MLB playoffs 2024: Bryce Harper, Phillies offense come back from the brink in epic NLDS Game 2 vs. Mets

PHILADELPHIA — Rarely, nowadays, does Bryce Harper yell.

Not in anger, not in elation.

So often, all around him, bedlam reigns. Yet the Phillies’ leading man strikes a mellow figure, providing a steady rhythm within the cacophony. Harper’s strategy for conquering the madness of his life and his job is to maintain calm. And so, his voice has grown quieter over the years. A product, perhaps, of knowing that his words have come to carry great weight.

Back in October 2022, when Harper delivered the swing of his life — the blast in NLCS Game 5 that punched a ticket to the World Series — he hardly reacted. As teammates poured over the dugout railing like a horde of excited children, their faces volcanoes of glee, the game’s greatest showman remained strikingly nonchalant, utterly expressionless. There was no need for words that day; actions spoke louder.

This time was a different story. This time, Harper roared. The moment, as he surely knew, called for it.

Harper delivered the galvanizing moment of his team’s 7-6 victory in NLDS Game 2 on Sunday — a two-run blast off the batter’s eye in dead-center field. Upon crossing home plate, the typically stoic Harper erupted, punching his right arm into the air. He then threw both hands toward the sky, as if telling the 45,679 fans at Citizens Bank Park to get back into the game. His ear-splitting “LET’S GO!” echoed across the upper reaches of the sold-out ballyard.

When a quiet voice bellows, it can move mountains.

For an hour and 58 minutes on Sunday, Harper’s club was mired in a sludge of offensive ineptitude. One day after getting embarrassed at home by the Mets in NLDS Game 1, the Phillies couldn’t manage a run through five innings in Game 2. Each scoreless bottom of the frame only made the home crowd more frustrated, more restless.

By the fourth, they were booing cleanup hitter Nick Castellanos for swinging at pitches beyond the strike zone. The walls were closing in; the air was leaking from the balloon. By the time Harper strolled to the plate in the sixth with a runner on first, doubt had consumed most of Citizens Bank Park. Understandably so.

The Phillies’ worst-case scenario was rattling around in the minds of every soul sardined into this theater of October baseball. The club’s most recent postseason showing warranted as much. A year ago, the Phillies returned home for Game 6 of the NLCS needing a single win against the overmatched Arizona Diamondbacks to secure a trip to the World Series.

Then the Phillies crumbled under the weight of expectation. On back-to-back nights, sold-out crowds watched in horror as the club’s star-studded, high-powered offense flailed at breaking ball after breaking ball. The result was a shocking playoff exit, one that left a dark cloud over this most recent Phillies season, 95 wins and an NL East title aside.

On Sunday, each trudge back to the dugout against a locked-in starting pitcher only reignited all those bad memories. The crowd felt that dismal energy and amplified it. Everyone needed a jolt to erase the doubt.

But, you see, Bryce Harper doesn’t do doubt. He never has. Philly’s force of nature is a man driven by an engine of unwavering self-belief. It’s why he can do what he does.

Harper’s blast did not win the game — or even tie it — but that hair-raising hack brought Philly back from the brink. With a single swing and the subsequent call to action, the man with the “SHOWMAN” headband awoke the crowd from its frustrated slumber and single-handedly changed the narrative of this entire series.

“To get on the board and get the crowd back in it,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said afterward of Harper’s homer. “I thought our at-bats were similar to last night up until that point, and then I thought our bats got a lot better. We started getting guys back into the zone and attacking and using the field.”

Harper’s home run also opened a portal to chaos, transforming an edgy pitchers’ duel into a roller-coaster title fight for the ages. The next batter, Castellanos, cranked a game-tying homer into the left-field seats. Citizens Bank Park, swaddled in skepticism just moments earlier, erupted.

But the Mets, a runaway train fueled by Grimace and timely hitting and who knows what else, punched back immediately. In the top of the seventh, outfielder Brandon Nimmo clobbered a low-middle fastball over the tall right-field wall to put New York back on top 4-3. The Phillies then retook the lead with a three-run, eighth-inning rally punctuated by a clutch triple courtesy of Harper’s emotional protege and fellow Las Vegan, Bryson Stott, on his 27th birthday.

On many nights, that would’ve been the final act.

Instead, two outs from an exhale, the Phillies surrendered their two-run lead. Mets third baseman Mark Vientos clobbered a chest-high heater over the wall in left-center for a two-run, game-tying homer. Vientos’ second blast of the night silenced the stunned crowd, sucking the life out of the building once again.

But as reliever Matt Strahm, the victim of Vientos’ moon shot, explained to Yahoo Sports after the game, his club had picked itself up off the mat already. The Phillies knew they could do it again.

Strahm said that when catcher J.T. Realmuto walked to the mound before the pitcher’s removal from the game, the score tied 6-6, he told Strahm not to worry. The offense would pick him up. Strahm knew Realmuto meant what he said.

That conversation would prove prescient. In the bottom of the frame, with two outs and Trea Turner on first, Harper drew a walk, bringing Castellanos to the dish. The free-swinging outfielder finished the job, lacing a single down the left-field line to score Turner, win the game and even the series.

Philadelphia roared like its talisman.

“I said it to the guys, I said, ‘Rocky would be proud,’” Harper, ever the Philadelphian, told media postgame. “Never-die mentality, man.”

After completing his postgame interview, Harper, showered and dressed, packed a duffle by his locker. The double doors next to him swung open. Through the entryway bounded Harper’s 5-year-old son, Krew, clad in a City Connect No. 3 jersey with the family name on the back.

Upon seeing his hero and the hero of the evening, Krew reared back for an earthquake of a high-five. Dad offered the target; Krew joyfully brought the hammer down. The two embraced, Bryce kissing his eldest atop his head.

Krew then looked up toward his father and, in a voice hoarse from hours of screaming, offered his congratulations: “Good game, Daddy.”

Heck, yeah, it was.