The Phillies accomplished on Tuesday night an important objective behind yet another brilliant start from Aaron Nola and another powerful performance from a relentless lineup. With the Phils’ 6-0 win over the Nationals, their seventh in eight games, they climbed over the .500-mark for the first time this season.

Entering tonight, they had been 0-5 in their previous five attempts to get over the hump this season. Afterward, the significance of finally doing it wasn’t lost upon Phillies manager Joe Girardi.

“It was the first thing I said when we won the game, the first time we’re over .500,” he said. “And these guys have had to work really hard to get there because we kind of dug ourselves a couple holes where we lost some games in a row a couple different times.”

Nola was again spectacular, outdueling Nationals starting pitcher Patrick Corbin for the second time in less than a week. Corbin limited the Phillies to just two runs, but his night was over in just five innings after throwing 92 pitches.

As for Nola, he dealt eight innings of shutout baseball, allowing only two hits while striking out nine and walking three. He now sports a 2.45 ERA and a pristine 4.75/1 K/BB ratio.

If you remove Nola’s outlier blowup start in Atlanta back on Aug. 21, he has allowed just eight runs over 41.1 IP, good for a 1.74 ERA with a 6/1 K/BB ratio.

It was the fourth time in seven starts that Nola pitched at least seven innings and surrendered two earned runs or less.

He got it done this time around on the strength of a curveball that was simply unhittable from the start. Here he is in the first breaking off a pair of his best hooks to finish off Nationals leadoff hitter Trea Turner.

Nola could feel it from the start.

“I feel like my pitches were working for the most part,” he said. “My changeup was a lot better than it has been the last couple outings.”

“You could see that his stuff was really good right from the beginning,” Girardi said. “Even the first fastball he threw, it started off the plate and came back. I had a good feeling about watching the breaking balls to Trea. He was great tonight.”

Nationals hitters whiffed on 12 of their 19 swings against Nola curveballs on Tuesday night. Just filthy.

You know, what the hell? Enjoy all 12 swings and misses.

After a shaky finish to an underwhelming season a year ago, Nola looks every bit the ace the Phillies envisioned when they handed him a long-term extension prior to the 2019 season.

 

Alec Bohm Is Way Ahead of Schedule

It was a big night for Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm, who picked up his fifth career multi-hit game in just 16 career starts.

The Phillies expected their best position prospect to hit following his call up on Aug. 13, but they couldn’t have possibly expected his current level of production.

Tonight, he broke a scoreless tie with this towering shot:

That’s great and all, no doubt. But his sixth-inning RBI double that split the right-center gap was equally impressive.

Let’s go to the tape.

With two strikes, Bohm gets an elevated pitch on the outer-half of the plate. A young guy who just banged one out to left in his previous at-bat might be overanxious and try to do too much with this pitch. Instead, Bohm sits back, goes with it, and has opposite field carry to beat a pair of outfielders. If you’re a Phillies fan, this swing should have you drooling:

After the game, his manager was impressed:

Hoskins’ Hot Start Came At The Right Time

There’s hot. There’s red-hot. And then there’s Rhys Hoskins-hot. The guy is simply out of his mind right now. He picked up a fourth straight multi-hit game tonight to raise his average all the way too .269. It wasn’t so long ago (19 days, actually) when Hoskins was hitting just .190 with a woeful .642 OPS.

Fast-forward less than three weeks and he has a robust .962 OPS. For some perspective, that’s better than the current .960 OPS of one Mike Trout.

It has been a rapid and meteoric rise for the Phillies first baseman who just weeks ago looked like he could be on the brink of yielding some starts to Alec Bohm.

That ain’t happening.

The rookie third baseman, by the way, made his major league debut on Aug. 13 – the day after Hoskins’ season plummeted to rock bottom. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, in fact, it probably is, but Hoskins has raised his OPS by 324 points since the day Bohm arrived in Philadelphia. Crazy.

 

McCutchen Keeps Rolling

Andrew McCutchen had only one hit on Tuesday night, but he made it count. With the Phillies holding a 3-0 lead in the sixth, he launched one 410 ft. out to left that gave the Phillies a 6-0 lead. That swing provided Nola and a still struggling bullpen with enough breathing room to remove all doubt.

Over his first 13 games, McCutchen was hitting just .191 and had a 32.5% hard hit rate, per FanGraphs. In his last 15 games entering tonight, McCutchen was hitting .328 with a 50% hard hit rate.

The contributions the Phillies are getting while Harper and Realmuto aren’t totally dialed in can make you really dream on this lineup a little bit. Both players are in the midst of what some would call “cold spells.”

Harper is just 4-for-27 (.148) with one extra-base hit over his last eight games. Meanwhile, Realmuto is 6-for-32 (.188) in the same stretch, but they combined to reach base a combined seven times on Tuesday night.

Despite the lack of batted ball production from the pair, the Phillies have averaged 6.4 runs per game on their way to winning seven of eight. Here’s a scary proposition for the rest of the National League – if the Phils’ lineup is this potent right now, what happens if and when it begins to fire on all cylinders?