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The Phillies Lost Because the Bats Once Again Were Nowhere to Be Found

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Oct 9th, 2025 · 11:32 PM EDT

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The Phillies lost 2-1 to the Dodgers in 11 innings on Thursday night, crashing out in the NLDS for the second year in a row.

How were those two runs conceded? How about a bases loaded, two-out walk, and then a bases loaded, two-out error? Two backbreakers after the pitching staff battled and battled all night long. We’ll be talking about the Orion Kerkering flub for years to come, but they lost the game and series because of the bats, which only showed up in Game 3.

Here’s the damage from Game 4 to print out and keep for posterity:

Four hits and 12 strikeouts. They made Tyler Glasnow look like the second coming of prime Randy Johnson. Couldn’t get anything off Roki Sasaki or Alex Vesia either.

Trea Turner, Bryce Harper, and Kyle Schwarber went 1 for 14 in an elimination game with four strikeouts. Brandon Marsh couldn’t hit the ball into the ocean if a tee was set up on a Sea Isle jetty and yet he kept coming to the plate in critical situations. Nick Castellanos knocked in the lone Phillies run and there wasn’t much else to write home about. They really could have used a healthy Harrison Bader considering the form he was in, pre-injury.

As it turns out, the explosion of the other night was a combination of nicking some runs off Yoshinobu Yamamoto before Dave Roberts hung Clayton Kershaw out to dry. The momentum did not continue into Game 4, as much as we hoped it would.

If you look at the the three games the Phillies lost, they scored three runs, three runs, and one run, so 2.3 runs per game, which isn’t gonna get it done. But we’ve seen this movie before, three times in three seasons actually, so nobody is truly surprised, and that’s the sad part.