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Feeling Good After Four Schwarbombs and a Mets Loss (Alternate Headline: Nothing Better Illustrates the Fleeting Baseball News Cycle)
Published:
The Phillies won 19-4 over the Braves. Kyle Schwarber hit four Schwarbombs:
Schwarber is the 21st player in MLB history to hit four home runs in a game. Michael Jack Schmidt is another. He joined NBC Sports Philadelphia on Thursday night while saying “shit” on live television, so that was funny.
The Phillies’ single-season dinger record belongs to Ryan Howard, who hit 58 back in 2006. Schwarber is on pace for about 58-60 homers with 28 games left to play. It would be sick if he gets there. He’s on 49 right now. It’ll be a fun way to count down the end of the regular season, a “Schwarber-watch” of sorts to run concurrent with the Phils wrapping up the division.
Speaking of which, and most important, the Phillies won and the Mets lost to the Marlins, pushing the NL East lead back to five. We all knew this was going to happen, right? The Mets look like the greatest team of all time while the Phils stink in a Citi Field sweep, then 24 hours later the Phillies drop 19 on the Braves and the Mets lose at home to the Fish. It’s like death, taxes, and sports complex traffic. Combined, those are four of life’s certainties. We know that the Mets are going to Met, in this case five unearned runs due to three errors, you’d just wish at some point they put their folly on display against the Phillies.
What’s particularly goofy is the fleeting nature of the baseball news cycle. We wake up on Thursday morning feeling bummed about a team that looked totally lifeless in New York. The division lead was trimmed by three games in three days. They couldn’t hit the baseball if it was five times larger and thrown at half-speed. They kill all of the post-All-Star Break vibes that had us going Posidelphia on this team. Then, by the time we’ve digested all of it, they’re putting a 19-spot on the Braves and making home run history.
It just shows how much of a rollercoaster baseball typically is. It’s a tough sport to write about because you rip the team one day and then they look amazing the next day. You feel stupid, but you also know that more than one thing can be true. You are feeling good about four Schwarbombs and a New York loss while the Mets series still sticks in your craw, just a little bit. Perhaps there is no better snapshot of the whiplash that all baseball fans experience.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com