The Phillies were one strike from defeat when Kyle Schwarber worked a 10-pitch walk, and Derek Hill finished the job moments later with a pinch-hit, go-ahead two-run homer that beat the Nationals 5-4 on Wednesday night.
The win mattered because it extended a run of late escapes in a season where the smallest swing can flip the standings. The Phillies had already rallied back from the edge of defeat on Tuesday night, when they scored eight runs in the ninth inning, and they did it again with their back against the wall in Washington.
Schwarber, back after sitting the previous two days with tightness in his lower back, said he was simply trying to stay in the zone and find a way on base. By the seventh inning, he said he was starting to feel like himself again, and that showed when he kept the inning alive with the Phillies down to their last out. Hill then pinch-hit for Justin Crawford and drove his first homer in a Phillies uniform into a game-changing swing, the kind of contact that turns one-run pressure into a finished comeback.
The detail that gives the night its edge is how close the Phillies came to running out of room before they found one more answer. They had already used both automated ball-strike challenges by the fifth inning, and both Schwarber and Hill came up with the game on the line and the count, and the result, at their most unforgiving. Schwarber now has 61 career pinch-hit plate appearances, with his last coming in 2024, while Hill has 17 pinch-hit plate appearances between the Phillies and the White Sox this season. Don Mattingly called it “a couple of crazy nights,” and that is exactly what the last two games have been for the Phillies.
Hill said he was trying to execute the plan the hitting department laid out, and he said the group gave him “a pretty dang good one.” That is the part the Phillies will carry forward: not just the homer, but the fact that they have found two straight nights when the last strike did not end the inning and the last out did not end the game.
