It is a long season. They go out and play a game and then the result of that game is dutifully recorded -- a notch in the win column or a notch in the loss column. Sabermetrics geeks call that advanced formula a “record.”
More days than not this season, the Phillies' record has tipped in the wrong direction -- an unsightly number heavy with defeats, forever drooping to the right in a sad daily admission of failure and regret. The Phillies hadn’t balanced their record at .500 since they were 6-6 back in mid April. That was so long ago you have to wonder if April is even still a month, or if it’s since been deleted by unhinged calendar-obsessed politicians waging never-ending anti-April campaigns.
The Phillies were a game under .500 before facing the Miami Marlins at Citizens Bank Park on Wednesday. It was their fifth opportunity since mid-April to even their record. The four chances that came before it obviously didn’t go the way they hoped.
It looked dodgy there for a moment. Cole Hamels pitched well -- seven innings, four hits, one earned run, 11 strikeouts. But he has been something of an anti-totem for the Phillies this year. When he pitches well, the team usually doesn’t hit. And when the team hits, he usually doesn’t pitch well.
When Hamels left the game, the score was tied 1-1 and it felt like the Phillies might find a new, even-more-humiliating way to hammer Hamels' record deeper into the dirt. A banana peel at home plate to thwart the would-be winning run or some such.
But no. No banana peels. No abject mistakes. No disappointment. Not this time.
In the bottom of the seventh, with two outs, Jimmy Rollins untied the score with an RBI single to center. Then Ryan Howard hit a two-run triple, lumbering into third base and then sort of collapsing on it in relief once he got there. (Third base is far.) And then Domonic Brown -- who had been in a really awful/super-protracted 0-for-8 slump that made it seem like he would never hit again and the Phils should either trade him to a low-level Caribbean Island minor league system or just cut their losses altogether and release him -- finally did something this season and hit a two-run homer. It was his 18th. He leads the National League. He can stick around.
MLB
The Phillies won, 6-1 (see game recap). Hamels got his second victory of the season. The Phillies got their second series sweep of the year. They are finally .500. Nothing went wrong.
Charlie Manuel begins almost every postgame press conference by reading the starting pitcher’s line. On Wednesday, he deviated from that habit.
“Cole Hamels got a win,” Manuel deadpanned with a smirk. Everyone had a good laugh.
It is easy for the manager to crack jokes when the team is playing well. The Phillies have won four games in a row, which might not seem like a lot until you consider that it’s their longest streak of the season. Less than a month ago, the Phillies were a season-low five games below .500. But in their last 23 games, the Phillies are 14-9. If the Washington Nationals lose on Wednesday night, the Phillies will move into second place in the National League East for the first time all season.
“I think we’re definitely headed in the right direction,” Howard said. “We just want to take what we did today and continue to try to build on it. I think we’re having more fun. Things are a lot looser.”
The Marlins are a good club to have around if you want to have a good time. So are the Mets. The Phillies are 14-5 against those two teams this season. Which means they’re 16-25 against everyone else.
“When you get to .500, like I said before, if we can get going, if we can win four, five straight or six straight or something like that, or eight out of 10 or something like that, we’ll be in good position,” Manuel said.
He’s right, of course. Five or six or eight wins, or something like that, would put the Phils in good position. About that: They begin a 10-game road trip on Thursday in Milwaukee. Then they head to Minnesota. Then they’re off to Colorado. The Rockies were three games over .500 as of Wednesday. The other two teams were a combined 17 games under .500. It’s one of those trips that, on paper, looks pretty good for the Phils. But you know how Manuel feels about things on paper.
“On paper, that doesn’t mean absolutely nothing to me,” Manuel said. “We’ve got to play every day as hard as we possibly can. And our number one priority is to win the game every day and see what happens.”
Here’s what has happened so far: For the first time in a long while, the Phils have won as many games as they’ve lost. It’s a start. Now what will they do with it?