In the visitors’ dugout in St. Louis, right after his team clinched a series win, Phillies manager Rob Thomson turned to catcher J.T. Realmuto. He needed to give the veteran backstop a heads up. The club was about to celebrate, but before they popped the champagne, the manager planned to ask how many games were left for them to win. He wanted Realmuto to be the one to give the answer: 11.
That was how many victories it would take to get from that wild-card win on Saturday to the end of a hypothetical World Series.
There were other players Thomson could have asked to deliver the answer: Some reasonable choices might have been one of the talented starters who led the team all year, Zack Wheeler or Aaron Nola, or the slugger who delivered the crucial home run in the second game, Bryce Harper. But Thomson has a soft spot for Realmuto’s place on the roster—“I’m an old catcher,” said the manager, a former minor-league backstop—and besides, he hoped to have more opportunities to ask this question later, with different players able to answer as the number of wins left got smaller. But for now? He’d stick with the catcher.
