2022 MLB Playoffs: Jean Segura delivers with bat, glove in Phillies' Game 3 win

By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer

PHILADELPHIA — Jean Segura sank deep into his knees Friday night, first to lift the go-ahead single and then to celebrate it.

More than a decade into his big-league career, the 32-year-old second baseman is playing his final games under contract with the Phillies. Once a top prospect, then a rising star, then a clubhouse concern, Segura just is who he is now: a competent contact hitter. At this month’s start, he was the longest-tenured major-leaguer who had not played a postseason game.

As the Phillies have mounted their increasingly magical postseason run, Segura has stayed exactly himself throughout: occasionally aloof, regularly joyous, consistently able to put bat on ball.

"I waited way too many years for the opportunity," he said late Friday. "I don’t want to let it go by."

After an early error in Game 3 of the NLCS, he was ready when his chance at atonement arose. With two men on and two out in the fourth inning, San Diego starter Joe Musgrove amassed two strikes on Segura. He then spun a slider precisely where catcher Austin Nola had set the target: below and outside the strike zone. 

Segura tracked it, though, and timed it just right — as he did during the Phillies’ famous six-run comeback in their postseason opener. But where he appeared to wield a putter to hit that go-ahead single, this time he wedged the ball a few feet over the leaping reach of second baseman Jake Cronenworth.

As Alec Bohm and Bryson Stott scampered home to score the decisive runs in the Phillies' 4-2 Game 3 victory, Segura spiked his bat and jogged down the first-base line, secure in his feat. He stared down his teammates from first and pumped both of his arms down and then up, as if he were finishing a weight-room exercise. The Citizens Bank Park crowd stood and screamed.

Moments later, Musgrove picked Segura off and put an end to the reverie — for a couple of hours. When Seranthony Domínguez finished a rare six-out save at 11 p.m. ET on the dot, Philadelphia screamed some more.

Until Friday’s first pitch, the Phillies had played 16 of their previous 18 games on the road. Their manager, Rob Thomson, has referred to it as a monthlong road trip. There’s quite a comfort, then, in knowing they have two more games to play at home this weekend and, if they win them, at least two more in the World Series.

On Friday, it took no time at all for the Phillies to assert themselves back in front of their adoring fans. Ranger Suárez began the game at his sharpest, spotting pitches to strike out both Ha-seong Kim and Juan Soto looking. Soto nodded his head, impressed, as he retreated to the Padres' dugout. Kyle Schwarber led off the Phillies’ half of the first inning with a homer to right-center. 

Suárez required 13 pitches to finish the first inning; Musgrove needed 23 to record his first out. After the Schwarber home run, both Rhys Hoskins and J.T. Realmuto worked walks. But Musgrove regrouped and coaxed a key double-play from Bryce Harper and an inning-ending groundout from Nick Castellanos. Musgrove turned what could’ve been a defining inning to a mere 24-pitch, one-run blip, keeping the pressure on the Phillies.

In the fourth inning, they temporarily succumbed to it. After Suárez hit Soto and Brandon Drury dribbled a ball where no Phillie could reach it, Segura dropped the feed on a potential double-play. Instead of ending the inning, he permitted a run and forced Suárez to throw more high-stress pitches. 

He made up for it with his bat. Then, in the top of the fifth, the Padres quickly erased half of the Phillies’ two-run lead and did so without recording a hit. Trent Grisham reached second when Hoskins let a grounder evade him and advanced a base each on ensuing groundouts.

Philadelphia responded in the sixth inning. Castellanos laced a double down the left-field line, and Bohm slapped a liner into right field. For the second time Friday, Soto tried to catch a likely single and thus turned it into a run-scoring double.

"I’m becoming less and less surprised with us coming with big hits," Hoskins said. "Or just finding ways to win games that we don’t feel like we’re supposed to."

For much of this season, the Phillies were not winning games like Friday’s. They started and ended the regular season slowly. But now they are hot, and they are confident.

"The game could have sped up on us there, and there’s been times throughout this season that it has," Bohm said. "And I think that’s where we’ve learned from those mistakes."

Segura saved the Phillies from one last precarious situation in the seventh. Reliever Jose Alvarado had been racking up pitches, and Soto lurked on deck behind Kim. Kim rapped a 3-1 pitch toward right field, but Segura dove to his left, snagged it and threw in time to record the inning-ending out. He pumped up his right arm, then again crouched and flexed his upper body.

Segura's teammates lost it at the sight of his celebration.

"I almost started flexing right there," Realmuto said.

This was Segura’s fourth season in Philadelphia. He arrived the same offseason as Realmuto and Harper. Unlikely to be here nearly as long as either of those two, he is not the same type of leader. But he is beloved for his time-earned nonchalance. 

"He takes everything really slow," said Stott, the rookie shortstop.

Segura spoke Friday of his Dominican Republic baseball-mad upbringing, of playing the sport with a machete, of playing the stickball-like game vitilla, of fans in the stands at winter-league games threatening to kill players who did not deliver. He uttered all of it without a change in his blank face.

"The way I handle pressure," he said, "since I was a little kid, I’ve loved it." 

After Segura vaulted his team into the lead, several Phillies joked in their dugout that they could not believe Musgrove had thrown him a breaking ball there — just where he hit one in St. Louis. They’ve seen him redirect such a pitch for a hit enough times to know he is comfortable waiting for it.

"That’s what we say: Jean can hit anything," said Bohm, the young third baseman. "It doesn’t matter how it looks."

In his first postseason, Segura has demonstrated that his teammates are right: He can, and it doesn’t.

Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He previously covered the Dodgers for The Athletic, the Angels and Dodgers for the Orange County Register and L.A. Times, and his alma mater, USC, for ESPN Los Angeles. He is the author of "How to Beat a Broken Game." Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.