The Phillies hosted the Athletics at the Bank at 6:40 pm ET with Zack Wheeler making his third start of the season and Jeffrey Springs taking the mound for Oakland. Don Mattingly had the Phillies out to a 7-1 start as interim manager, and Philadelphia entered with the sharper form, 8-2 over its last 10 games against the Athletics' 5-5 stretch.
Philadelphia had reason to like the matchup. The Phillies had already beaten Springs once last season, a 9-6 win in 11 innings, when Alec Bohm and Kyle Schwarber both went deep off the left-hander. The bigger backdrop, though, was the way the Phillies had handled left-handed starters lately — they had not won against one since last September, apart from situational openers, a stretch that made this one matter beyond a single game.
Wheeler's presence gave the Phillies their best chance to control that problem. He was returning in his third start of the season, while Cristopher Sanchez had already shown what Philadelphia could do against the same lineup by striking out 10 in his previous outing. The Athletics came in hitting.233 on the road and averaging 3.63 runs per game away from home, numbers that left them little margin if the Phillies' bats kept producing.
That offense has been carried in part by Bryce Harper, who already had 19 extra-base hits, nine home runs and had just turned in the 14th multi-homer game of his Phillies career. If the game followed the recent pattern, Philadelphia's edge was clear. If Springs found a way to slow them, it would be the first clean break from a trend that had hung around since last September.
The question now is whether the Phillies are finally turning their record against lefties into something repeatable, or whether this is just another night in a season that keeps asking the same thing of them.