CLEVELAND -- They were both over quick. Real quick. Big early lead for the Indians. No fight from the Phillies. Embarrassing loss.
The Indians hammered the Phillies again Wednesday night, adding a 6-0 win to their 14-2 victory on Tuesday (see Instant Replay).
In the two-game series at Progressive Field, the Phillies were outscored 20-2, out-hit 31-8 and went 3 for 25 with runners on base and 1 for 16 with runners in scoring position.
Their two Cy Young Award winners, Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee, allowed a combined 12 earned runs and 18 hits in 9 2/3 innings to a team that came in three games under .500. And the Phillies’ bats were stifled by two starters with a combined eight career wins between them.
“They pretty much pounded us both games, there’s no way around it,” Lee said after giving up five runs, four earned and nine hits in six innings. “They crushed us both games. It was never really close, either one of them. We gotta have a little more pride than that and figure out a way to at least get back into games and make it somewhat competitive.”
After an encouraging three-game sweep of the Mets, the Phillies have regressed to 12-16, and the reality is that they’re 5-1 this year vs. the Mets and 7-15 against everybody else.
And Halladay and Lee have won just four of 12 starts.
“I felt OK,” Lee said. “I felt like they hit some decent pitches and got some breaks, and that’s what happens when you’re swinging the bat well as a team, putting the ball in play. It seems things go your way whenever as a group you’re squaring the ball up, and that’s what they’re doing. It seems like everything is going their way.”
Once again, the Phillies had tons of base runners. They had at least two men on base in five of the first seven innings. Their leadoff batter reached five of the first seven innings. Twice -- in the fourth and the seventh -- they had first and second with nobody out.
“We had chances,” manager Charlie Manuel said. “We had men in scoring position. We just couldn’t knock them in.”
The top five in the lineup went 0 for 16, and the Phillies finished with just three hits against five Indians pitchers.
“Would’ve been nice to cash a couple in for sure,” said Michael Young, who went 0 for 4 with two strikeouts and grounded into his seventh double-play of the year. “Like I said, we would’ve liked to cash in on a couple. If we could get some of those opportunities back, it’d be nice.
“They were swinging the bats well against two really good pitchers, so you have to give them some credit for that. But at the same time, we felt like we had a lot more to take offensively than what we showed these last couple games.”
This is the first time the Phillies have allowed 14 or more hits in consecutive games since a series against the Nationals last May.
The Indians have now scored 39 runs in their last four games, winning them by a combined 39-5.
“Hot,” Manuel said. “They're playing good. They have a lot of energy. Things are going good for them right now. They were aggressive. They hunted fastballs. And we gave them quite a few.”
The Phillies have now been shut out four times in their last 15 games. This is the first time they’ve been blanked four times in the first 28 games of the season since 1997.
Lee, making his first start in Cleveland since he was with the Indians in 2009, was better than Halladay a night earlier but did allow four earned runs and nine hits in six innings to fall to 2-2.
“The things I regret are obviously I walked a couple of guys and both scored,” he said. “I have to do a better job of at least making them work their way on base. But they got breaks when they needed them and they swung the bat well, you have to give them credit.
Lee was out-pitched by a 22-year-old right-hander making his sixth career start.
Trevor Bauer, promoted from Triple A Columbus earlier in the day, picked up his second career win despite walking six batters in five innings.
Bauer allowed only one hit -- a fourth-inning single by Domonic Brown -- and struck out five.
“We had some walks, but it was kind of tough to really get locked in on one certain pitch,” Young said. “He had good velocity, good breaking ball, threw his off-speed stuff over. Any count, really. There were no patterns.”
The Phillies fell to 12-16, still 5½ games behind the Braves in the NL East and trailing seven teams in the wild-card standings.
“We had a good series against the Mets and the Indians beat up on us the two games in here,” Manuel said. “We won three and all of a sudden come back and lose two. They took it to us pretty good.”