The Philadelphia Phillies wild card chase has been reduced to nine innings on a Sunday afternoon, and they did it to themselves. A 12-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays on Saturday night was the fourth straight defeat in a last-week slide that has taken a comfortable September and turned it into a coin toss with the season on it. They host the Rays again at 3:05 PM ET in the finale.

Four losses in a row in the last week of the year is not a slump. That is a team running out of road.

What happened to the Phillies against the Rays

Aaron Nola started on two days' rest and got hit hard. That sentence is the whole story of the week, really: a rotation horse asked to do something no rotation horse is built to do, in the last weekend of a 162-game season, because the calendar stopped offering better options. Then the bullpen came in behind him and unraveled. Twelve runs on the board, one on the Phillies' side, and the loudest inning of the night belonged to the visitors.

A 12-1 game in late September has a particular sound to it. Everyone in the park knows by the fifth that it is over, and the only question left is how much of the pen you have to burn to get to tomorrow. That bill comes due this afternoon.

I don't have the full inning-by-inning ledger of who threw what in front of me, so I'm not going to pretend I can tell you exactly which arms are unavailable. What I can tell you is that a manager who goes to his ace on two days' rest is a manager who has already made peace with an uncomfortable bullpen morning.

Griffin Jax line drive off the back: what we know

The Rays did not get out of it clean either. Starter Griffin Jax took a Trea Turner line drive off his lower back and left after three innings. Tampa Bay won the game by eleven anyway, which tells you how thoroughly the night got away from Philadelphia after he departed. Hoping Jax is fine. Nobody wants a season to end that way, on either side of the field.

Why this Phillies collapse hits differently

Because of where it is happening. Philadelphia is a town with a long institutional memory for the final week, and it is not a warm one.

checked the almanac: the 1964 Phillies led the National League by six and a half games with twelve to play, lost ten in a row, and finished a game out. sixty-plus years later the city still says "sixty-four" like it's a weather event.

This is not that. Not remotely that, and nobody in that clubhouse should be handed that ghost. But the shape rhymes just enough that everyone in the building can feel it, and the way to make the rhyme stop is to win the last game of the year.

What comes next for the Phillies and Rays

One game. Rays at Phillies, Sunday afternoon, and the Phillies play for a National League wild card spot. Tampa Bay has nothing at stake but the thing every good clubhouse plays for in game 162, which is not letting the other guys have it. Those teams are dangerous. They have no pressure and they just scored twelve runs.

What I'm watching: who Philadelphia hands the ball to, and how early the phone rings in the pen. After Nola went on two days' rest and the relief corps got shelled behind him, the finale is a bullpen game whether the lineup card says so or not. The first pitching change tells you what the staff actually has left.

One more thing worth saying out loud. This is the best week of the baseball year. A division title fell in Cleveland, Texas is playing for an AL West crown and a .500 record on the same afternoon, and a team in Philadelphia woke up Sunday morning with its whole season sitting on one start. You cannot script it better than that.

First pitch at 3:05. Everything else is noise.