The way the Phillies’ bullpen is set up right now, there is José Alvarado, Orion Kerkering, Matt Strahm and everyone else. It means that a single encouraging outing can establish someone as the top dog among the rest, until someone, perhaps including that same reliever, changes it. On Tuesday, that outing belonged to Joe Ross.
After two laborious innings from Cristopher Sánchez caused understandable dread about the Phillies’ bullpen needing to piece together far more outs than it seemed capable of, the real trouble was something potentially much worse.
The bullpen, against all odds, did its part.