Phillies fall to Pirates, suffer their fourth straight loss

PITTSBURGH — Maybe this is just how it’s going to be.

Never mind that the Phillies have the fourth-highest payroll in baseball. Or that they rolled out a lineup Saturday with a half-dozen players who have been All-Stars.

For the seventh time in 10 games, they lacked Bryce Harper.

And for the eighth time in nine games, they lost.

» READ MORE: Phillies place Bryce Harper on 10-day injured list: ‘I can’t really function on a baseball field’

In this case, correlation appears to equal causation. Because other than a first-inning homer by Kyle Schwarber, the Bryce-less Phillies shot blanks again in a 2-1 loss to the Pirates before a bipartisan crowd of 32,951 on the banks of the Allegheny River.

“Obviously that’s a big loss,” Schwarber said, referring not to the game but to Harper’s arrival on the injured list with the recurrence of a right wrist problem that pained him for most of last season. “It’s a guy who’s right in the middle of the lineup. But we have to be able to find ways to score runs and create runs and find opportunities.”

Lest anyone forget, the Phillies (37-27) have done it before.

Harper will miss at least the next seven games, likely more considering he said he “can’t really function on a baseball field” with the pain in his wrist. There isn’t a timetable for his return.

Meanwhile, leave it to Schwarber, de facto team captain and often the voice of reason within the clubhouse, to provide the history lesson.

“In 2022, his [elbow] and his [broken] thumb, those were big losses at the time,” Schwarber said. “We have to just find a way to be able to come together. You know the guys are going to step up.”

They did three seasons ago. The Phillies went 32-20 while Harper was recovering from a fractured left thumb. And they were 15-15 at the beginning of the 2023 season, when he was coming back from Tommy John elbow surgery.

But the Phillies look lost lately without their best player. They went 1-4 last week after Harper took a fastball off the right elbow and mustered 11 hits in the last two games against the Pirates, including only four on Saturday.

» READ MORE: Otto Kemp makes his major league debut with his family in attendance: ‘Everybody’s pulling for him’

In all, the Phillies are 48-for-230 (.209) and have scored 24 runs in the last seven games without No. 3 occupying his familiar No. 3 spot in the batting order.

“I think guys are trying to do a little bit too much right now,” manager Rob Thomson said. “We need to get back to using field, working pitchers.”

The Phillies were aggressive against Pirates lefty Andrew Heaney, who threw only 73 pitches before exiting in the seventh inning with a left leg cramp. After Schwarber’s homer, they didn’t get a runner into scoring position until Alec Bohm led off the seventh with a double and took third base on a wild pitch.

And that’s where the game was lost.

Because the Pirates put a 1-1 game in the hands of reliever Isaac Mattson, who got called up from triple A before the game. Mattson struck out Nick Castellanos looking at a pitch that clipped the bottom of the zone, then got J.T. Realmuto to fly to shallow right field and Bryson Stott to fly to center.

“It’s just not happening right now,” Schwarber said. “Like we said, we’ve been through periods like this before. I think the overall message is to make sure that we just keep trying to make the adjustments that we need to make.”

Short of pioneering cloning before the trade deadline, the Phillies won’t replace Harper. Their hope is that they won’t have to, that by going on the injured list now, the pain in his right wrist will subside.

» READ MORE: Can starters provide relief? Sizing up who could fill a need in the Phillies’ bullpen for the playoffs.

Until then, with a diminished offense, the difference between winning and losing will boil down to little things.

In the first inning, left fielder Weston Wilson dove for a ball in the gap and didn’t come close to catching it. The ball rolled to the wall and went for a leadoff triple for Nick Gonzales, who scored on Andrew McCutchen’s single.

Thomson commended Wilson for his effort but wished he hadn’t been so aggressive.

“That early in the game,” Thomson said, “I’d probably want to keep the ball in front of me.”

It wound up costing starter Ranger Suárez a run. Suárez was brilliant again, not allowing another until the seventh inning on Henry Davis’ tiebreaking solo homer.

“I think it was a good changeup, but look at the results,” Suárez said through a team interpreter. “He hit it out. That’s where I wanted the pitch. I know he’s an aggressive hitter, and it ended that way.

“We play to win, right? Losing is not in our plans ever. It’s just about turning the page and start over.”

For a while, at least, it’s going to be harder without Harper.