Philadelphia Phillies edge New York Mets in Game 2 of NLDS

It wasn’t until 7:23 p.m. that Castellanos stamped Game 2 as his personal showcase, a reminder that for all of his foibles and failures, he is hitting cleanup behind Kyle Schwarber, Trea Turner and Bryce Harper because he is the guy who now has walked off five games this season, and the Phillies are still here because the Mets don’t have a monopoly on comebacks.

The latest was an instant classic that saw the Phillies fight with the moxie and resolve frequently exhibited by New York this postseason. The Mets had co-opted Philadelphia’s never-say-die attitude of recent postseasons, illustrating they weren’t just cosplaying a playoff team. Phillies fans who had seen the Mets storm to a 6-2 victory in Game 1 with a five-run eighth inning allowed the disillusionment to carry over to Sunday’s Game 2. Castellanos found himself the target, and with his teammates struggling to hit all game, he distilled the fans’ reactions into fuel.

“I was just kind of frustrated,” Castellanos said, “so I guess I locked in more.”

The powers of a locked-in Castellanos are evident in his ability to punish baseballs at the most opportune — and, quite frequently, it seems, inopportune — times. When he came up in the sixth, Phillies star Bryce Harper had just hammered a Luis Severino fastball out to center field to plate the Phillies’ first two runs. Two pitches later, Castellanos followed with his game-tying shot.

The Mets stole the lead back on a seventh-inning Brandon Nimmo home run that made it 4-3, and when they stumbled into trouble in the bottom of the inning, New York manager Carlos Mendoza called on closer Edwin Diaz. He secured the final out of the seventh and returned in the eighth to face the heart of Philadelphia’s lineup. Harper walked, Castellanos sent him to third with an inside-out single to right field and Bryson Stott, celebrating his 27th birthday, weathered a pair of 99-mph fastballs and three sliders before Diaz hung a slider and Stott sent it into the right-field corner for a triple that gave Philadelphia a lead it would stretch to 6-4.