Phillies’ Kyle Schwarber Gets Honest After Wild Astros Comeback

Philadelphia Phillies star slugger Kyle Schwarber did not have a tidy explanation for the swing that flipped Wednesday night.

Facing a 3-2 sweeper from Houston reliever A.J. Blubaugh with the bases loaded in the sixth, the Phillies slugger finished the cut with one hand. The ball still carried 408 feet into the right-field seats for a grand slam.

“That’s a good question; I don’t know. It just happened to go out,” Schwarber said after the game.

The blast was Schwarber’s major league-leading 44th home run and the 10th grand slam of his career. It capped a six-run inning and sent Philadelphia to an 11-7 win over the Astros at Citizens Bank Park.

The Phillies (82-64) had already climbed out of a 4-0 hole in the third and a 6-4 deficit later. Trea Turner’s opposite-field homer in the fifth made it a one-run game before the sixth-inning outburst.

Cristopher Sanchez was not sharp. The left-hander allowed six runs on 10 hits over six innings, yet still earned his National League-leading 17th win because the lineup refused to stay down.

Houston jumped ahead in the third. Yordan Alvarez doubled home a run, Isaac Paredes hit a two-run homer and Jose Altuve doubled for his 2,500th career hit. Philadelphia answered immediately with four runs, all on singles.

“That’s a really quality pitcher out there they have as their starter. To go out there and we get four scored against us, and we respond right away and put four back, I think it was all singles? To have that in the bag, we’re not always going to rely on slug, we’re not going to rely on putting the ball in the seats,” Schwarber said.

Cam Smith’s two-run homer in the fourth put Houston back in front, 6-4. Turner’s solo shot cut the lead to one. Then Philadelphia loaded the bases in the sixth.

Edmundo Sosa singled in a run. Bryan De La Cruz walked in another. Schwarber finished the job.

“I get up there, bases loaded. There’s a lot of really good things that happened before that, to come up in that situation. Have guys on base for that,” he said.

Schwarber framed the night as more than one swing.

“I feel like there was a lot of good things to look at the game today. Got punched right away, we respond right back, punch right back. Kept finding ways to keep responding, keep trying to find ways to put guys on base, scoring position, execute.”

He came back to that idea when the talk turned to how the club wants to play.

“We want to be known for doing all the little things right as well, too. That could be singles, getting guys over, situational baseball as well.”

Bryce Harper drove in two runs. Luis Arraez, Sosa and De La Cruz also delivered RBIs. Both teams finished with 12 hits.

Sanchez has carried the rotation for much of the year. Schwarber made a point of saying the lineup owed him one.

“For us, those are big wins because we keep responding. They had a really good pitcher out there; we had our guy out there. For how many times he’s picked us up throughout the year. For us to go out there and pick him up, those are things we’re always going to have to rely on.”

Help arrived from elsewhere in the standings. The Tampa Bay Rays beat the Atlanta Braves 7-2, so Philadelphia moved within three games of first place in the NL East with 16 games remaining. The Chicago Cubs lost 8-6 to Milwaukee, leaving the Phillies two games ahead of Chicago in the loss column in the race for the National League’s No. 4 seed.

FanGraphs listed Philadelphia’s postseason probability at 98.7 percent after the win.Schwarber did not treat the math as a finished product.

“We’re going to need to find ways to win games. We just can’t always be a pretty standard, straightforward game sometimes. There’s going to be times, like we’ve seen it throughout the rest of this year, where we’ve come back, battled through different things. That’s what it’s going to take to get through this stretch and hopefully find our way into October.”

Bryan King took the loss for Houston after failing to record an out. Paredes added an RBI single in the seventh. Jhoan Duran closed it out in front of 38,642 at Citizens Bank Park.

The series finale is Thursday afternoon.