DENVER — Alec Bohm was hitting .150 when the Phillies left St. Louis in mid-April. He wasn’t producing, he wasn’t experiencing any luck when hitting the ball hard and was hearing it from all angles as scrutiny intensified.
“I know eventually everything sort of evens out and I know that I’ve hit well over .400 for an entire month in this league at times,” Bohm said that weekend. “I think the longer you play in the big leagues and the more experience you get and the more comfortable you get with who you are and that you belong here, the less anything really affects you.”
Bohm hasn’t quite hit .400 since that weekend but has been one of the Phillies’ top bats for over a month — .324 with a hit in 25 of the 30 games.
He helped turn a potential loss into a win Monday night with a 422-foot, two-run homer to dead center in the eighth inning of a 9-3 Phillies win. Eight of the Phils’ nine runs came in the final three innings.
Bohm was facing right-hander Seth Halvorsen, whose second and third pitches were 100 and 101 mph. Halvorsen then went with a slider, missed middle-in and Bohm made him pay.
The Phils have won four in a row, passed the Mets in the NL East by a half-game and will end the night with the best record in the National League unless the Dodgers come back from a huge deficit.
Trea Turner, who tripled and scored the Phillies’ first run in the fifth, added crucial insurance with a two-run double in the eighth. Those extra runs are always important but especially so a day after the Phillies lost Jose Alvarado for 80 games and the playoffs to a PED suspension. Matt Strahm had pitched in back-to-back games and Jordan Romano had appeared in three of the last five so the Phillies were likely without their top three relievers. Joe Ross, Carlos Hernandez and Tanner Banks pitched the final three innings. Hernandez went 1-2-3 in the eighth.
The Phillies are 29-18 and the Rockies are 8-39 but no game or series is a guarantee. The Rockies scored first Monday for the first time in 15 games and were up two the majority of the night.
“Anybody’s capable of beating anybody on any given day, that’s the way it is,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said pregame. “The other part of it is we historically haven’t played well here, so we need to play well.”
The Phillies had lost seven of their previous 12 games at Coors Field, scoring two runs or fewer in five of them, despite the Rockies averaging 96 losses over that span. Monday night looked like it might be another Denver dud when the Phils had runners on the corners with nobody out, down two in the seventh inning for Harper, Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos and still ended it trailing.
But then came the explosion — four runs in the eighth and three more in the ninth. Schwarber blasted a 466-foot homer in the ninth (his 300th) and Edmundo Sosa hit a two-run shot as part of a 4-for-5 night. Sosa is hitting .386 with a .945 OPS in 62 plate appearances.
The Phillies had 19 hits and seven different players had multiple knocks, a homer or both. That’s the kind of damage you’d expect from this offense at baseball’s most hitter-friendly stadium.
Jesus Luzardo is on the hill Tuesday night as the Phils look to make it five in a row.
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