcher.
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He was blitzing through the lineup of one of the National League’s best teams with ease, a team he struggled against 12 days earlier, using his curveball like a video game pitch to make the home team look like Little League hitters. He worked quickly and efficiently, too.
Nola, making his 18th major league start on Thursday afternoon in D.C., was nine outs away from his first career shutout. And, despite the fact that his own team hadn’t scored a run yet, either, it looked like a very distinct possibility since he needed just 72 pitches to get through the first six innings.
Nola must have smelled the finish line: he needed only five pitches to dispatch of the Nats bats in the seventh.
But then, with one out and no one on base in the top of the eighth, manager Pete Mackanin sent Emmanuel Burris to hit for Nola.
Burris tried to bunt for a hit on the first pitch. Unsuccessfully. Peter Bourjos followed with his 20th strikeout in 63 plate appearances this season. The game, once under the complete control of Aaron Nola, was starting over with the bullpen.
Somehow, Mackanin’s decision did not backfire. Somehow, the Phillies still managed to complete a sweep of the wildly-talented Washington Nationals.
After Elvis Araujo struck out Bryce Harper – on three pitches, no less – with the bases loaded and two outs in the bottom of the eighth, Odubel Herrera, Freddy Galvis, and Cameron Rupp starred for the offense in the top of the ninth as the Phillies pulled off an improbable 3-0 victory.
Improbable not because of the work Nola did for the first two-thirds of the game. Improbable because the much-maligned offense and makeshift ‘pen outplayed Harper, Jonathan Papelbon, and the first-place Nats.
It was the second time in 22 games this season that the Phils got to their former disgruntled closer, a closer who questioned their desire to win on his way out the door last summer.
Sweet victory? You bet.
“Absolutely,” said Rupp, who kept his bat on his shoulder on two tough sliders with two strikes before coming through in his battle with Papelbon. “It’s always sweet, especially sweeping these guys in your division. You know, a lot of people write us off, saying we don’t want to win, we don’t want to – that’s not true. I mean, we come out here to play. We have fun. And it shows. We’ve won close games. We haven’t really out-slugged anybody yet, but that’s coming. I think if we come out and keep playing the way we are – we’re surprising a lot of people already and we’re going to continue to do it.”
After Herrera led off the ninth with a single and Galvis followed with a double, putting two runners in scoring position with no one out, Washington manager Dusty Baker wisely walked Maikel Franco. Mackanin then pulled Ryan Howard back for Darin Ruf with left-hander Felipe Rivero on the mound, but Baker countered by bringing in Papelbon … the former Phillies closer who somehow forget how to pitch when he’s assigned to do so against the former team he couldn’t wait to leave for two years.
Papelbon struck out Ruf on three pitches, but he left a 2-2 pitch up in Rupp’s happy zone.
“I want a pitch up,” Rupp said. “He threw me two good breaking balls that I saw well enough to lay off. Then he came back and put it right where I wanted it.”
Rupp, Papelbon’s battery mate a year ago, ripped a high fastball over Harper’s head in right and to the wall. Harper may have taken a bad route, but, even if he caught it a run would have scored. Instead, two runs scored. The Phillies added another run for good measure off Papelbon.
All three runs were charged to let hander Felipe Rivero. But this is Papelbon against the Phillies since he was traded away last July: 9.64 ERA in five games; eight hits, eight runs, five earned runs, two home runs, three walks, two hit batsmen and three strikeouts in 4 2/3 innings. Yikes.
It was the second time in 12 days the Phillies rallied for a win over Papelbon and the Nationals.
Following the first one, two Sundays ago, the vocal closer chimed, “We’re in first place and we won the (bleeping) series, man.”
This time … well, the Nationals are still in first place.
The three-game sweep was the first for the Phillies over the Nationals since August of 2014. It was their first sweep in Washington since taking four straight at Nationals Park since May of 2009.
The Phillies (12-10) are two games over .500 for the first time since Oct. 1, 2012, when Charlie Manuel was still the manager. Kyle Kendrick got the win that night (also in Washington) and Phillippe Aumont got the save.
Only four players remain from that 2012 roster: Carlos Ruiz, Howard, Galvis, and Ruf. The future is here, and Mackanin has a responsibility to protect it.
That’s part of the reason he pulled Nola on Thursday afternoon.
“You have to score runs,” Mackanin said of taking his starter out after 77 pitches in a scoreless game. “Plus, down the road, it keeps his inning count down.”
Nola was sensational. His curveball was unhittable.
“It was pretty nasty, wasn’t it?” Rupp said. “That’s as good as it’s been, this year for sure.”
Harper may have taken the best approach against Nola with two outs and the go-ahead run on third in the sixth inning. He swung at Nola’s first pitch, a fastball over the outer half of the plate.
But Cesar Hernandez ranged to his backhand side, stabbed the hard grounder, and made a jumping, off-balanced throw to Howard at first to nip Harper and end the inning. Harper threw his helmet to the turf in disgust.
Although Mackanin pulled Nola perhaps before the pitcher would have liked, he showed plenty of confidence letting the 22-year-old pitch to Harper in a spot similar to two nights earlier, when the Phils held a two-run lead with a runner in scoring position and two outs and Mackanin had Vince Velasquez walk Harper intentionally.
“Eighth inning, maybe different,” Mackanin said of Thursday’s call. “Possibly with a different pitcher, but Nola locates his pitches so well. I want to give our pitcher credit to get good hitters out.”
Two innings later, Mackanin showed the same confidence handing the ball to a bullpen that was clearly the team’s Achilles’ heel three weeks earlier.
Dalier Hinojosa bounced back from a one-out walk and did his part to escape the eighth unharmed, at least on the scoreboard. He took a Matt den Dekker comebacker off his pitching hand.
An X-ray on Hinojosa’s hand came back negative, but Mackanin said it’s still something that will be re-examined. He’s day-to-day.
Araujo followed, with two on and two out. He looked on his way to taking the game into the ninth when he placed a 1-2 pitch on the outside corner against pinch-hitter Anthony Rendon.
“Yeah,” Araujo said. “But I saw later (on replay) it was a little outside.”
And so, he struck out Harper on three pitches. No problem.
“I think it’ll make more comfortable the next time,” Araujo said of the confidence-building, game-defining at-bat. “We’ll see what happens.”
“He’s an unproven guy, but he’s got the stuff to be successful,” Mackanin said. “He did a great job right there.”
And then Jeanmar Gomez collected his seventh save in seven tries, with an assist from Bourjos, who made a leaping catch at the wall.
The Phillies pitching as a whole did their part on a road trip that saw the Phillies win five out of six games in Milwaukee and Washington, and during a nine-day span when they’ve won six of their last seven games. Thanks to Nola and Co., the rotation had a 3.24 ERA on the road trip.
Overall, the starting staff’s 3.43 ERA is seventh best in baseball.
“Can’t say enough about it,” Mackanin said. “If our pitching continues to do what it’s doing we’ll be in a lot of games.”
Follow Ryan on Twitter: @ryanlawrence21