When I laid out a potential path to a Marlins upset in the NL Wild Card Series, it started with Jesús Luzardo hanging with Zack Wheeler. The 33-year-old righty has been one of the best starters in baseball over his tenure with the Phillies, whose run to last year’s pennant was in large part the result of a procession of dominant Wheeler starts. But Luzardo is an excellent pitcher himself; perhaps a player of his youth and talent could raise his game in the biggest start of his life.
Luzardo didn’t pitch badly by any means, but on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, there was simply no hanging with Wheeler. I’ll list his stats here, but they don’t do the performance justice: 6.2 innings, five hits, no walks, one run, eight strikeouts. The Phillies won, 4–1, and now have a stranglehold on a series they were heavily favored to win from the start.
“I think the story was Wheeler,” said Marlins manager Skip Schumaker. “He was excellent tonight. The sinker/sweeper combination gave us trouble. A lot of weak ground ball contact…. He was just excellent.”
Wheeler’s dominance was the result of two factors. First, he was ahead in the count on basically everyone, all night: 19 first-pitch strikes for 24 batters faced. After running Josh Bell 3–0 with two outs in the first inning, he didn’t get into another three-ball count until he faced Nick Fortes in the sixth. In between, he fell behind 1–0 to three out of 14 batters; in each of those cases, the next two pitches were strikes, and he retired the batter in question. Those three 1–0 counts represented the only pitches Wheeler threw behind in the count during that time.
“I think your OPS goes down a couple hundred points when you’re 0–1 compared to 1–0,” Bell said. “He doesn’t walk a ton of people… I’m sure he wasn’t trying to make mistakes all over the plate, he was trying to make corners.”
It’s always easier to pitch from that advantageous position. All the more so for Wheeler, whose sweeper was nearly unhittable.
“That was the best the sweeper’s been,” he said. “That was a big pitch for me tonight. I just had a very good feel for where to start it and what it was going to do. It did the same thing every single time, no matter if I threw it up or down.”
We talk a lot about having a fastball-breaking ball combination that looks similar out of the hand but has such different velocity and movement that the batter can’t possibly cover for both. The Marlins put some swings on Wheeler’s sweeper that made me think they couldn’t have hit it even if they’d known he was coming. Here’s Jon Berti, missing a 1–2 sweeper in the third inning by more than the length of his bat:
Zack Wheeler, Wicked Sweepers. ?
5th and 6th Ks. pic.twitter.com/p66Y7n0Xdb
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) October 4, 2023
A swing like is enough to make a person resent his ancestors for climbing out of the sea millions of years ago, growing lungs and arms, and ultimately putting him in this unenviable position.
“He locates it well and can throw it to both sides of the plate,” Marlins third baseman Jake Burger said. “He keeps you honest with his other pitches, too. For lefties, it’s a cutter, for righties, a four-seamer. There’s a reason he’s one of the best in the game.”
The Marlins threatened against Wheeler in the sixth and seventh innings as he tired, but even then they couldn’t quite square him up. Miami’s five hits included two ground-ball singles that sneaked under the gloves of Trea Turner and Bryson Stott, plus two infield singles, both on bang-bang plays. One of those was partially the result of inexperienced and overexuberant first base play from Bryce Harper, who laid out for a Burger grounder but left his bag uncovered; Stott had to hold the ball until Wheeler could scramble over to the bag, but by then it was too late. The fifth hit was a scalded seventh-inning double by Bell, who scored the Marlins’ lone run of the night.
“He’s got such a whippy arm and electric stuff,” Bell said. “He was definitely on tonight.”
Wheeler has now made three home playoff starts in his career, all Phillies wins. In 19.2 innings he has 24 strikeouts, a 1.37 ERA, and just 11 baserunners allowed.
“I just feel like I’m doing my job, honestly. That’s why I came here, and that’s why the Phillies signed me, to pitch like I am,” he said. “ It’s been a fun ride. Making it to the postseason, there’s nothing like it. I just try to do the exact same thing, but I think my adrenaline and everything comes up and it just plays a tiny bit more, and sometimes that helps you.”
Bell was the only hitter who could get a bead on Wheeler or anyone else, going 3-for-4 with two doubles (the second came off Craig Kimbrel). He also drew Wheeler’s only 3–0 count and accounted for three of the four batted balls he allowed with an exit velocity of over 100 mph. Bell’s first double also gave him the distinction of becoming the first Marlin to reach second base against Wheeler — in the seventh inning.
By that point, the game wasn’t quite out of reach; when the Marlins finally chased Wheeler, the tying run was on first base. That’s because Luzardo, under pressure most of the night, never let the dam break.
“It’s obviously a great lineup full of veterans, so they know how to grind guys out,” he said. “Like, they did just that, they ground me out. [They weren’t] as aggressive as they usually are, not chasing much, just making me come in the zone.”
The 26-year-old lefthander scattered eight hits and didn’t allow a home run or a walk, but he was constantly under pressure. He threw first-pitch strikes to just 10 of 19 batters and needed 90 pitches to get through four innings; by that time, every Phillies position player except Harper had recorded a hit.
“I thought the first-pitch strike just wasn’t there tonight,” Schumaker said. “Usually it is, and that’s when he can get to his really good slider. He just didn’t have the command like he usually does the first few innings. The pitch count ran up on him in the fourth, and we had to get him out of there.”
The Phillies could’ve put the game out of reach early, but they passed up opportunities to score. In the first inning, with runners at second and third and nobody out, third base coach Dusty Wathan held Schwarber on a 276-foot flyout to Jesús Sánchez in the right field corner. Schwarber, who had led off the first inning with a single, was ultimately stranded on third.
“You have to be careful there because Sánchez can throw,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. “It was a little bit offline. By our reports, he’s a more accurate thrower than that throw there. And you’ve got Harper coming to the plate, so you’d better make sure, with the catch making the first out, you’d better make sure that guy’s going to be standing up at the plate.”
Philadelphia lost another potential run in the fourth when Nick Castellanos, trying to score from second on a single to center field, was cut down at the plate after a superb throw from Jazz Chisholm Jr. and an arguably even better tag by Fortes. By the time the Phillies put that final insurance run on the board in the eighth, after a Castellanos double, it was because Harper blew through Wathan’s stop sign and beat the throw to the plate. (As a matter of general practice, Harper treats stop signs the way Texas drivers treat speed limits.)
“He’s just so aggressive, and he wants to win,” Thomson said. “He wants to score. It’s not like I tell him, ‘Hey, if somebody tells you not to run, go ahead and run if you want to.’”
It’s a microcosm. Harper and his confreres couldn’t quite put the Marlins away, letting them hang around until things got legitimately nervy. But when the time came, they just would not be stopped. Now this team, which entered the series as a 3-to-2 favorite, has an 81% chance of advancing. Wheeler was the story in Game 1; the next chapter, in all likelihood, will take place in Georgia.
