The Philadelphia Phillies are in the midst of a disastrous stretch, having gone 3-11 since the All-Star Game. Bryce Harper and Trea Turner are ice cold at the plate. Jeff Hoffman had his worst outing as a Phillie Saturday night against the Seattle Mariners. All-Stars Zack Wheeler and Cristopher Sánchez each had clunkers in their most recent starts.
No one is excusing how the Phillies have played recently. Luckily for them, they played so well early in the season that they are still 20 games above .500, and are holding onto a five-game lead in the National League East. But if they don’t straighten things out in the next 10 days, their lead in the division is going to evaporate, leaving the Phillies to fight just to make the playoffs over the final month-and-a-half of the season. It’s been a disaster of late, full stop.
But what the Phillies absolutely didn’t need during their worst stretch of the season was the performance that home-plate umpire Ryan Wills turned in Saturday. According to Umpire Scorecards, Willis struggled so much that his calls gave a +1.31 favor to the Mariners.
While Harper was extremely frustrated with Wills’ zone when he was struck out looking in the top of the ninth inning, the biggest missed call clearly came in the bottom of the 10th inning.
In his second inning of work, Phillies reliever Carlos Estévez missed the target J.T. Realmuto set up by quite a bit with two outs and two strikes on Mitch Haniger. What he didn’t miss was the strike zone. Not even close. Umpires are supposed to stick with pitches and call them based on whether they are in the zone, not on how perfect the frame was. Obviously, a good frame helps. But this wasn’t a pitch that was on the black, it was clearly in the zone.
Had Wills called it correctly, it would have been an inning-ending strikeout, sending the game to the 11th. Instead, three pitches later Estévez, clearly out of gas, walked in the winning run.
“It’s harder to strike out someone with five strikes, instead of three,” Estévez said after the game, according to MLB.com‘s Todd Zolecki. “That’s one thing. But at the same time, I hit a guy with a slider. I got myself in that situation.”
None of this is to suggest Wills had any bias against the Phillies — he just did a really awful job Saturday. This wasn’t even really a zone you could adjust to. It wasn’t like he was consistently giving the low strike or doing something that by late in the game you could have reasonably been able to expect. It was kind of all over the place.
But that’s the danger when your pitching gives up a 5-0 lead and you fail to score the zombie runner in the top of the 10th inning. When you don’t control what you can control, you run the risk that factors out of your control will decide the game. At least in part, that’s what happened Saturday night.
