PHILADELPHIA —Aaron Nola left Game 4 of the World Series on Wednesday in the fifth inning, having not allowed a run. Funny, how a sentence can be factually accurate yet convey nothing close to the proper context of a situation, of this tenuous situation that the Phillies now face. Yes, the Houston Astros hadn’t scored while Nola was in the game, but he had allowed seven hits, hit a batter, and exited with the bases loaded with no outs, hardly a seamless baton handoff to José Alvarado. And soon enough, the Astros started a conga line to home plate.
The reasons for Nola’s struggles Wednesday — physical, mental, something else — don’t matter now. Perhaps he was tiring at the end of a long season, though 24 hours earlier he had said he felt good. Perhaps he wasn’t capable of meeting the moment, though he had pitched brilliantly in the National League wild-card round and divisional series. Perhaps the Houston Astros — a team that won 106 regular-season games and its first seven of the postseason — were just due not merely to thump the Phillies like they did, 5-0, but to tag them with the embarrassment of becoming just the second team to be no-hit in a World Series game.
But again, the details of the Phillies’ first bad night at Citizens Bank Park in more than a month are irrelevant. Game 4 is over. The series is tied. And for the first time in these playoffs, the Phillies are in peril of breaking — either at the hands of an opponent that was better than they were for most of this season or from the attrition to their pitching staff.
The irony of Wednesday’s loss was that the Phillies’ 7-0 laugher Tuesday in Game 3 had seemingly set them up to take control of the series. Ranger Suárez had been so brilliant for five innings, and the Astros so listless, that manager Rob Thomson got away with using the four relievers at the very back of his bullpen. Alvarado, Seranthony Domínguez, Zach Eflin, David Robertson: Thomson had to burn none of them Tuesday, so they presumably would be fresh and ready Wednesday and Thursday.
“Give them another day’s rest,” Thomson said Wednesday, a few hours before Game 4, “and now they can go back-to-back here in the next two days, depending upon how many pitches they throw, obviously. But all those guys that we have in the bullpen, I have faith in them. I use ‘em maybe at different times of a game or different game state. But they have all thrown very well.”
Alvarado didn’t. He fired his first pitch Wednesday, a 99-mph sinker, right into Yordan Alvarez’s rump to drive in the game’s first run. He got two quick strikes on Alex Bregman before serving up a 100-mph fastball that caught too much of the plate. Bregman laced it to right field for a two-run double. It took Alvarado 22 pitches to get through that fifth inning, to limit the Astros — if you want to call it that — to five runs. Then came Andrew Bellatti for the second time in two nights. Then came Robertson and Eflin. And there went the edge that conventional wisdom said Monday’s rainout/off-day had given the Phillies.
This was never going to be anything close to a cakewalk, upsetting the Astros, and suddenly a series in these playoffs has never looked harder for the Phillies. Never mind that they get just one more game in the cauldron of Citizens Bank Park, that Houston regained home-field advantage with its Game 4 victory. It’ll be a patchwork pitching effort in Thursday’s Game 5: Noah Syndergaard, probably Connor Brogdon, maybe Kyle Gibson or Nick Nelson, maybe a reliever or two who will have to go on back-to-back days for who knows how many pitches and innings.
Zack Wheeler’s velocity was down when the Astros knocked him around in Game 2, and ahead of Wheeler’s scheduled Game 6 start Saturday, the one-two punch that made the Phillies so tough to beat in those earlier rounds is softer, slower, and easier to see coming. Nola likely has taken the mound for the last time this season, and if Thomson has to go to him again, he’s sure to have little more than fumes, guile, and a half-decent curveball. There’s a joke to be made about whether the Phillies’ best option might be to start Suárez in Games 6 and 7, but it would probably cut too close to the truth.
In a moment of levity Wednesday afternoon, before everything about this series shifted away from his team, Thomson said, “I think we’ve used everybody on our roster in the World Series except for Garrett Stubbs to this point. So try to figure out a way to get Garrett in there if we can.” Stubbs is the Phillies’ backup catcher, of course. He pitched 3 2/3 innings over four games this season, in blowouts when the Phillies needed a position player to eat up outs. But if this team, which has shown a knack for pulling off the improbable, wants to do it again, it may need him to start warming up.
