Phillies both lucky and good to beat Mariners

SEATTLE – Before the question could be asked Sunday afternoon at T-Mobile Park, Brandon Marsh answered it.

“No idea,” he said.

He had no clue how he caught a fly ball on the warning track in right-center field in the seventh inning in a 6-0 victory over the Mariners. Seattle second baseman Jorge Polanco had launched a ball high into the sky. Marsh tracked the ball, which crossed the center of the sun. It blinded him, giving him two options at the last moment: protect himself from a broken nose by covering his face, which would have been a natural human reaction, or stick out his glove and hope the baseball gods help him, even though those gods had abandoned the Phillies weeks ago.

“I was going to let it hit my face,” Marsh said. “The only chance I had to catch it was to palms-up it. Yeah, man. Better lucky than good sometimes.”

“Lucky” is not a word that would describe the Phillies the past few weeks, but Marsh’s miraculous catch had people buzzing and wondering if it might signal something. After all, it protected the Phillies’ 1-0 lead in a game they desperately needed to win. The Phils had lost 13 of their last 17 games before Sunday’s win. They had lost six in a row.

“If I don’t catch that ball, that’s a double, triple, depending on how it kicks,” Marsh said. “It’s a completely different game.”

Minutes later, Bryson Stott, Bryce Harper and Alec Bohm each hit home runs in the eighth inning to turn a tight game into a comfortable victory.

“Hopefully that’s the turning point,” Marsh said.

“Just watching from the dugout, we just haven’t had that many breaks,” Zack Wheeler added. “Bloop hits at the right time, that type of stuff. It’s baseball. It’s going to happen. You’re going to have your down moments where we feel like a crappy team, but we really aren’t. We’ve got to keep that mindset.”

Harper showed up Sunday in a career-worst 2-for-38 slump, although a double on Saturday offered signs of a turnaround.

Perhaps trying to press his luck, he wore high socks on Sunday, which he never does.

Harper can be superstitious at times. He might use a teammate’s bat or hit without batting gloves, if he is in a slump. Earlier this season, he wore a red gaiter on a warm evening in St. Louis because the previous week he homered three times in a game while wearing one in the cold at Citizens Bank Park.

Harper smacked hard-hit singles in the fourth and sixth innings before hitting a two-run homer in the eighth.

He wasn’t ready to say he saw any otherworldly signs on the baseball field, though.

“I don’t know,” he said, laughing. “I’m not going to say that.”

Harper mostly saw Wheeler throwing like one of the best pitchers in baseball. He allowed two hits and one walk and struck out nine in eight scoreless innings.

“Wheels going out there and being the ace that he is,” Harper said.

Wheeler was happy to see Marsh make the catch and his teammate provide insurance runs in the eighth.

“It felt normal,” he said.

Normal is good, right?

“You want to feel like a good team,” Wheeler said. “We’re a good team. We’ve been losing a lot. Things haven’t been going our way. But when they do, we’re kind of like, ‘All right, here we go again. We’re back to normal.’ Hopefully we just start going back up.”

It starts with the starting pitching. It starts with the stars in the lineup.

“You guys know how I am, man” Harper said. “I just want to be the best I can for this team, this organization as well. Day in and day out. I know when I play better, our team is better. Obviously, it’s not going well for a lot of us right now, but the quicker we can turn that page, the quicker we can keep going knowing we’re still the best team in baseball, knowing we’ve got a great record, knowing that we’ve got all the guys in here that we need, just everything. Right? We’ve just got to keep going.”