TAMPA, Fla. – When Brandon Marsh stepped to the plate against Diamondbacks right-hander Brandon Pfaadt last Saturday, it had been 2½ weeks since his last major-league at-bat and 34 days since his last hit.
Marsh had gone 0-for-31 from March 31 through April 16 before landing on the injured list with a mild hamstring strain.
He returned over the weekend and in his first at-bat against Pfaadt Saturday, Marsh smoked an RBI double. That hit enabled the Phillies to put up an early crooked number against the Diamondbacks but it wasn't as big a knock as he delivered Thursday night at Steinbrenner Field, when he hit an RBI double to left-center in the 10th inning that helped the Phillies to a 7-6 win.
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SIGN UP HERE "For sure, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't," Marsh said Thursday when asked if that first double against the D-backs felt like the release he'd been seeking. "But if something else would have happened, it would have happened, that's baseball. That was a big weight off the shoulders and now we go."
Marsh is 5-for-11 since returning and the Phillies are finally getting some offensive production out of center field. Johan Rojas, who scored the tying run in the ninth inning Thursday as a pinch-runner for Kyle Schwarber after advancing two bases on an errant pickoff throw, is hitting .299 for the season.
"Personally, it was a big moment, it felt good coming through for the guys," Marsh said. "But it took all of us tonight. Almost everyone was in the game at one point. That was a huge, huge win for us in the last game of a series."
The Phillies arrived in Cleveland around 3 a.m. Friday fresh off a sweep of the Rays. They're 22-15 and one of the hottest teams in baseball, having won nine of 11. They've scored at least seven runs in eight of those games.
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Manager Rob Thomson plans to split the playing time of Marsh and Rojas during this long run for the Phillies of games against right-handed starting pitchers. They're three games into a stretch of facing a righty in eight out of nine. Thomson wants to get both back-to-back starts toward the end of those nine games. The arrangement might be Rojas on Friday, Marsh on Saturday and Sunday, then Rojas on Monday against lefty Matthew Liberatore.
Either way, the Phillies are in a better place now in center field than they were in April.
"I don't know if freer is the word. Maybe a little more light on my feet, feel my normal weight again," Marsh said with a smile and shimmy.
"… It feels good to contribute and help the boys out a little bit. I just take it day by day, at-bat by at-bat and just ride with my guys here. They've all got my back and I've got theirs so we'll just keep stepping that way."