Category: Sports Columnists

ATLANTA — While it may be overly reductive to call baseball the most individual of the team sports, it sure can be the most isolating. That’s true with regard to the physical proximity between teammates on the field of play, and also to the psycho-emotional weight a player must bear when things go awry. In baseball, it is almost always clear where the blame lies.

There was a time in Alec Bohm’s career when he carried more of this baggage than could fit in the overhead bin. Andrew Painter accumulated enough of it in such a short period of time that the Phillies shipped him to the minors without a return ticket. Bryce Harper? He beat a different path to Truist Field and this best-of-three wild-card series. But there he was on Wednesday afternoon, in the seventh inning of a game the Phillies needed to win, making the lonely walk back from the warning track with the slow, confused strides of a man whose misplayed fly ball had just allowed the go-ahead run to score.

“Obviously,” Harper would say later, “a world of emotion there.”

The Phillies’ 4-3 victory in 10 innings over the Braves in Game 2 on Wednesday was a lot of different things.

It was playoff baseball at its finest, not to mention its most hazardous to a fan’s cardiac health.

It was a showcase: of the razor-thin margins that will determine which of these two teams advances, and of the strengths that once again have the Phillies on the verge of an NLDS berth.

Mostly, though, Game 2 was a story. First, of failure. Then, of overcoming it.

Whether the story endures is a question that will be decided on Thursday in a decisive Game 3. The winner will move on to face the Dodgers in a best-of-five series. The loser will move on to face the haunting what-ifs of an early offseason.

“I expect them to come out [Thursday] and it to be a similar game,” Braves manager Walt Weiss said. “Like I said [Tuesday], this is usually what it looks like when these two teams play. So yeah, that’s what’ll happen [Thursday]. We’ll come out and we’ll be ready.”

But if momentum is real, and if adversity is a buoy, the Phillies have to like their chances, whatever the odds say.

“It’s in our DNA,” Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber said. “We’re not going to quit.”

It was Schwarber who set the redemption arc in motion in the eighth. The Phillies were reeling from what had been a disaster of a seventh inning in the field. After leadoff hitter Sean Murphy drew a walk against a tiring Cristopher Sánchez, Bohm unwisely threw to second on a sacrifice bunt attempt by Ha-Seong Kim instead of taking the out at first.

Then, two batters later, Harper misjudged a line drive off the bat of Drake Baldwin and could not secure the catch. The play plated Murphy with the go-ahead run and set up a sacrifice fly by Matt Olson that gave the Braves a 3-1 lead. The lead was brief.

Schwarber took care of the first run, belting a 3-2 pitch from Braves lefty Dylan Lee into the right-center field seats to cut the deficit to one run. That set the stage for Harper, who atoned for his fielding miscue by hitting a 1-1 slider from Lee over the wall in right-center. Bohm, too, would get his chance. First, he needed Painter to take advantage of his own.

Entering the series, interim manager Don Mattingly was murky about his plans for Painter, the one-time top prospect whose first stint in the majors lasted just 14 starts, 11 of them Phillies losses. The rookie had rebounded nicely from his midseason demotion, rediscovering his fastball and his confidence while posting a 3.65 ERA and averaging more than a strikeout per inning in 11 starts down the stretch. But Mattingly entered the postseason planning on using Painter out of the bullpen, something the righty had never previously done. When Schwarber and Harper tied the game at 3 in the top of the eighth, the kid’s time had come.

Six pitches into Painter’s outing, there was a runner on first and he had not thrown a strike. Things changed drastically after a meeting on the mound and a brief pep talk from catcher J.T. Realmuto. Michael Harris II took a called strike and then hit Painter’s 2-1 pitch directly to Bohm, who started and finished a 3-6-3 double play. Murphy then popped up the first pitch to Bohm to end the inning. From six pitches, no strikes, to three pitches, three outs.

After a scoreless ninth from Painter, Bohm gave him the only run he’d need to close out the game. With two out in the top of the 10th, the Phillies corner infielder and soon-to-be-free agent took a ball and then a strike and then drilled a 99 mph fastball from Didier Fuentes over the right-field wall.

“Everybody is fighting for every out, every at-bat,” Mattingly said. “It’s not going to stop.”

This was one of those wins that meant more than the final score, more even than a season prolonged for another day. It was a revelation. The Phillies entered this postseason riding a string of three straight playoffs series defined by failure. Nick Castellanos being thrown out on a sacrifice bunt. Orion Kerkering short-circuiting. The no-show against the Mets. Two straight home losses needing a win to reach the World Series. Once upon a time, this Phillies team had a mojo that forced you to believe, regardless of circumstance, that they would overcome.

In Game 2, they overcame, three individual triumphs stitched together into a collective in that peculiar baseball way. The old saw that says baseball is a game of failure is not entirely correct. It is a game of bouncing back from failure. More often than not, the last team standing is the team that bounces back the best.

ATLANTA — As Don Mattingly settled into his seat on the golf cart to return to his clubhouse after he’d mismanaged his flawed roster into an eighth-inning collapse, Braves ace Chris Sale strode toward the interview room to discuss his role in the Braves’ 5-3 win in Game 1 of the National League wild-card series.

With his magnificent left hand, Sale doffed his cap and tipped it in Mattingly’s direction. Mattingly’s head was down, understandably. Sale, persistent, took his cap off and tipped it again. Mattingly nodded appreciatively.

After Mattingly’s performance Tuesday, that might be the last time the pair sees each other for a long, long time. Mattingly is the Phillies’ interim manager, and he wants to come back next season. A report last month said Mattingly would have to win the NL pennant to make that happen.

