It was a two-run homer in the eighth inning of Game 5 of the National League Championship Series on Sunday, and it sent the Philadelphia Phillies to a 4-3 victory over the San Diego Padres and a berth in the World Series, this franchise’s first since 2009. The Houston Astros or New York Yankees await.
The blast was Harper’s fifth of the postseason. At this point, he is as close to an approximation of 1928 Babe Ruth or 1977 Reggie Jackson as baseball has seen in recent Octobers. He is hitting .419 with a 1.351 on-base-plus-slugging percentage. He is the center of the Phillies’ universe, his gravity like that of a thousand suns.
When lefty Ranger Suárez retired Padres catcher Austin Nola on a flyball to right to end the top of the ninth — a hairy half-inning in which right-hander David Robertson was pulled after issuing back-to-back one-out walks — the Phillies threw their gloves in the air and converged at the center of the diamond to convene a victory party certain to rage deep into the night.
“We’ve got four more!” Harper shouted to a raucous crowd from the stage erected beyond second base, where he was presented the NLCS MVP trophy. He was referring to the number of wins remaining to secure the championship. “We’re going to bring this [expletive] home, boys!”
In the Phillies’ victorious clubhouse, the first bottles of champagne were directed toward the ungoggled face of Manager Rob Thomson, who took over for the fired Joe Girardi in early June, when the team had a 22-29 record, and led them to a 65-46 record the rest of the way.
“It’s special for me personally,” said Thomson, a rookie major league manager but a veteran of 37 seasons in professional baseball. “But there are so many guys on this club who had never even been to the playoffs [before this year]. … I’m probably more happy for them than for anybody else.”
Those 87 regular season wins were good enough for the Phillies to sneak into the postseason as the sixth seed — a prize that didn’t even exist until this year’s playoff expansion. But they have transformed into a juggernaut in the postseason, blitzing three teams — the St. Louis Cardinals, the Atlanta Braves and now the Padres — that outpaced them collectively by 22 games in the regular season standings. In three rounds, they are 9-2, including 5-0 at home.
“You could see us grow together, always with the feeling that if we got in … we’d have a chance to contend,” said President of Baseball Operations Dave Dombrowski, who is looking for a third World Series title to go with the ones he won with the Florida Marlins in 1997 and the Boston Red Sox in 2018. “Our stars have stepped up.”
The Phillies held a slim lead for much of the game, constructed upon Rhys Hoskins’s two-run homer in the third and six-plus outstanding innings from ace Zack Wheeler. But carrying that lead home would prove a harrowing task, owing to the Padres’ resilience and the deteriorating elements.
Much of the game was played in a light rain and a steady wind, cloaking the downtown skyline in the distance in a spooky blanket of haze. Beyond straightaway center, between the Stars and Stripes and a giant LED Liberty…
Read More: Phillies advance to World Series, beat Padres in NLCS Game 5
