Giants 2, Phillies 0

There’s not a lot to say. The Phillies’ bats couldn’t muster up more than three hits as a great start by Vince Velasquez was wasted.

Velasquez pitched six and a third innings, and was charged with a single run on five hits and a walk, and he struck out nine. He left with only 91 pitches thrown in one of the best outings he’s had recently.

The run probably should not have scored, though. Joe Panik led off the sixth with a double that maybe should have been a single and moved to third on a groundout. Then Andrew McCutchen chopped one to Scott Kingery who fielded it cleanly, threw high to home, and Panik was able to evade Jorge Alfaro’s tag. A better throw or a better tag or both may have prevented the run, but who knows.

Velasquez was done after this play, and Luis Garcia finished the seventh. Adam Morgan allowed an insurance run in the eighth, before Edubray Ramos finished the game.

For the Phillies, lately, it seems as if the pitching is all that’s working well. The offense has gone quieter than we’ve seen in years, and the defense seems to border on Bad News Bear-levels at times. I will freely admit I saw both these categories as strengths before the season, with pitching being the weakness. Baseball is hard to predict, but I don’t think anyone could have imagined the depths of the current slump. Here’s hoping that’s all it is and that they'll pull out of it before it’s too late.

Speaking of getting stuff done before it’s too late, I missed the first half of this game watching Solo, and I heartily recommend watching it while it’s still in theatres. It’s very very good.

With the loss—yet another boring loss—the Phils drop to 31-25, and are 1.5 games out of the wild card.

The season finale against San Francisco is tomorrow afternoon, at 12:05PM, with Jake Arrieta taking the hill against the Giants’ Dereck Rodriguez, who happens to be Ivan ‘Pudge’ Rodriguez’s son. I like imagining that he’s a pitcher because his dad was a catcher and they could play catch better. It’s kind of adorable if that’s how that happened.

Good night folks.