CHICAGO – The Phillies’ losing streak is growing like an insidious tumor. Things have gotten so bad that now even Cristopher Sanchez is getting rocked.

Sanchez, runner-up for the National League Cy Young award last season, was tagged for 12 hits, including two scorchers that cleared the bricks and ivy, in an 8-7 loss to the seemingly unbeatable Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field on Thursday afternoon.

The Phillies, losers of nine straight, were swept in a four-game series at Wrigley for the first time since 1973.

The final loss was extra painful. In a show of life, the Phils rallied for four runs in the late innings to come back from a 6-2 deficit and tie the game on a pinch-hit single by Edmundo Sosa in the top of the eighth.

The lead did not last long as Brad Keller, returning to the stadium in which he pitched for the Cubs last season, surrendered a leadoff homer to Seiya Suzuki in the bottom of the inning.

The homer was Suzuki’s third of the series.

But the Phils tied the game again on a pinch-hit homer by Adolis Garcia leading off the top of the ninth, only to leave runners on the corners after putting two men on base with no outs after the long ball.

The Phils lost it in the bottom of the 10th when the Cubs pushed across the game-winning run on a hit by Dansby Swanson against Tanner Banks. 

The loss was the Phillies’ 13th in the last 15 games as they plunged to 8-17 on the season, the worst record in the National League at game’s end.

But through the fog, team leader Kyle Schwarber saw a lot of good in the club’s latest loss.

“For me personally, that’s how we should go about our day every single day,” he said. “We gave up some runs but kept fighting back and extended it into extra innings. That’s the way we play baseball. It ends in a loss, but that’s our brand of baseball right there, the way we should keep playing. Guys were grinding. We kept the energy up. We found a way through it, kept the pressure on them. Obviously, we don’t end up with a win but if we keep playing baseball like that we’re going to get a lot of good results moving forward.”

Manager Rob Thomson, whose team had scored just 16 runs in the previous eight games and entered Thursday hitting just .218, second-to-last in the majors, agreed with Schwarber.

“It’s a tough loss, but you feel good about the way they battled at the end,” he said. “As the game went on, the at bats got better and better.”

Despite the optimism expressed by Schwarber and Thomson, the Phils are 9 ½ games behind the division-leading Atlanta Braves in the NL East. If the Cubs, winners of nine in a row, are the hottest team in baseball, the Braves aren’t far behind. They’ve won eight of their last nine and 12 of their last 15, hardly a comforting thought for the Phillies as they head to Atlanta for a weekend series beginning Friday night.

Zack Wheeler will make his return in Saturday night’s game. Can he help lift this team? 

Time will tell.

In the meantime, the Phils will turn their desperate eyes to rookie Andrew Painter in Friday night’s game and it sure would help if the bat rack continued to stir as it did in the late innings Thursday.

Brandon Marsh had a big day with a pair of solo homers and an RBI single to keep the Phils in the game early, but he took a third strike with the potential tying run at third to end the top of the ninth.

Starting pitching continues to be a surprising issue for the Phillies. The starting staff entered the day ranked 28th in the majors with a 5.37 ERA. (Last year, they were second at 3.53). Sanchez was hit hard in 5 1/3 innings of work. The 12 hits he allowed tied a career-high, reached in August 2024. He gave up six runs, walked two and struck out just four. Over his last four starts, Sanchez has given up 37 hits.

The big blow against Sanchez was a three-run homer by Michael Busch to dead center in the third inning. Busch hit a 95-mph sinker that was right down the middle. An inning later, Ian Happ clubbed an 0-2 Sanchez slider over everything in left field to give the Cubs a 5-2 lead that they built to 6-2 with a run in the sixth.

“Overall, it was a bad outing,” Sanchez said. “I think my only good pitch today was the changeup. I missed too many spots with the sinker. So, overall, bad day. They got me.”

The Phillies’ offense showed some fight against Cubs’ starter Edward Cabrera and made it a 6-5 game with three runs in the seventh. Marsh hit his second homer and Bryson Stott (single) and Alec Bohm (double on a ball that was not caught at right-field wall) had hits. A run scored on an infield error and another on a sacrifice fly.

An inning later, the Phillies rallied to tie … then they tied it again, only to see the losing continue.

But through it all, Schwarber saw some good.

“I feel like this was a step in the right direction,” he said. “The more games we play like this, with the energy we had, good things will happen.”