Arraez Arrives, and the Phillies Make It Four in a Row

Sometimes a trade tells you a team knows exactly what’s wrong with it. The Phillies have spent this season mashing home runs and striking out in bunches — thunder and lightning with too many empty at-bats in between. So they went out and got the one thing money can’t manufacture in the batting cage: a guy who simply does not miss the ball. Tuesday night at Citizens Bank Park, in his very first game in red pinstripes, Luis Arraez showed the whole ballpark why they wanted him.

Arraez went 2-for-2 with two RBI in his Philadelphia debut, and the Phillies beat the Washington Nationals 5-0 for their fourth straight win. A three-time batting champion and four-time All-Star, he came over from the San Francisco Giants for a pair of minor leaguers — a low price for a hitter whose entire game is the thing this lineup has been missing. Put the bat on the ball, move the line, let the sluggers behind you do the rest. It paid off before the ink was dry.

He wasn’t alone

Trea Turner kept his torrid stretch going with three hits and an RBI at the top of the order, and Jesús Luzardo turned in the kind of start that wins pennant races — four hits over eight innings, pounding the zone, handing the ball to the bullpen with the game already decided. When your new contact hitter, your table-setter and your starter all show up on the same night, you get a 5-0 laugher. When you string four of those together, you get something that feels like momentum.

What Arraez actually does

Let’s talk about what Arraez does for this team, because it’s more than two hits on a Tuesday. This has been a lineup that lives and dies by the long ball — spectacular when the wind’s blowing out, silent when it isn’t. A hitter like Arraez changes the math of an inning. He fouls off the pitcher’s pitch, works the count, slaps a single the other way, and suddenly there’s a man on for Harper and Schwarber instead of a two-out solo shot that doesn’t hurt anybody. He’s the connective tissue. Good lineups have one. Great ones build around it.

This is a club that not long ago was staring at a four-game losing streak and a lot of hard questions. Now they’ve flipped it — and a fresh bat has the wild-card race pointed in the right direction.Jake Sullivan

South Jersey knows this stretch of the calendar in its bones. Every game from here is a little heavier, every win a little louder driving home down Route 42 with the radio on. On Tuesday, a guy who’s made a career out of the least glamorous skill in baseball — just hitting the ball where they ain’t — gave the whole region a reason to believe this front office knows what it’s doing. Welcome to Philly, Luis. Around here, we’ve been waiting for a hitter like you.

Based on reporting from ESPN, MLB.com, The Washington Post, and Bleacher Report.