Zack Wheeler makes Phillies history during the team's 5-1 win over the Rockies

Scott Lauber, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Apr 2, 2025

Published in Baseball

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PHILADELPHIA — Zack Wheeler took a breath, came set and uncorked a full-count curveball, his 105th pitch of a cold, wet Wednesday night.

Strike three.

Of course.

There are certain things that you can just count on. The sun will rise. The sun will set. And every fifth game, Wheeler will pitch a gem for the Phillies.

Maybe that sounds like a variation of a bad baseball cliché. But whenever anything occurs with such absurd regularity, what else are we left with?

Because between the raindrops, in a 5-1 victory over the Colorado Rockies in the first night game of the season at Citizens Bank Park, Wheeler did exactly what he has now achieved in 13 consecutive regular-season starts dating to last year.

Last at least six innings? He went seven.

Allow two runs or less? He gave up one.

It’s the longest such streak by a Phillies pitcher, eclipsing Dutch Leonard’s 12-game run in 1947. It’s the best roll by any pitcher since the Rays’ Shane McLanahan’s 13-start stretch in 2022. It’s tied for the third-longest streak of six or more innings and two or fewer runs since 2000.

And it enabled the Phillies to wait around again for their late-arriving offense to kick into gear in the seventh and eighth innings.

Wheeler leaned on his fastball, as usual. But he got swings and misses with six different pitches, including five with the curveball that he used to strike out Michael Toglia to close the seventh inning.

But for Hunter Goodman’s seventh-inning homer, Wheeler controlled the game, just like he always does. In all, he finished with 10 punch-outs, his 26th career double-digit strikeout game.

Rinse and repeat.

In his last 13 starts, Wheeler has worked 84 1/3 innings and given up 17 earned runs for a 1.81 ERA. It’s as consistent as it gets.

Apart from Wheeler, whose excellence spans seasons, the first week of a new season tends to produce all manner of statistical oddities. Here’s a doozy through five games in 2025:

— Runs scored by the Phillies in the first three innings: 0

Strange, isn’t it? In fact, all but four of their 29 runs have come in the sixth inning or later. No matter the starter, from the Nationals’ MacKenzie Gore in the late-afternoon shadows to the Rockies’ Kyle Freeland in the April chill, the Phillies hit snooze for two-thirds of the game.

The sample is too small to extrapolate much. And it’s not like they’ve been muted entirely. They had Freeland on the ropes in the fifth inning with the bases loaded, but Bryce Harper, Alec Bohm and Kyle Schwarber struck out.

Schwarber did give the Phillies a lead in the fourth inning with an RBI double. And from there, they played small ball.

Two batters later, Schwarber held up just long enough on J.T. Realmuto’s tapper in front of the mound, then broke for home and scored ahead of first baseman Toglia’s throw to the plate.

In the seventh inning, Edmundo Sosa singled, took second on a passed ball, went to third on Johan Rojas’ sacrifice bunt, and scored on Trea Turner’s third single of the game.

But the offense really came alive in the eighth. The Phillies tacked on two more runs on doubles by Realmuto and Sosa, sandwiched around an intentional walk of Max Kepler.