Zack Wheeler struck out a career high 14 last night after 2026 All-Star Game snub
Zack Wheeler found out three days ago that he wasn’t selected for the All-Star Game at Citizens Bank Park despite carrying a 2.36 ERA through 13 starts in his comeback season from thoracic outlet surgery, and his response was to walk into Great American Ball Park on Tuesday night and throw an absolute gem.
Wheeler went seven innings, allowing just four hits and one run while striking out a career-high 14 on 104 pitches. Wheeler notched a 37 percent chase rate that had Cincinnati hitters swinging at everything and hitting nothing.
Turns out, an angry Zack Wheeler is a terrifying version of a pitcher who was already one of the best in baseball before you gave him a reason to prove you wrong.
Zack Wheeler SNUBBED from All-Star Game
Wheeler was left off the NL All-Star roster while Paul Skenes, who has an ERA nearly a run and a half higher and has been roughed up twice by the Phillies for five-plus runs this season, made the team because the Pirates needed a representative and apparently the unwritten rule that every franchise deserves an All-Star matters more than actually selecting the best players in the league.
Skenes was then replaced on the roster on Tuesday, which only sharpened Wheeler’s frustration because the man who should have been on the team in the first place had to watch his spot go to the Pirates’ representative and then watched that representative get replaced by someone else while he still wasn’t selected.
Zack Wheeler said after the game that his issue wasn’t about pitching in the actual All-Star Game but about the honor of being selected during a season where he fought back from a blood clot in his right shoulder and the most dangerous surgery a pitcher can undergo and returned to pitch at a level that only a handful of arms in the entire sport can match.
His Sunday start in Detroit made him technically unavailable to pitch on Tuesday in Philadelphia, and he felt penalized for where his turn fell in the rotation rather than being evaluated on the body of work that warranted the selection regardless of scheduling logistics.
Wheeler said he would have been willing to throw in the game and compared it to a normal bullpen day, which makes the snub feel even more arbitrary because the only reason he was left off was a scheduling technicality that the league could have worked around if they actually wanted the best pitchers on the roster.
The Phillies dealt with the same thing last season when Sanchez was left off the All-Star team because of how his pitching schedule lined up, and watching it happen again to Wheeler during a season that should be a celebration of one of the great comeback stories in recent baseball history is the kind of institutional disrespect that fuels the performances we saw Tuesday night.
Zack Wheeler matches his career high with 14 strikeouts
Wheeler generated 51 swings from Cincinnati hitters on Tuesday and 39 percent of them were whiffs, which means roughly four out of every 10 swings the Reds took against him resulted in empty air because the combination of his fastball, his slider, and his overall command was so overwhelming that professional hitters couldn’t make contact even when they knew what was coming.
His chase rate entering the start was 36.2 percent, the highest of his career and within the top seven percent of all pitchers in baseball, and he pushed it to 37 percent against the Reds because Wheeler’s ability to get hitters to expand the zone and swing at pitches they shouldn’t be swinging at has been the defining characteristic of his 2026 season.
Mattingly pointed to the fastball as the starting point for everything Wheeler does because the heater is so good that it sets up the secondary pitches by forcing hitters to gear up for velocity and then getting caught off-speed on breaking balls that they wouldn’t normally chase if the fastball wasn’t living in the back of their minds on every pitch.
The Reds had no answers for any of it outside of Eugenio Suarez’s solo homer in the seventh, and Wheeler worked with strong pace and made nearly every at-bat uncomfortable because the man was pitching with the kind of purpose that only comes from a competitor who feels disrespected and channeling that anger into execution rather than letting it affect his focus.
The career-high 14 strikeouts on 104 pitches is the kind of outing that any pitcher would be proud of under normal circumstances, but doing it three days after being snubbed from the All-Star Game at his own ballpark while carrying a 2.28 ERA in his comeback from thoracic outlet syndrome surgery is the kind of statement performance that transcends the box score and enters the category of “don’t ever disrespect this man again.”
Schwarber Went Deep on a 3-0 Count Because He’s a Madman
Kyle Schwarber had put only 14 balls in play on 3-0 counts in his entire career entering Tuesday night, which tells you how rare it is for a hitter to get the green light in that situation and how unusual it is for Schwarber specifically to be swinging rather than taking the free ball and working the count deeper.
With the Phillies up 1-0 in the third inning against Reds lefty Andrew Abbott, Schwarber saw a 92 mph fastball up in the zone on 3-0 and decided that taking pitches is for people who don’t lead the majors in home runs.
He turned on it for a 112.2 mph exit velocity rocket that traveled 408 feet into the right-field seats for his 31st homer of the season, extending his major league lead to two over Houston’s Yordan Alvarez and giving Wheeler a 3-0 cushion that was more than enough support for a pitcher who was already dealing at a level that made additional run support feel almost unfair.
Schwarber said the situation called for it and that with two outs and first base open he was ready for one specific pitch and got exactly the one he was looking for because pitchers who fall behind 3-0 to the guy leading the majors in home runs and then throw a fastball in the zone are asking to have the ball deposited into the seats and Schwarber was happy to oblige.
