TORONTO -- After four consecutive losses against the Toronto Blue Jays, there was nothing left for the Phillies to do but look to the next series against the New York Mets.
“We didn’t play solid baseball,” second baseman Chase Utley said. “We made some mistakes in the field. At this point, we’ve got to put this game behind us and start fresh tomorrow.”
The Phillies were defeated 3-0 and 6-5 in 10 innings in their two home games in the home-and-home interleague series on Monday and Tuesday. That was bad enough for a team that had gathered some steam with a run of six wins in eight previous games.
But the Phillies were crushed by an aggregate score of 22-6 in the Toronto portion of the series. And three of the Phillies’ runs in the 12-6 loss on Thursday came in the ninth inning of a game that was long out of hand (see Instant Replay).
The series in New York opens Friday night and for the Phillies it could not come soon enough.
“We have another series starting tomorrow in New York,” manager Ryne Sandberg said. “The way that this season has gone we’ve been able to bounce back and come back in a series and change momentum and do things differently. We’ll work on that tomorrow night.”
MLB
The Phillies must clean up their act if they intend to turn things around. There were too many fundamental mistakes in all aspects of their game against the Blue Jays.
“We were out-homered 11-2 in four games and that goes a long way,” Sandberg said. “And it just added up and took its toll and we weren’t able to answer that on the offensive side.
“We weren’t fundamentally sound for the four games. A lot of little things. Little base running things, a base here or there, some defense, some pitches in the middle of the plate, pitching behind in the count. We didn’t execute.”
Then he used a word heard often during the past couple of games. “Frustrating,” he said. “I think their offense spoke for itself in this series.”
If the Phillies were looking for Thursday’s starter A.J. Burnett to be their stopper, the guy to stop the losses and right things, they were mistaken.
Burnett was no match for Toronto knuckleball pitcher R.A. Dickey, who held the Phillies to three runs. Burnett allowed three home runs and seven runs (six earned) in six innings.
“It’s very frustrating,” Burnett said. “The shutdown innings tonight weren’t there. You want to come in and stop the bleeding and set the tone but that wasn’t there. It’s a series you have to put behind you. We’ve got another game tomorrow and we’re full of positive thoughts.”
If Burnett cannot command his curveball then he is in trouble, because his fastball becomes quite hittable. On Thursday, he had trouble with most of his pitches, let alone the breaking ball. Instead of living on the edges, he was too often in the center of the plate and the Blue Jays were not missing.
“The ball was in the middle of the plate tonight, I wasn’t on the corners at all very much,” Burnett said. “The sinker was middle and that’s what big-league hitters can do to you when the balls are in the middle of the plate, they can whack it. The hook was in inconsistent. I had it at times. That’s the bottom line: Pitches were not on the corners, they were in the middle of the plate.”
Burnett entered the game with a 2.06 ERA and left it with a 2.90. In his four previous starts, he had a 0.98 ERA. Those came after he was diagnosed with an inguinal hernia. But since leaving the Blue Jays as a free agent after the 2008 season, he is 0-4 with an 8.56 ERA at Rogers Centre.
“It seemed to me that he was missing on the corners with fastballs that he normally gets ahead with,” Sandberg said. “His breaking pitch was staying in the zone instead of being a hard-biter in the zone and out of the zone and that’s been a good pitch for him up until this start.”
Burnett was not the answer so the Phillies are still searching. Now it is back to the National League, back to the drawing board and, the Phillies hope, back to the winning ways they had been showing just a week ago.