Series Preview: Seattle Mariners at Philadelphia Phillies

You wake up with the blanket tucked beneath your chin and your right leg stretched out on top of the covers. Your mouth and the soft skin beneath your eyes feels lightly dried out by the air conditioning as you dress for the day. When you open your apartment door, a stagnant warmth greets you. Rent is a steal for this place, but every so often it feels more commensurate than you’d like.

Down the stairs you traipse, 163-year-old stairs yowling with each step. The small atrium door sticks initially and you bodily shove it open, throw open the front door and emerge onto the stoop.

Immediately, you are transported into a dog’s panting mouth. Forget white whales, Philadelphia in August is the true belly of the beast. A wet heat envelops you, moisture clinging to each bit of exposed skin and weighing down the cotton of your shirt. Without thinking, you take a deep breath and are immediately overwhelmed with regret. The air sticks in your lungs and with it, because it is Monday, is the scent of garbage in heaving piles on the street. You see the takeout boxes with a variation of your name scribbled on the sides, anchoring Thursday night’s bag of Doritos, all of it commingling with the array of diapers and baby wipes and Yuengling cans and old Celsius packaging of your various neighbors.

Gingerly, you nudge a pile of used paper towels out of the small portion of the sidewalk available for pedestrians, and carry on your way.

The Mariners travel south to play three against the Phillies.

Though it certainly hasn’t seemed like it the last three days, the Phillies have not had much serious competition for the top of their division since the All Star Break. They’re currently tied with the Dodgers for second-best division in the NL and while the season has had its highs and lows (especially if you ask their fans) they are all but locked in for yet another consecutive postseason run.

You need to be a little bit dumb to succeed as a professional baseball player, in a sport where failure isn’t just an option, it is perhaps the most guaranteed thing in the game. They are all a little insane if we use the traditional definition of doing the exact same thing again and again and hoping for a different result. And for the last few years, Phillies brass has cornered the market on this archetype, and it’s worked. This is a division-leading lineup and the lines look like it. Bryson Stott is struggling, JT Realmuto is having a down(er) year, Nick Castellanos is streaky as ever, but Alec Bohm hasn’t fully been embarrassing himself. But then you’ve got Kyle Schwarber playing in a way that’s inspiring threats of hunger strikes and Phanatic sacrifices if they don’t re-sign or extend him, and Trea Turner merging defensive wizardry with competent hitting (again), and Bryce Harper being exactly who he’s been since he was a 19-year-old rookie.

Ranger Suárez is a lot like a modern day crafty lefty. His fastball averages just 90 mph, he has pinpoint command of a deep, six-pitch repertoire, and generates plenty of weak contact with a nasty sinker/cutter combo. It doesn’t seem like it should work, but Suárez is now 45 starts into a two-year stretch where his ERA and FIP are among the best in baseball and his 6.2 fWAR ranks 14th. He’s overshadowed by some of the bigger names in the Phillies rotation, but he’s been a key cog for them for a while now.

Another overshadowed starter in Philadelphia, Cristopher Sánchez has been arguably the best pitcher for the Phillies this year. He’s improved his underlying peripherals and top line results for the third season in a row to the point where he’s fourth in the majors in fWAR with 4.3 and fifth in both ERA and FIP. He didn’t exactly come out of nowhere, but he was never a highly regarded prospect. Instead, he parlayed impeccable command and an outlier repertoire — very few pitchers rely solely on a sinker/changeup combo these days — into a profile very reminiscent of Logan Webb. This year, he’s added a bunch of strikeouts by increasing the velocity of his pitches by more than a tick over last year while still maintaining his elite groundball rate.

Jesús Luzardo has shown flashes of brilliance in the past but a string of injuries last year caused the Marlins to sell low on the left-handed starter. They traded him to the Phillies during the offseason and have watched him flourish in Philadelphia. Beyond just getting healthy, the biggest change to Luzardo’s pitch mix is the addition of a sweeper. He already had a devastating slider and this horizontally breaking sweeper is just an evolution of his existing breaking ball. Because his fastball is fairly mediocre, splitting his slider into two separate options, to go along with a solid changeup, gives him three excellent secondary pitches to attack batters with.

Out: Restful, mellow, chill Septembers

In: Losing your ever-loving mind on a daily basis while the leaves start to change.