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Outside of that, he hit eight homers in September and didn’t hit more than six in the three other months of the season. The 10 most underrated moments of the Phillies’ playoff run We all remember Bryce Harper’s home run, but here are 10 high impact moments you may have forgotten. But in today’s baseball, managers understand that the true “save” situation sometimes doesn’t happen in the 9th. That was the case here, and as Hader threw warmup pitches in the ‘pen he would never use, Harper circled the bases, three outs away from his first World Series.
Of Greg Vaughn‘s 355 career home runs, 136 came in three seasons. He enjoyed 40-homer efforts on each occasion, but his 1998 campaign for the NL champion Padres was easily the apex. Alvarado started the 9th inning with an Austin Nola groundout, but a walk to Jurickson Profar put a runner on 1st with one out. Juan Soto then hit what appeared to be a game-ending double play ball to short, but a Bohm error on the throw to second put runners on 1st and 2nd with one out.
Bryce Harper’s 9th Inning Wild Card Game 1 Walk
González took advantage of certain opportunities to reach that magical number of 40. He slugged 28 of his dingers away from Petco Park, and 24 of them came prior to the All-Star break. But if we drill down a little more, April and May are what really set him off on this path of achievement, as he collected 20 homers and 40 RBI in that time. But after that point, which was Nevin’s age-30 campaign, he’d rack up just two 20-homer performances over his final five seasons.
Staked to a 2-0 lead thanks to four straight two-out hits in the 1st off Max Fried, Suarez ran into trouble right away in the bottom of the inning. With the bases loaded and one out, William Contreras had a chance to answer right back, but instead bounced a ball to short that the Phillies turned into a key double play, setting the tone for the entire series. The Phils would build a 7-3 lead before holding on for a 7-6, series-opening victory. Phil Nevin‘s power progression to this 41-homer barrage in 2001 was interesting to look at. His first full season’s worth of plate appearances came in 1999 when he stepped up to the plate 441 times.
SS Bogaerts joining Padres on 11-year contract
But we forget that it’s ludicrous Harper was allowed to face Robert Suarez to begin with. The whole reason the Padres traded for Josh Hader, perhaps the most dominant left-handed closer in baseball, was for situations just like this. Up 3-2, bottom of the 8th, Bryce Harper at the plate as the winning run. Alvarado then got the dangerous Manny Machado to fly out to right field for the second out before the switch-hitting Josh Bell came to the plate. With the tying runs on base, Alvarado threw a nasty cutter to Bell that he swung through, saving the Game 1 win against a plucky Padres team. What followed was the greatest playoff run by a Phillies hitter in franchise history, and it was all born from that walk in the 9th inning of Game 1.
As of October 2022, Nate Colbert tops the ranking of the San Diego Padres all-time home run leaders with 163 home runs throughout his career. Colbert is followed within this ranking by Adrian Gonzalez with a total of 161 home runs recorded throughout his career. The home run off a 2-2 sinker from lockdown reliever Robert Suarez turned a 3-2 Philadelphia Phillies deficit into a 4-3 lead over the San Diego Padres in the eighth inning of NLCS Game 5. It also put the Phillies, up 3-1 in the best-of-seven series, three outs from advancing to the World Series for the first time since 2009 and for just the eighth time in franchise history. They closed things out in the ninth and are headed to the World Series for the first time since 2009. Framed another way, Harper's homer advanced the Phils' chances of winning Game 5 from 40.1 percent to 86.9 percent.
Zach Eflin Double Play In Game 3 of the NLCS
We, of course, remember the six-run 9th inning that kick-started the festivities in Game 1 of the wild card round, and we remember Bryce Harper’s incredible solo homer in Game 2. As the weeks have passed since the Phillies fell in six games to the Houston Astros in the World Series, I’ve found it’s gotten easier to look back on their 2022 postseason run. At first, the memories were bittersweet, knowing they came up just short of their ultimate goal in the Fall Classic, however, the passage of time, as it frequently does, has healed many of those wounds. Coincidentally enough, that non-100-RBI performance came when he hit a career-high number of homers, as he collected 99 RBI in 2009. After having a couple of cups of coffee with the Texas Rangers to begin his big-league career, Adrián González immediately became a power source for the Padres.
In Game 2, Nola was just a bit better, going 6.2 innings and allowing just four hits with six strikeouts and one walk. Wheeler went 6.1 innings in Game 1 and gave up just two hits with four strikeouts and one walk. It was Jose Alvarado who gave up St. Louis’ two runs on that mammoth dinger to Juan Yepez, of all people. Just after their loss to the Astros, I ranked the 10 best moments of the Phils’ postseason in an effort to feel better, and they are generally the ones you play on a loop in your head when you’re feeling down.
With runners on 1st and 2nd and one out, Trent Grisham, for reasons passing understanding, decided to bunt. Suarez, one of the best fielding pitchers in baseball, accepted the free out with glee. Zack Wheeler outdueled San Diego’s Yu Darvish in an outstanding first game of the Championship Series, but the Phils’ 2-0 lead was in danger of evaporating in the 9th. "San Diego Padres All-time Home Run Leaders as of October 2022." The 2021 campaign was Tatís’ second straight year finishing in the top-five of NL MVP voting, and he also brought home his second straight Silver Slugger. San Diego started out strong as a squad, but its playoff chances faded with a tough second half, which was sort of how the young shortstop’s performance went, as well.
When it comes to Padres home run leaders for a single season, there have been just a handful of 40-homer seasons since 1969. For the moment, they all fit neatly into the top-five of the franchise’s single-season leaderboard, and it had been a while since the last time it occurred…until it was done last year. During the regular season, Strider had pitched in four games against the Phils, three of them starts, and had gone 4-0 with a 1.27 ERA, allowing an opponents’ batting average of .097.
As we’ll see below, Fernando Tatís Jr.‘s 42 home runs from 2021 marked the first time a Padres player surpassed 40 since 2009. While it didn’t happen in 2022 , it’s not outrageous to think he’ll be all over this leaderboard within the next few years. Be sure to also see where these sluggers land on the Padres’ all-time home run leaderboard, as well. It was a legendary performance, and it took all of about 2 minutes in real time.
He owned a 1.020 OPS with 28 home runs and 60 RBI prior to the All-Star break but saw his OPS drop just over 100 points to .916 during the final stretch. While his 2022 season will be delayed because of a wrist injury, you just have to think Fernando Tatís Jr. is going to at least continue challenging Vaughn’s record in the near future.
So here was Strider, in the 3rd inning, after shutting the Phils down in the first two frames with a blazing 98 mph fastball, seemingly invincible. However, a one-out Brandon Marsh walk and two-base throwing error on an errant pickoff by Strider brought Stott to the plate with a chance to get the Phils on the board. The lefty worked a 9-pitch at-bat before finally lining a ball down the right-field line to break through against Strider. They were pitching clinics against one of the best lineups in baseball during the regular season, and the Phils needed every one of those goose eggs.
