You’re general manager at one of the drinkeries inside Xfinity Live! You called in extra staff Monday night. Sure, it’s usually a slow time of the week. But the Phillies were playing right across Pattison Avenue in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series with a chance to earn another trip to the World Series with a win over the Diamondbacks.
You expected to be slammed postgame. Why not? Aaron Nola was starting. The Phillies had won all his starts this postseason. The game was at Citizens Bank Park. The Phillies were undefeated at home in the playoffs. You just knew they’d win. Players would come to celebrate. Fans would be there in anticipation of celebrating with them. It would be a madhouse. You were sure of it.
Then Arizona zapped Nola for three runs in the top of the second. It was the largest deficit the Phillies have faced in the entire postseason, one of only a handful of occasions they’ve trailed at all.
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You thought about cutting some of the surplus bartenders and waitresses, sending them home to save on payroll. Then you remembered that the Phillies have come from behind all year long. You expected a rally.
Well, it didn’t happen. This time the Phillies big bats remained silent. The Diamondbacks won, 5-1, forcing a decisive Game 7 Tuesday night at Citizens Bank Park beginning at 8:07. Lefthander Ranger Suarez will square off against Arizona righthander Brandon Pfaadt.
In the storybook version, the Phillies would have ended up spraying Champagne. But in the real world Nola, so dominant in October, gave up more runs in that fateful second than he had in his previous 19 2/3 postseason innings. He was lifted with one out in the fifth after giving up a single to Corbin Carroll and a triple to Ketel Marte. He allowed four runs on six hits, including homers to Tommy Pham and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. He walked two and struck.
He wasn’t booed when he trudged back to the dugout. He got a polite ovation, an acknowledgement, probably, both of his 0.96 postseason ERA before Monday and the reality that the organization’s longest-tenured player can become a free agent after the World Series.
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The sellout of 45,473 also chanted its support – Nol-la! No-la! – when he followed up the two homers with a walk to Alek Thomas.
"That was awesome.” he said. “They were definitely picking me up right there.” He also appreciated the cheers he got when he went out to warm up and the reception when he came off the field. “Not a great night for me. A tough one for me pitching. But it was great,” he added.
Not every fan was that understanding. As manager Rob Thomson walked slowly to the mound to bring Mike Lorenzen on in relief, one frustrated leather lung in the 200 level yelled, “It’s about time!”
He wasn’t terrible. But something seemed just slightly off. After a regular season in which he allowed a career-high 32 homers he’d served up just one long ball in his last 37 innings before Pham and Gurriel took him deep back-to-back.
“It was a bad inning,” said Nola, stating the obvious, standing in the spot where’s he dissected so many of his starts, good and bad, over the years. “They didn’t miss too many balls over the plate. Obviously, this wasn’t a very good night for me. Tough loss. But I’ll cheer my team on (Tuesday) and we’ll do whatever we can to win. That’s what it comes down to.”
Nola struck out three of the first four batters he faced in the first inning but didn’t get another whiff until the final out of the fourth. Thomson conceded that his stuff wasn’t the same in the second inning.
“The breaking ball to Pham, maybe a little bit of a hanger,” he said. “The home run to Gurriel, they wanted to go up a little higher and he couldn’t get it there. He didn’t execute some pitches and he paid for it.”
So there will be a winner-take-all game Tuesday night at Citizens Bank Park. If you run one of the bars at Xfinity Live! You’ll probably want to have extra workers again and cross your fingers that the patrons who show up aren’t there to drown their sorrows.