PHILADELPHIA — As Alex McFarlane battled Ronald Acuña Jr., the hard-throwing righty reliever did not mix in his sweeper. He sent Acuña fastball after fastball until the seventh was sent into the left-field stands at 105.9 mph and the Braves right fielder pranced his way around the bases during Sunday’s eighth inning.The fastballs were what McFarlane and catcher Garrett Stubbs wanted. The location of the seventh pitch — 100.5 mph to the outside corner — was not what they wanted.“(I was) trusting myself to make those pitches,” McFarlane said, “and just, next time, make it more up in the zone and not not in the zone.”
FULL AT-BAT 🚨
Ronald Acuña Jr. saw 6 straight fastballs over 100 MPH – when the 7th came, he didn't miss it 😤 https://t.co/rNJ77k5KcY pic.twitter.com/nTJTBRZteN
— MLB (@MLB) September 6, 2026The Phillies have four more chances against the Braves this season after a brutal 5-4 loss, including another Monday. But there likely won’t be a “next time” for McFarlane quite like Sunday, when the Phillies’ bullpen gave up four runs in the final two innings to dull a dazzling start from Aaron Nola and two seventh-inning homers (by Derek Hill and Kyle Schwarber).Another opportunity to make up ground in the National League East slipped away, leaving the Phillies five games back of the Braves, yet again, with 19 left to play.The teams’ first meetings since April have been decidedly less lopsided, but the Phillies — as of now — do not look like the better team. Until the Phillies prove otherwise, it is easy to wonder if they can defy what they’ve established as their identity in recent postseasons: a lineup gone cold, good starting pitching wasted, a bullpen that surrenders decisive runs. Those woes all emerged in various ways this weekend.The bullpen has remained a problem, but the two relievers called upon Sunday — McFarlane and Jhoan Duran — had not been. Duran recorded his 30th save Saturday. McFarlane entered Sunday with a 0.79 ERA in his first 11 major-league games. He had ascended the bullpen trust rankings and earned the right to pitch the eighth. Then he gave up two straight hits and a decisive three-run homer to Acuña after seven straight fastballs.“If it pops him up, you’re like, ‘You’re good,’” interim manager Don Mattingly said. “Just watching the at-bat, you feel like you beat him most of those (pitches) and then the sixth was the first one I felt like he was on time.”The Phillies’ fastball-heavy plan against Acuña was somewhat savvy. Acuña had never homered off a fastball 100 mph or harder until facing McFarlane in the eighth. And, from 2022-25, Acuña slugged .542 on all pitches in the top third of the strike zone, as defined by MLB’s Statcast. That dipped to .125 in 2025 and, entering this September, Acuña had slugged only .224 on those pitches this season. But in the first five days of the month, he had four hits on elevated fastballs, including a three-run homer against the Washington Nationals. His breakthrough continued Sunday.It came after Philadelphia’s starting pitcher delivered, too. Nola’s second-half success is obvious in some ways — in the box scores, the innings pitched, pitches thrown — but has emerged in little moments, too. Winning a 14-pitch at-bat against Mike Yastrzemski on Sunday was one of them. Nola may have struggled to close out such a battle just two months ago. Instead, after Yastrzemski fouled off 10 pitches, Nola got him on a foul tip.Nearly five months ago, Nola gave up six runs in 4 2/3 innings against the Braves. He threw 101 pitches. The Phillies were flailing, and manager Rob Thomson was fired two days later.“The stuff’s a little better right now than it did back in April,” Nola said, “and I made a little bit better pitches today than I did in that game. Just tried to dial it in and take it pitch by pitch today.”The Phillies and Nola have come far since April. But many questions about this team will remain unanswered until the postseason, when the Phillies see if several months of hair-on-fire baseball were enough to prepare them for bigger tests.The lineup entered the weekend with an .811 OPS with runners in scoring position. Over three games against the Braves, the Phillies have gone 3-for-24 with RISP. This is the type of pitching the Phillies will see in the postseason, and if this weekend is an indication, they are still working on mastering it.The Phillies scored four runs, including two homers in the seventh, on Sunday, but could not counter when the Braves scored the go-ahead run against Duran in the ninth — even after Bryson Stott reached third. Edmundo Sosa, sent in to pinch hit in a tough right-on-right matchup in the ninth, swung at every pitch he saw. They were all out of the zone.The struggles feel so familiar. The demons from past postseasons have yet to be vanquished.“We need to split the series with these guys, and just take it game by game,” Nola said. “It’s baseball, and they played a good game late and obviously beat us today. We’ve got to come out tomorrow and compete, and it’ll be a good battle tomorrow.”
