WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Home or road, the first-place Phillies keep chugging along, riding their first leadoff home run of the season, a game-saving catch by Johan Rojas and just enough from the bullpen to an eighth straight win, 4-3 over the Athletics on Friday night.
Trea Turner hit the fourth pitch of the game 426 feet over the wall in center field at Sutter Health Park to give ace Zack Wheeler a quick lead and Wheeler, Orion Kerkering and Matt Strahm held the A’s scoreless through eight innings. Jordan Romano entered in the ninth with his team up four and gave three of them back on a Nick Kurtz home run but Tanner Banks recorded the 27th out for his first save as a Phillie.
Rojas’ catch was the play of the game. He got turned around on a deep line drive hit over his head by Tyler Soderstrom but recovered to corral it with the tying run on third base. The ball had a catch probability of just 11%, according to Statcast. Matt Strahm tipped his cap to the center fielder as he walked off the mound.
The Phillies are on fire in all phases — up and down the lineup, in the rotation and with solid defense and baserunning. They’re 33-18, the best record in the National League and a half-game behind the Tigers for the best mark in the majors. They’ve also won 12 of their last 13 road games and are tied with the Cubs for the best road record in the majors at 16-10.
Wheeler began his night with two backward K’s in a 1-2-3 bottom of the first and encountered little resistance until the bottom of the seventh. He went 6⅔ innings, didn’t allow a hit to the seven batters he faced with a man on base and was pulled after back-to-back walks in the seventh for Kerkering, who struck out Luis Urias to put a two-on, two-out threat to bed for the second straight outing.
Wheeler is up to 22⅔ straight scoreless innings and is 6-1 with a 2.42 ERA. He was the National League Cy Young runner-up in 2021 and 2024 and is certainly the favorite through 11 starts this season. He’s been even better than he was both those years and has the lowest WHIP in the NL at 0.88. Wheeler has allowed two runs or fewer in seven consecutive starts and the Phillies have won six.
He didn’t even have his sharpest fastball command, either, but still overpowered a young A’s lineup early with some of his best velocity of the year. Wheeler maxed out above 98 with his fastball, above 97 with his sinker and averaged more than 1 mph over his season average. Armed with six pitches, he kept the A’s off balance as the night progressed by mixing in more splitters, sweepers and curveballs the second and third times through.
“Sometimes they just explode out of his hand and you know he’s got his A-plus-plus stuff instead of his A-plus stuff,” Bryson Stott said last weekend after Wheeler beat the Pirates.
“A guy with that many pitches, that many strike pitches, he may save one or two the first time through the order and you think you’ve got him, and then he busts out the splitter, cutter or slider. That’s what the great ones do, they keep a pitch in their arsenal and start using it the second or third time through.”
Athletics left-hander Jacob Lopez retired 17 of 18 Phillies from the second through seventh innings but Turner’s longball was enough to keep them ahead until Alec Bohm, Rojas and Turner added insurance with RBI knocks in the top of the ninth off closer Mason Miller.
Turner’s homer was his fourth of the season, first leadoff homer as a Phillie and would have been out in all 30 stadiums. He has been hitting for six weeks but the power is now accompanying all the table-setting. Turner has two doubles, two triples and two home runs in his last eight games. He said Wednesday night in Colorado that being hit in the elbow by two pitches in the span of four days in late April affected his mechanics of driving the ball but that he figured out a small tweak in the batting cage at Coors Field.
The Phillies are 20-5 since being swept by the Mets at Citi Field the third week of April and have won in all different ways these last three series. The last two victories have involved little offense but terrific pitching, minus Romano’s ninth inning Friday. The Phillies’ rotation has a 1.28 ERA during the eight-game winning streak, the equivalent of allowing one run every seven innings.
The eight straight wins are the Phillies’ most since Rob Thomson’s first eight games as manager in June 2022. They’ll look to make it nine — and eight series wins in the last nine — behind Cristopher Sanchez on Saturday night.
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