NEW YORK — Don’t tell Bryce Harper it’s still early.
Not after a stretch or series like this.
The Phillies were swept out of Queens on Wednesday afternoon, losing 4-3 in extra innings to end a brutal three-game set. They did nothing offensively until the ninth inning Monday, couldn’t buy a big knock Tuesday and didn’t produce an extra-base hit Sunday, leaving 12 more on base.
They’ve lost four in a row, nine of 14 and already trail the Mets by five games in the NL East.
They’ve been held scoreless in 26 of the last 30 innings and only one of their last 20 hits has gone for extra bases.
“I’d rather you guys say it’s a little early,” Harper said at his locker, frustrated by the events of the last few days. “I don’t like that just because you should be wanting to play good baseball all year long, from April to November. Obviously, that’s not gonna happen, you’re gonna go through ups and downs and try to stay as even-keeled as you can. But we’re a good team in here and we expect to win. Winning takes care of it all.”
It does. It overshadows individual slumps, narratives and storylines like The 2025 Phillies aren’t having enough fun and need to bring back water celebrations and Dancing On My Own.
“We’ve just got to win,” Harper said. “It takes care of everything, it takes care of mindset, it takes care of what you’re feeling. It doesn’t matter if one guy’s struggling or not, you come to win and winning takes care of it all. As a team, we just have to be better. It’s a really good Mets team over there, they played really good baseball this series, obviously. But it doesn’t matter. We’ve gotta really understand what we want to do and how we want to do it, where we want to go.”
The Phillies are 2-9 against the Mets their last three series. They’ve lost close games and lopsided ones. The most consistent theme of those 11 games has been the Phillies putting men on base, not capitalizing and the Mets breaking things open late.
“You can see that right now,” Harper said. “They’ve played us really well and they’ve beaten us. As a team we’ve got to try to flip that, do what it takes to win games, no matter if it’s the Mets or anybody else. We’ve got to understand that we’re a really good team too and you’re gonna go through ups and downs in a season, but we’ve got to figure it out now.”
Some of it has been poor at-bats. Some of it has been bad luck. Alec Bohm was snakebit for a few weeks, at one point making an out in nine of 10 line drives, and lately it’s been J.T. Realmuto and Trea Turner with tough-luck outs.
It’s exacerbated by a lack of power. Mixing in a two-run homer here or there can make up for situational failures. But the Phillies have one longball in their last five games, Bryson Stott’s off Edwin Diaz in the ninth inning Monday. Two weekends ago in St. Louis, they had a homerless series.
“It’s the randomness of the game,” manager Rob Thomson said. “We’re not gonna start telling guys to swing uphill. If you hit a ball hard, you hit a ball hard. The runners in scoring position number, it’s skewed at some point because you take the (second) inning where we had a runner at second base and (Weston) Wilson hits a bullet to the third baseman. That’s all he can do. Trea comes up later and hits a bullet to the shortstop. That’s all he can do. And so you’re 0-for-2 in that situation. But they hit the ball hard, that’s what I’m looking for.”
Hitters tend to try to do too much when they’re going through a down period. It’s happened to basically the entire Phillies lineup two Octobers in a row after the Diamondbacks seized momentum in the 2023 NLCS and the Mets outplayed them last fall.
With all the noise, all the outside panic, how do guys still let the game come to them?
“Trying to keep it as light as possible so they don’t get too frustrated and get in their own head,” Thomson said. “But I think we’re in a pretty good spot with that.”
On to Wrigley Field to take on the first-place Cubs, who at 6.24 runs per game are the only team in MLB above 5.50.
