It took a full eight innings for the Phillies to even get a man on base, but they needed only four hits and one run to take their third straight game from the Cincinnati Reds, all of them coming in walk-off fashion.
Rookie pitcher Travis Wood took a perfect game into the ninth, but watched it evaporate as a fresh-off-the-DL Carlos Ruiz hit a leadoff double.
And because Roy Halladay also had a shutout going with only five scattered hits allowed, Wood was pitching to avoid the loss.
He got out of the jam by stranding Ruiz at third, and a scoreless tie would send these two teams into extra innings for the third game in a row.
Brad Lidge, not surprisingly, had the bases loaded at one point in the 10th, but worked his way out of it.
The Phillies weren’t able to get anything going in their half of the 10th, but after Jose Contreras shut the Reds down in the top of the 11th, Jimmy Rollins and Ruiz went to work.
Ruiz, for the second time in the night, hit a double into the gap in left center to get things started for the Phils’ offense. Wilson Valdez drew a two-out walk and it was all set up for Rollins to become the hero.
This is the situation in which superstars are supposed to come through, and Rollins didn’t disappoint, as he hit a base knock into right field allowing Ruiz to come around from second to end the game.
It marked the third consecutive walk-off win in extra innings, the first time in franchise history that has been done.
The Phils have one more game in the series against the Reds on Sunday before the All-Star break, but hopefully the streak won’t continue and the Phils can simply take care of business in the first nine innings.
Halladay continues to show why he truly is the best pitcher in baseball, but he’s not going to be able to pitch like that every time.
The Phils still need to start getting the bats moving a whole lot sooner than the ninth inning, or they’re going to start dropping a lot of games.
With anyone other than Halladay on the mound, the Phils would have lost this game.
So while the win is great to have and was exciting to watch, they still need to realize how inept their bats truly were during regulation and make a greater effort to resolve the problems once and for all.
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