Phillies win the hard way — against themselves and the Nationals

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PHILADELPHIA — He stood next to his locker with a gray towel around his neck, tugging at each end, as if he had just been through a 12-round fight and José Alvarado loved every moment of this. More and more reporters joined the scrum around him Tuesday night after a 7-6 Philadelphia Phillies win. Some teammates formed an audience. “That’s a big moment,” Alvarado said, retelling how he struck out the side after loading the bases in the eighth inning. Alvarado has a photo of Rocky Balboa tucked in the back of his locker this year.

It didn’t need to be this hard. That, so far, is the story of the 16-13 Phillies.

“You see some new stuff every day in this game,” Alec Bohm said, and in this case, he was referring to the rock fight held between the teams that entered Tuesday with the two worst bullpen ERAs in baseball. The Phillies cruised in the first six innings. They could have used a boring game against the inferior Washington Nationals.

Then Zack Wheeler shook off J.T. Realmuto, only for Luis García Jr. to homer on that pitch. Matt Strahm allowed an inherited runner to score. Johan Rojas misplayed two balls in center field, ran through a stop sign, hit the longest ball (421 feet) of his entire career, and tied the score with a shallow sacrifice fly. Trea Turner botched two plays — one in the eighth inning that loaded the bases for Alvarado, and another in the ninth that extended the game so Nathaniel Lowe could swat a go-ahead, three-run homer off Orion Kerkering, who was one strike away from his first-career save.

The Phillies still won only because Bohm scored when he probably shouldn’t have on Rojas’ sacrifice fly and Bryson Stott scampered home on a subsequent wild pitch that culminated in the pitcher stepping on Stott’s left hand. (X-rays were negative later.) Stott said it didn’t matter; his left hand is not important.

That was some new stuff.

PRETTY WILD ENDING#RingTheBell pic.twitter.com/0Jhv5vd8XT

— Philadelphia Phillies (@Phillies) April 30, 2025

“Doesn’t matter the situation — good, bad, if it looks ugly, whatever it is,” Turner said. “We’re going to keep fighting it. And it was nice to pull it out.”

But the shortstop wasn’t blind to the obvious. This was far too hard. “Tough,” said Turner, who went 4-for-4 with a double. “I put the team in a bad spot right there, but the boys picked me up and had some good ABs.”

There is an accumulating tax in a six-month season when a team has to lean on its best relievers every night. The Phillies have played many close games in the season’s first month. The little things matter in close games, and the Phillies are not the finest team at accomplishing the little things.

They are giving their opponent too many extra outs on a nightly basis.

“Yes,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. “Absolutely. We have to clean it up. We really do.”

There are various metrics, most of them unreliable at this juncture in the season, to evaluate defense. Stick with this: The Phillies have often not passed the eye test. They have fumbled too many double-play opportunities, whether it’s at the start of the play or on the turn. The most basic measurement — how often a team turns a batted ball into an out — suggests the Phillies are failing. They have allowed a .319 batting average on balls in play, which ranks 28th in baseball, ahead of only Baltimore and Colorado. A lot of it is pitching.

Some of it is defense. Can this team be a good defensive one? Or at least average?

“Well, you see it at times,” Thomson said. “But right now, we are giving up too many outs. And there are times that we haven’t done that — last year, this year. So we just need to slow down and get the outs that we need to get.”

They could at least say this Tuesday night: They won. Turner represented the duality of this dumb nine-inning sample. He was on base the entire night. He scored two runs. He’s bumped his average to .290, and all anyone will remember are the defensive missteps.

“A little bit of everything,” Turner said. “Try to compartmentalize, separate the two. Obviously, a good offensive game, but I let the other team back in, and that’s not good. Sometimes, when it’s not going well offensively, you can affect the game on defense. So that’s proof right there. It doesn’t matter if you’re 4-for-4; you can still affect the game in a positive or negative way.”

Johan Rojas slides safely into home after an eighth-inning RBI double by Trea Turner. (Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)

The same can be said for Rojas, whose spot in this lineup is far less secure than Turner’s. Rojas started in center field for the 12th straight game. He should have caught a deep fly ball in the third inning that instead landed as a triple for CJ Abrams. Wheeler pitched around it, although it added 12 pitches to his count that would have been helpful in the seventh inning.

But, in the bottom half, Rojas torched a hanging changeup to deep left-center for a solo homer. He started the bottom of the eighth with a single and came around to score on a Turner double, although Rojas ran through a stop sign from Phillies third-base coach Dusty Wathan in the process. Wathan wanted to hold Rojas because there were no outs, and Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber were due to bat. Rojas scored only because the cutoff man hesitated once Rojas stopped, already past the stop sign, and the whole play will not be preserved on video for future generations.

Then, in the ninth, Rojas overran a line drive he should have caught. It went as a run-scoring double against Kerkering, whose defense failed him. Rojas is here to bat ninth and catch the ball in center. Those are the parameters.

“He needs to keep it simple,” Thomson said. “Make the plays he’s supposed to make. But I’m not concerned. We’ll take care of that. He’s a great defender.”

“I get ready for the next one,” Rojas said. “Always be ready, 100 percent.”

Maybe center field is cursed at Citizens Bank Park; it’s been that way for roughly a decade. But the Phillies don’t win Tuesday without Rojas and Turner doing what they did at the plate. And they probably should have lost because of what they did in the field. It is not a Phillies win without feeling exhausted by the whole thing.

It’ll just depend on one’s perspective to decide which is most important as April soon becomes May.

(Top photo of José Alvarado celebrating after escaping the eighth inning with the bases loaded: Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)

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