PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia Phillies slugger Bryce Harper stood as still in the clubhouse as he does when he admires a home run and accepted the beer bath from bottles his teammates took delight in pouring on him.
Harper’s goggles provided no defense for the waterfall of booze streaming down his cheeks.
“It’s so cold! But it’s so good!” first baseman Rhys Hoskins barked in Harper’s face.
Then it was time for the Phillies to sing: “I’m going going, back back, to Cali Cali!” they shouted in unison to the Notorious B.I.G. classic.
That’s right, the next stop for the Fightin’ Phils is a trip west for the National League Championship Series — against either the Los Angeles Dodgers or the San Diego Padres — as a team that looked completely lost in May but suddenly looks every bit like a World Series contender in October.
Brandon Marsh hit a three-run homer and J.T. Realmuto lined an inside-the-park home run that sent Philadelphia bolting headfirst into the NLCS for the first time since 2010 with an 8-3 win over the Atlanta Braves on Saturday afternoon.
Philadelphia wrapped up the best-of-five NL Division Series in four games, dispatching the 2021 World Series champions who this season won the NL East for the fifth year in a row by outlasting the New York Mets, with the Phillies a distant third at 14 games back in the division standings.
The Mets were ousted in the wild-card round, and now the Braves are going home, too. Atlanta’s loss means Major League Baseball’s most recent repeat champions remain the New York Yankees who won three straight World Series from 1998 to 2000.
“Like I told them, the goal when we leave spring training is to win the division,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said. “Until you win the division, you don’t have a chance to do anything special because you never know what’s going to happen, you don’t know what team’s going to get hot, what things have to go right for you to go deep into the postseason.
“And we got in. It didn’t happen for us this year.”
Matt Olson and Travis d’Arnaud hit solo homers, but it was another largely quiet day for Atlanta’s bats.
Not so for the home team. Realmuto became the first catcher to hit an inside-the-park homer in postseason history, and Harper punctuated the romp with a clinching shot over the left-field wall for Philadelphia, which is taking off under manager Rob Thomson. A career coach for the Yankees and Phillies, Thomson transformed a team well out of contention at 23-29 when the franchise fired Joe Girardi on June 3.
“We just got off to a little bit of a slow start and kind of spiraled. And May was a really tough month. It was a really tough schedule,” Thomson said.
“Then once we hit June, the schedule kind of lightened up a little bit and we started winning, and guys started getting confidence and believing that they could win and believing that, ‘OK, now this is the team that we thought we were.’ And just kept going.”
After last weekend’s 2-0 sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals, the NL Central champions, in MLB’s new wild-card round, the Phillies used a dose of Marsh Madness to keep the party rolling in October.
Heck, call it Mash Madness, as the Phillies turned Citizens Bank Park into a cozy home bandbox for the second straight game — and with another fired-up, towel-waving crowd along for every longball.
“I feel like I’m with them,” Harper said of the fans. “I feel like they’re with us each day. I feel like I’m in hand in hand with them. That’s all they want to see. They just want you to play hard. That’s it. They want you to go out there and bust your ass each day. No excuses.”
After Hoskins spiked his bat on a three-run shot in Friday’s Game 3 win, it was Marsh’s turn in the second inning to hammer his own three-run homer in Game 4.
Braves starter Charlie Morton was hit on his pitching elbow by Alec Bohm’s single traveling 71.9 mph to lead off the inning. After being checked, Morton allowed a single to Jean Segura and hung a 2-2 curveball that No. 9 hitter Marsh launched deep into the right field seats for a 3-0 lead.
Morton walked out to the mound for the start of the third inning but could not get loose and was replaced by Collin McHugh. Morton entered 5-0 with a 0.73 ERA in five career elimination games, including four starts.
The 24-year-old Marsh is known as much for his stringy hair and ZZ Top-esque beard as he is for being one of the top young players on the team. Marsh, who also doubled in the fourth, was acquired from the Los Angeles Angels in August just ahead of this season’s trade deadline. Phillies team president Dave Dombrowski swung another deadline deal with the Angels that got them Game 4 starter Noah Syndergaard, also known for his long locks.
Hey, it will be easy for the Phillies to let their hair down and party.
Reliever Brad Hand was one of six Philadelphia pitchers and got the win.
Syndergaard, bumped from the rotation at the end of the season, wasn’t asked by Thomson to do much other than keep the Phillies in the game. Maybe go unscathed once around the order. Syndergaard delivered with three strikeouts in three innings in a brief throwback to his commanding “Thor” days with the Mets.
Orlando Arcia hit a solo shot off him in the third to make it 3-1, but then Realmuto hustled his way into postseason history.
He connected to lead off the bottom half against McHugh. The ball hit the angled portion of the wall beyond the reach of center fielder Michael Harris II, and the carom rolled along the warning track toward right-center. Ronald Acuña Jr. stood in right field watching the play, and he didn’t start running toward the ball until Realmuto was well past first base. Realmuto, who runs extremely well for a catcher, made a headfirst slide into the plate, well ahead of the relay.
With that, it was bedlam inside the park as a sellout crowd of 45,660 was deliriously cheering, every sense tingling that there wasn’t going to be a Game 5 in Atlanta.
Nope. Just Game 3 of the NLCS back in Philly on Friday.
Harper hit a solo homer in the eighth, the second of the series for the 2021 NL MVP.
It seemed fitting the trio of Phillies sluggers that form the heart of the franchise put the game away in the sixth. Hoskins-Realmuto-Harper all had RBI singles that made it 7-2 and a series clinch a mere formality.
“They’re hitting on all cylinders at the right time. It’s a good club,” Snitker said. “They’ve got really good players, and they’re getting it going at the right time.”
The Braves did that last fall, with Morton part of the run to the club’s first World Series championship since 1995. Now that reign is over.
“Losing stinks,” Morton said, “especially when you get a chance to finally taste the win.”