Since they last saw each other, the Phillies and Mets made some decisions. The Mets chose to dedicate a purple seat in their stadium to Grimace, whose corporate-sponsored first pitch famously set them off on a win streak earlier this season. The Phillies, facing an empty spot in their starting rotation as late as September, re-decided that Taijuan Walker is a starting pitcher. 

One of these things is something a serious, playoff-bound team does. The other involves Taijuan Walker.

It was a beautiful thing, watching Walker pitch three scoreless against the Mets in Philadelphia. After Kolby Allard’s start last Saturday went predictably sideways, Walker was called upon to fulfill his new duty as a long reliever, which he did. In what wound up being rightfully known as “The Cal Stevenson Game,” Walker performed his own heroics, kept the dazzling Mets from scoring any more runs, and bought the Phillies a few innings to figure out how their bats worked. 

Perhaps that put it in people’s heads that he’d be capable of making a full start again. But the Phillies haven’t really had “good news” about their fifth starter spot all year long. If you truly, deeply want to win a ball game, and your options are to hand the ball to Walker, Allard or any of the arms the Phillies have turned to this season, then you better hope your lineup is feeling spry.

It’s easy to go negative after two gut-punching losses in a row, but the Phillies are still tied for the top seed in the National League. 

I was sitting in Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City a few weeks ago after Walker had been yanked from another game in which he had watched a lot of his best sinkers sail over the fence. A stadium employee came by to empty a trash can and after I told him he could take our pitcher with him, too, he accused me of being a “typical negative northeastern fan,” as though a five-run third for the Royals should’ve had me in a good mood. 

And while he had a point – the Phillies would recover and go on to a two-day, 22-run explosion to win the series in Kansas City – these Phillies have a way of losing in a way that makes you feel like they’re going to lose forever; that they’ve somehow reached into tomorrow and ruined that, too. They’ve won 91 games already, and they’ve done it as a streaky team, the strengths of which can blip away at any given moment. 

A lot of that feeling has to do with this fifth starter role. When a struggling pitcher’s best stuff isn’t working and the opposing lineup is just doing whatever it wants, there’s a feeling of helplessness – not only about when the other team will finally run out of home runs, but also about what’s to be done about this spot in the rotation in which the Phillies can’t find a win. Are we really going to have to sit through another one of these in four days?

Perspective is important here. There have been plenty of years when you didn’t have to wait that long between Phillies starts to see a bad one. Some years you only had to wait until a reliever finished warming up to see the next disaster. But expectations are higher for these Phillies for whom the rotation has been a huge reason they’ve won 91 games – and now, to make the playoffs, all they’ve got to do is win one more.

That’s been true since the last game of the Brewers series, when the Phillies turned to Aaron Nola to make their postseason official. Nola has brought frustrations of his own, as it turns out he’s actually two pitchers. One of them gets blown up by the sixth. The other throws seven solid frames and only gives up one home run to his friend. Out of the two of them, who’s it going to be with the ball when the game starts? This time of year, historically, it’s been harder and harder to tell. But Nola’s performance against the Brewers was an ice-cold dispatching that should have resulted in the win the Phillies needed to lock in their playoff berth. Instead, it was a 2-1 walkoff win for Milwaukee because the offense couldn’t get out of bed. 

So the Phillies brought that need for one more win to Flushing on Thursday night and shoved Taijuan Walker out there to get it. What followed was predictably loud, flashy, and unpleasant as the Mets started homering in the first inning and never looked back. 

“Walker is 3-7 with a 6.91 ERA this season,” Todd Zolecki informed us. “It is the sixth-highest ERA in Phillies history (minimum 80 innings pitched) and is also the highest for a Philly pitcher since 1930.”

Memories of those three shutout innings from a week ago have faded into the void now. You might see a few headlines about how the Phillies are “still trying to figure out” their fifth starter situation. They are not. At this point, they are simply trying to survive it. It’s not often you get a simple “Yeah, my bad,” from the manager, but that’s what Rob Thomson had for Phillies fans after the length of Walker’s start in Thursday’s easy 10-6 defeat.

In the end, it’ll all be forgivable. Walker squeezed out whatever he had left weeks ago. Thomson will keep managing the same way that got the Phillies to the top of baseball. And the Phillies will once again work out that complex formula to align a solid start from their pitching with a productive night from their offense. They will remind the people watching that they are a good team that can win in the playoffs (once, you know, they reach them).

But for now, the Phillies, truthfully, just need to win one more game. Anyone can win one game–hell, even the 2024 White Sox have won 36 of them. As frustrating as it is to blow a great Aaron Nola start, as annoying as it is to hear Mets fans express joy, the Phillies are fully capable of winning one more game. 

And then after that, you know. Just eleven more.

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