The 31st homer on a 3-0 count against a lefty in Cincinnati, the city where Schwarber grew up as a massive Reds fan in nearby Middletown, Ohio, is the kind of detail that makes this game even better because the man went deep in the ballpark he grew up dreaming about playing in against the franchise he grew up rooting for while wearing the uniform of the team that paid him $150 million to stay in Philadelphia.
Cincinnati pursued Schwarber aggressively in free agency last winter and the Phillies met the price with a five-year, $150 million deal that showed how much the organization values what he brings to the lineup, the clubhouse, and the community in South Philadelphia, and every time Schwarber hits a homer in Cincinnati it’s a reminder that the Reds couldn’t close the deal on the local kid and the Phillies could.
Where would the 2026 Phillies be without Zack Wheeler or Kyle Schwarber?
Nobody wants to hear the answer to that question because both players have been so central to the franchise’s identity since 2022 that imagining the Phillies without either of them is like imagining Citizens Bank Park without the Liberty Bell or the Phanatic.
The Phillies rode the Wheeler-Schwarber tandem in 2022 when they started 22-29, fired Joe Girardi, and went all the way to the World Series with Wheeler posting a 2.69 ERA and 0.92 WHIP in 23 starts after Girardi’s dismissal while Schwarber hit 40 homers in that 123-game stretch.
Now in 2026 the Phillies started 9-19, fired Thomson, promoted Mattingly, and have gone 42-22 since the managerial change with Wheeler and Schwarber once again serving as the foundational pieces that everything else is built on because the steadiness of Wheeler behind Sanchez on the mound and the consistent power from Schwarber at the plate are the two constants that have defined both turnaround seasons.
Wheeler came back from thoracic outlet surgery at age 36 and has been pitching at a level that warranted an All-Star selection that he didn’t receive. Schwarber came off a 56-homer, 132-RBI season that finished second in MVP voting to Ohtani and has continued producing at an elite level with 31 homers through 92 games.
Both players are among the greatest free-agent signings in Phillies franchise history and Tuesday night in Cincinnati was the latest reminder of what the franchise has in two competitors who keep delivering signature performances in moments that matter.
The Eighth Inning Was a Circus but the Phillies Won Anyway
After Wheeler’s masterpiece through seven innings, the eighth turned into a 27-minute mess that included Kerkering working into trouble, a controversial play at second where Elly De La Cruz was ruled safe on a bouncing ball to Bohm at third, the Phillies arguing that De La Cruz abandoned the base path by running past the bag toward left field before returning to second.
Crew chief Alfonso Marquez ruling that only the safe/out call was reviewable and not the abandonment question, and the subsequent ejections of pitching coach Caleb Cotham and third base coach Bobby Dickerson for losing their minds over a call that the entire Phillies dugout felt was wrong.
Kerkering walked the bases loaded after the controversy before Bowlan came in and struck out Suarez to end the inning without any damage, and Duran closed out the ninth to secure the 4-1 win and give the first-time All-Star a clean save under dark red skies in Cincinnati.
The controversial call was infuriating in the moment but ultimately didn’t affect the outcome because the Phillies’ pitching staff recorded 14 strikeouts from Wheeler alone and the bullpen held the Reds scoreless in the eighth and ninth despite the circus that surrounded the De La Cruz play.
Mattingly handling the situation by arguing his case, getting his coaches ejected, and then moving on to close out the win is the kind of competitive fire that permeates the entire organization under his leadership and the eighth-inning drama was just another chapter in a season that has been defined by the Phillies fighting through adversity in every form imaginable.
Zack Wheeler Will Be Honored at Citizens Bank Park Next Week
Schwarber will be honored at the All-Star Game at Citizens Bank Park next week as one of the five Phillies representatives at the Midsummer Classic. Zack Wheeler, even with a 2.28 ERA and a career-high 14-strikeout performance on Tuesday, will not be because the selection process decided that scheduling logistics and franchise representation quotas mattered more than putting the best pitchers in the league on the roster.
The snub is going to fuel Zack Wheeler for the rest of the season and if Tuesday’s career-best performance was any indication of how he’s going to pitch when he feels disrespected, then the All-Star voters did the Phillies a favor by giving their ace a chip on his shoulder heading into the second half of a season where every start matters in a tightening NL East race.
Wheeler at 2.28 ERA without an All-Star selection is a pitcher with something to prove every time he takes the mound, and a pitcher with something to prove who already has the best stuff in the rotation is the most dangerous weapon the Phillies could ask for heading into August and September.
The Phillies are 51-41 and riding the Wheeler-Schwarber combination the same way they did in 2022 when that tandem carried the franchise to the World Series after a slow start and a managerial change. The parallels are impossible to ignore and the only question is whether the 2026 version of the story ends with a deeper October run than the 2022 version did.
Zack Wheeler struck out 14 and lowered his ERA to 2.28 on a night where he had every reason to be angry and used that anger to pitch the best game of his career. Schwarber hit his 31st homer on a 3-0 count against his childhood team in his childhood city. The Phillies won 4-1 in Cincinnati behind the two free-agent signings who keep proving they were worth every penny.
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