Jesús Luzardo rescues the Phillies and their fans from the abyss

Jesús Luzardo said he was relieved. He can only imagine how the rest of us felt.

There’s nothing more uncomfortable than watching a pitcher who suddenly can’t get an out. The better he was before, the more uncomfortable it is.

Former Phillies pitching coach Rich Dubee once said something to me that stuck. I forget the exact topic of conversation, or what I said to rankle him. What I do remember is that he looked at me with that great squinting glare and said, “You don’t know what it’s like to be out on that bump.”

He was right. Nobody is alone quite like a pitcher. There isn’t another position in team sports where a player stands with the ball in his hands and no other teammate within a 60-foot radius. All eyes are on you. I suppose it is similar to golf, if golf was played in a stadium in front of 40,000 people, with nine teammates whose fate depends on your success and failure. You could also compare it to a football kicker, if 50% of a football game was determined by kicking field goals. Even then, you at least have the holder by your side.

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No man is an island, unless that man is a pitcher.

Luzardo? He was Tom Hanks in Cast Away.

On Wednesday, the Phillies’ left-hander found himself in a position that only six pitchers had experienced in the previous 60-plus years of Major League Baseball: taking the mound for a start after giving up 20 runs combined in his previous two outings. Really, you can argue that nobody had ever walked in Luzardo’s shoes. None of the six pitchers who’d come before him had looked like a Cy Young candidate through 11 starts. Nor had they been anointed as the primary reason to believe the Phillies could win a postseason series against any team in the majors.

So, yeah, when Luzardo returned to the dugout on Wednesday afternoon having retired 18 of the 23 Cubs batters he’d faced, it wouldn’t have surprised anyone to see him holding a volleyball above his ahead and yelling as a confused Weston Wilson looked on.

“I don’t think anybody else on the planet wanted it more than I did,” Luzardo said after the Phillies finished off a 7-2 win over the Cubs to take two of three from one of the hottest teams in the majors.

He shouldn’t sell the rest of us short. It wasn’t just good for the soul to see Luzardo hold the Cubs to one run over six innings with 10 strikeouts. It was the kind of outing that can pull an entire fan base out of the existential death spiral of doom and gloom that accompanied the Phillies’ recent stretch of nine losses in 10 games.

That’s not an overreaction as long as you didn’t overreact to begin with. It’s a difficult thing to do with these Phillies. The reality of most baseball teams is the midpoint between their extremes. The problem with the Phillies is that their extremes are quite extreme. They don’t just win 11 of 12 and lose 10 of 12. They do one right after the other.

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In that sense, a series like this one against the Cubs is the North Star shining from a meaningless abyss. Chicago came to Citizens Bank Park having won 17 of its last 24 games to soar past the Phillies in the National League standings. It sure seemed like these were two teams headed in opposite directions since their April series at Wrigley Field when the Phillies took two out of three.

Yet, things aren’t always as they seem in any isolated stretch of a 162-game season. Consider the Cubs’ and Phillies’ record since that first series now that the Phillies have again taken two out of three.

Cubs: 24-15.

Phillies: 24-16.

What to make of it? Nothing more than we should have made of it before. When Zack Wheeler pitches like he did on Monday and Luzardo pitches like he did on Wednesday, the Phillies are capable of winning two out of three from any team that might stand between them and their first World Series title since 2008. They have now won four of six against the Cubs, which is exactly what they would need to do in a postseason series. Factor in their series win against the Dodgers in April, and the Phillies have won six of nine games against two of the three teams atop the NL. Luzardo has started three of the wins. Wheeler has started one.

The formula now remains the same as it was when the Phillies had the best record in the league. Great starting pitching and just enough from the bullpen and the lineup. Luzardo will play an outsized role in whether the starting pitching remains great.

It isn’t the most comfortable way to go through a season, especially not when one of the few guys who was hitting is now on the injured list. The Phillies will need Bryce Harper back in the lineup to make the formula work.

But it can work. We saw that in this series. We’ve seen it throughout the season. It’s the paradox of the baseball calendar. In the regular season, no team is who they are in a small sample of games. In the postseason, it’s all they get.