Phils fall again to the Mets

The game included no quick pitches or ejections and featured merely one home run, but the Phillies on Wednesday night still couldn't find a way to beat their division rivals.

The bats struggled early and the bullpen struggled late in the Phillies' 9-4 loss, their eighth consecutive defeat to the first-place New York Mets. The Mets have claimed 11 of the first 12 games in the season series, and in this week's three meetings at Citizens Bank Park they have outscored the home team, 31-16.

"The Mets have had our number all year. We want to beat them," Phillies interim manager Pete Mackanin said. "The best thing to do, once again, [is to] put it behind us and beat them [Thursday]. We've got to salvage a game out of this."

The trio of Hector Neris, Elvis Araujo, and Luis Garcia surrendered five runs (four earned) over the final two innings. Fielding errors on consecutive plays in the ninth from shortstop Freddy Galvis did not help Araujo's cause. That all but negated a four-run bottom of the eighth against the Mets bullpen that made the game interesting, albeit briefly.

Jerad Eickhoff's first home start was uneven, to put it mildly. The Phillies' newest rookie starter, who needed only 75 pitches in his six-inning major-league debut Friday, exhausted a whopping 40 in the first inning Wednesday. The 25-year-old righthander then settled in, retiring 16 Mets in a row, and completed six innings.

Eickhoff, whom the Phillies acquired from the Texas Rangers last month in the Cole Hamels trade, admitted he had some "jitters" given Wednesday's was his first home start as a big-leaguer.

"I think I was getting those out of the way in the first inning," he said. "Balls were catching more of the plate. Just getting those jitters out of the way."

His counterpart, crafty veteran Bartolo Colon, held the Phillies to only five hits over seven scoreless innings. The Phils experienced much more success against the Mets' relief corps, sending nine batters to the plate in their four-run eighth, highlighted by Cameron Rupp's two-run double. Struggling Mets lefthander Eric O'Flaherty was charged with three earned runs.

The game began inauspiciously for the last-place Phillies. Odubel Herrera misplayed a fly ball to deep center field off the bat of Mets leadoff batter Curtis Granderson, who came around to score on Daniel Murphy's slow bouncer to shortstop. Eickhoff struggled to locate his pitches in the inning, in which the Mets batted around and added two more runs, each earned.

But after walking Juan Uribe with one out in the first, Eickhoff did not allow another Mets batter to reach base until Michael Conforto's two-out double in the sixth. He was the Phillies' first rookie to retire 16 straight batters in a start since Mike Grace set down 17 in a row in May 1996.

Eickhoff's final five innings much more closely resembled his debut five nights earlier in Miami. He needed only 57 pitches after the first inning, including just 23 between the third and fifth innings. He more effectively used his breaking pitches in the middle innings. He struck out six and walked one.

Mackanin said Eickhoff "did an outstanding job after that first inning."

"I'm happy that he came out of it," Mackanin said. "That's more important than anything else. The fact that as poorly as he located his pitches in the first inning, he just turned it right around and located extremely well the rest of the way."

@jakemkaplan