PHILADELPHIA — Brandon Marsh hit a home run and an RBI triple, Trea Turner launched his sixth longball in nine games and the Philadelphia Phillies completed a three-game sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers with a 5-1 victory Thursday night.
Aaron Nola (11-4) struck out nine in six innings and Kyle Schwarber also went deep for the Phillies, who swept the Dodgers for the first time since 2011 — and the first time in Philadelphia since 2008. Los Angeles has lost four straight and eight of 12 overall.
''(Nola's) been tremendous,'' Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. ''He's Mr. Consistency. You look at tonight's game, and the first two innings he's in trouble, and he keeps grinding and battling. In the second inning (with the bases loaded) he strikes out (Shohei) Ohtani and gets a groundball from (Will) Smith and gets out of it. Then he settled in and as the game went on, he got better. He's been dynamite all year.''
In a matchup between the top two teams in the National League, the Phillies led in every inning of the series except for the first one on Tuesday, which ended with both teams scoreless. They outscored the Dodgers 19-5 in the three games.
''I'd be lying if I said we didn't wake up differently for games like this,'' Marsh said. ''It's a big test for us to see where we stand and I think we held our own.''
Marsh clubbed a 3-1 fastball from Landon Knack into the right-field seats leading off the second inning. Marsh then ripped a triple off Knack down the right-field line in the sixth, scoring Nick Castellanos to put the Phillies ahead 3-1.
Marsh is batting .304 with all nine of his homers against right-handed pitchers this season.
''I'm going to take a page out of (Castellanos') book,'' Marsh said. ''It's just see ball, hit ball. Keep it simple. It's hard enough as it is. The second you try to complicate it even more, it's just downhill. … Just trust the work and stay stubborn to it.''