PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Bryce Harper celebrated his 31st birthday with a bang — a 420-foot homer on the first pitch he saw in the NL Championship Series.
That merited a special tribute. As he rounded third base, the Philadelphia Phillies slugger concocted a celebration on the fly: Harper held up three fingers on his left hand and one on his right and pretended to blow them out like candles on a cake as he crossed the plate.
“Sometimes I just do stuff, and that felt right,” Harper said. “So I thought I would step on home plate and do that.”
Harper keeps rising to the moment in October, helping the Phillies take another step toward winning their first World Series title since 2008.
The two-time NL MVP launched his 10th postseason homer with Philadelphia, Kyle Schwarber hit his first of this postseason and Nick Castellanos also went deep again to power the Phillies past the Arizona Diamondbacks 5-3 in Game 1 of the NLCS on Monday night.
Harper also walked, scored twice and knocked in two runs to send the Phillies to their 10th straight home playoff win against NL teams.
“This guy, he is looking for the moment, and he wants it,” Schwarber said. “He’s doing such an unbelievable job for us. Talking about when he is going up to the plate, you are just thinking that he is going to do something special every single time. Can that be unfair to have an expectation on a player? Sure. But that’s what everyone is thinking when you’re in the dugout. Man, what’s this guy going to do next?”
The same could be said about Zack Wheeler after another stellar postseason outing.
Wheeler struck out eight in six innings to help the defending National League champions win their seventh Game 1 of the last two postseasons. Wheeler sawed two bats in half during the first two innings, leaving the Diamondbacks with more pieces of busted lumber than hits through five.
José Alvarado got four clutch outs on 15 pitches and Craig Kimbrel worked a scoreless ninth for the save.
Arizona was stuck with its first loss of the playoffs after ripping off five straight wins against the Brewers and Dodgers.
The Diamondbacks were simply the latest team to unravel under the red storm of 45,396 towel-waving fans at Citizens Bank Park. The Phillies never gave the crowd a reason to stop cheering — or Arizona a chance to catch its breath until it was too late.
Schwarber started the home run derby when he launched Zac Gallen’s first pitch 420 feet into the right-field seats. There was some minor consternation that Schwarber — with 47 homers this season and 93 over the last two — had yet to go deep through six playoff games. How easy it was to forget that Schwarber didn’t hit any in the Wild Card Series or NLDS last season before he launched six in the NLCS and World Series. So those Schwarbombs might just be getting started.
“That’s what he does at the start of the game,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. “He can put the other team on their heels a little bit and get the lead. And we added on tonight.”
Four pitches later, Harper homered to right-center — the first time in 127 postseason games Philadelphia went deep twice in the first inning.
