What a difference a day makes: Mets 3, Phillies 0

It wasn’t that long ago that the sports fans of Philadelphia were feeling really good about themselves. When most of us went to bed on Thursday night, the Phillies had swept the Rockies, the Sixers closed out the Raptors, and the Eagles made some nice moves in the NFL draft.

Fast forward 24 hours and we’re feeling miserable. On Friday night, the Flyers lost their season finale (although the finale part actually qualifies as good news), the Eagles used a second-round pick on a player at a non-premium position who might not get to start for two years, Joel Embiid has a broken face, and the Phillies got no hit by the Mets.

Yes, the Phillies’ four-game winning streak came to a fantastic end as Tylor Megill and four Mets relievers combined to give up zero hits in a 3-0 win.

Let’s go over the positives:

• Aaron Nola pitched reasonably well. He traded scoreless innings with Megill for the first four innings but got dinged by a few hits in the fifth and then a solo home run by Pete Alonso in the sixth. Not a masterpiece of pitching by any means, but a decent enough showing. Unfortunately, the Phillies have apparently decided that Nola does not get any run support this season as they’ve scored a grand total of one run across his last three starts.
• The Phillies were very patient at the plate. They saw a lot of pitches, walking six times, and raising Megill’s pitch count to the point where he had to leave the game after six innings.

As for the negatives:

The whole being no-hit thing ranks pretty high on the negative scale. There were a few hard-hit balls here and there, but they also struck out 12 times. (Apparently, the seeing a lot of pitches things can be a drawback.)

It makes you wistful for the days of playing the Rockies when they could simply put the ball into play, and it was a 50-50 chance as to whether or not the Rockies would actually record an out. The Phillies didn’t put the ball into play all that much on Friday, and when they did, the Mets didn’t have all that much difficulty getting an out.

But whatever. It was a bad game and a bad night, but it’s not like a no-hitter counts for more than one game in the standings. The Phillies still have two more games in the series - and four more against the Mets next week - so they can’t dwell too long on this setback.

Besides, if the city’s fortunes can turn sour in just a day’s time, then it stands to reason that 24 hours from now, things might be looking up once again.