That yardstick got longer Tuesday.

Mattingly used his best reliever, closer Jhoan Duran, in a situation overwhelmingly foreign to Duran. The decision smacked of the odd and desperate moves that cost Rob Thomson the manager’s job 28 games into this season. Mattingly was installed by Phillies president Dave Dombrowski last winter as Thomson’s bench coach to mitigate misjudgments like this. Mattingly was promoted to interim manager in April with the assumption that such misjudgments would not continue.

Yes.

Well.

Sale has pitched against teams Mattingly coached and managed. He respects Mattingly. So do I. Pretty much everybody associated with baseball respects Mattingly, both as a player and a manager. Sale one day will be in the Hall of Fame. It’s an injustice that Mattingly isn’t there already. He served as the face of the most important sports franchise in American history during some of its leanest years. From 1984-94, Mattingly was the soul of the New York Yankees. People have named their children after Donnie Baseball, including their daughters: no, not “Donna,” but, rather, “Mattingly” as a first name.

The Hit Man is a legend. That doesn’t mean he is infallible. He hit .307 in his 14-year career, but he also struck out 444 times. He struck out again Tuesday.

With a 3-2 lead, Mattingly asked Duran to pitch the seventh and eighth innings. Duran has pitched in the seventh inning just three times in the past four seasons, and zero times in 2026.

Mattingly asked Duran to get him six outs, which requires Duran to pitch, sit, and pitch — an up-down. Duran has done that once this year, on Aug. 29, against the Angels, the second-worst team in baseball. He did it on two days’ rest; he’d had just one day off before Tuesday. That also was 10 appearances ago.

Duran dominated the seventh.

He fell apart in the eighth.

Predictably.

With two outs, Michael Harris II nubbed an infield single. Duran then hit Ozzie Albies with a 3-2 pitch. Duran looked tired.

“After the infield single, that at-bat to Albies was a little uncharacteristic of him, just not being able to find the zone there and the curveball, being that wild with a 3-2 count,” said catcher J.T. Realmuto. “I thought maybe he looked a little tired.”

The first thing that goes when a pitcher is tired? Command.

First, the wild curveball.

Then, disaster.

Austin Riley came to bat. Realmuto set up outside. Duran missed by a foot-and-a-half.

Riley turned Duran’s pitch, a 99.9 mph fastball, into a 104.6 mph missile over the right-center field wall. That was Duran’s 25th pitch, the third-most he’s thrown this season and the most he’s thrown in 15 appearances.

Mattingly has been dealt a bad hand from a stacked deck. He is plagued with a thin bullpen. He had to use No. 1 starter Zack Wheeler in Game 162 on Sunday because his hitters stunk down the stretch and couldn’t lock up a playoff spot. That meant using Jesús Luzardo on Tuesday, but Luzardo had just come off the injured list, and he was limited to 75 pitches or so: He gave them 77 in five innings of one-run ball.

Mattingly’s plan: Use Duran until his arm fell off.

It failed.

“We talked about it before the game … he’d go the seventh, eighth,” Mattingly said. The Braves’ best hitters were due up in that span, but Mattingly said that was his plan regardless of where the Braves were in the lineup … and, incredibly, beyond.

Mattingly said he would have used Duran for a third inning, too.

“If the second [inning] went really quick, I would have just checked with him. If not, we would have went to somebody else,” Mattingly said.

He added that, in the ninth, Duran might have combined with another reliever, such as Jonathan Bowlan, who also just came off the IL.

What could Mattingly have done differently?

Mattingly could have left Luzardo in for another inning. Everyone, including Luzardo, was satisfied that, after 21 days off, he lasted five innings and had 77 bullets. But if Duran can be asked to throw three innings, Luzardo, in perhaps his last start of the season, with a garbage bullpen behind him, could have pitched into the sixth.

Mattingly could either have stitched together a seventh inning with rookie Alex McFarlane, who’d already pitched the sixth, and Bowlan, or just given Bowlan the seventh. He was, most likely, going to pitch in the ninth, anyway. He could have leaned on José Alvarado, who is inconsistent but has good numbers against Ronald Acuna Jr. and Matt Olson, two batters he would have likely faced.

This might seem like unfair second-guessing, but, well, that’s baseball, and the beauty of the game: Its deliberate nature fosters hindsights.

At any rate, Mattingly won’t face the same backlash that Thomson faced in his four years in the crosshairs and his legacy of woulda-couldas.

It began with lifting Wheeler for Alvarado in Game 6 of the 2022 World Series. It continued with Craig Kimbrel’s bullpen usage in the 2023 NLCS. It mushroomed when Thomson used 40-year-old reliever David Robertson in multiple innings in Game 1 of the 2025 NLDS, a role Robertson had not filled all year, then asked Bryson Stott to bunt over Nick Castellanos in Game 2 the next night.

So, thanks in part to Thomson’s litany of miscues, but thanks much more to Dombrowski’s failure to bolster the bullpen, Mattingly’s mistakes Tuesday won’t resonate as much.

That won’t make the ice on which Mattingly is skating any thicker.

In April, the day before he fired Thomson, Dombrowski offered the manager’s job to fired Red Sox manager Alex Cora, who declined … for the moment. Mattingly was Dombrowski’s second choice. Dombrowksi has said he would not consider Mattingly as manager for next season until after this one ends.

On Tuesday, Cora got one step closer to wearing Phillies pinstripes.