Sports
Bryce Harper Nearly Ended The Phillies And Alec Bohm Had To Come Get Him
By Michael Yappaport, . BSN Network. Satire.
PHILADELPHIA, Bohm hit the homer.
That is the sentence. Alec Bohm, in the tenth inning, two outs, season on the line, hit the home run that kept the Philadelphia Phillies alive against the Atlanta Braves and forced a Game 3. Bryce Harper, the man who earns more in a postseason parking fee than Bohm earns in a motivational speech, spent the earlier innings reminding everyone that he is also capable of doing the opposite of that.
Harper committed a gaffe. Then Harper hit a home run. Then the game kept going anyway, because Harper's home run and Harper's gaffe apparently cancel out, leaving the Phillies exactly where they started except now it is the tenth inning and nobody has had anything to eat.
This is when Bohm arrived.
Alec Bohm is the kind of player that gets introduced at a charity dinner as "and also Alec Bohm." He is not the reason you bought the ticket. He is not the reason anyone in your section knows the starting lineup. He is the guy who shows up to the group project the night before it is due, reads the room, and writes the whole thing while the guy whose dad owns the company takes a nap.
Harper, for his part, addressed the situation with the confidence of a man who has been told he is very good at baseball so many times that he has started to believe the gaffe was also impressive.
"We're resilient," Harper said after the game, using the word teams use when they describe surviving something they caused. "This team never quits."
This team also never makes it easy. There is a specific kind of Philadelphia sports evening where you age four years in real time and end the night technically fine. Tuesday was that. The Phillies gaffe their way into a crisis, Harper homers his way back to neutral, and then Bohm, a man dressed in red who nobody was following on social media an hour ago, puts the whole thing to bed with one swing in the tenth.
Game 3 is now necessary. A Game 3 that did not need to exist, that exists specifically because the Phillies play every postseason game like it is a hostage negotiation with themselves.
The Braves will be there. Atlanta will come to Game 3 having watched the Phillies nearly eliminate themselves in real time and will have to figure out how to beat a team that cannot be counted on to stay beaten, or to stay healthy, or to stay out of its own way, or frankly to stay anything.
Bohm is going to get approximately forty-eight hours of credit for this before everyone goes back to talking about Harper.
Harper hit a home run, though. You have to give him that.
You also have to give Bohm the game.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/50071368/alec-bohm-home-run-caps-phillies-rally-forces-game-3-vs-braves