This one had no business being that good this late. The Phillies trailed the Angels 3-1 heading into the 9th, and it looked like Anaheim was going to close it out clean when Bryson Stott squared up a pitch from Angels reliever Joyce and sent it toward the wall with a shot that looked like a go-ahead 3-run homer off the bat.
OH MY GOODNESS ROBBERY IN THE NINTH IN ANAHEIM
Instead, Wade Meckler ran it down at the wall and took it away. Meckler is still a newcomer in Anaheim — the Angels claimed him off waivers from the Giants back in January after San Francisco designated him for assignment, and he didn't even get the call up to the big-league roster until May 22, when he introduced himself with a 3-run homer in his first Angels at-bat. Since then he's carved out a real role, and this catch was the kind of highlight that gets a rookie a longer leash.
For a few minutes, it looked like the play of the game, and the Angels dugout reacted like it. Then the Phillies got two outs into the 9th and Edmundo Sosa stepped in and made the whole sequence irrelevant.
EDMUNDO SOSA GRAND SLAM WITH 2 OUTS IN THE 9TH What a baseball game in Anaheim
Sosa's slam turned a 3-1 deficit into a 5-3 Phillies lead with two outs already in the book, which means the inning that Meckler thought he'd saved ended with the Phillies up 2. It's a brutal way for a defensive gem to age in real time — Meckler does the hard part, takes away a game-tying-or-better homer, and the very next batter or two later Sosa erases the point of it anyway.
It's also a nice moment for Sosa specifically, who's had a rough go of it in 2026. The Phillies' longtime super-sub has been hitting just.213 with a.600 OPS in a season where interim manager Don Mattingly has leaned on him more than ever in left field because Philadelphia is short on right-handed outfield bats. A go-ahead grand slam in the 9th, on the road, with 2 outs, is exactly the kind of swing that buys a struggling role player more rope.
None of it changes what Meckler's catch actually was, either — a legitimate, difficult, game-altering robbery that just happened to get buried by an even bigger swing two batters later. Baseball in Anaheim delivered both a highlight-reel defensive play and the biggest offensive answer possible to it, inside the same half-inning.