Game 5 - Saturday Night, April 10th in Flushing
Record - 1-4, 4th Place, 2 games behind the Nationals
One Sentence Summary: The Phillies finally won their first game of the season behind the spectacular pitching of Vince Velasquez.
What It Means: As confirmed by this Jayson Stark Tweet, Velasquez became the first pitcher to win his Phillies debut by a score of 1-0 since Mike Krukow pitched a shutout against the Expos on April 11, 1982.
What Happened: On a very cold night, Velasquez pitched six shutout innings, striking out a career high nine. Jeanmar Gomez was called on in the ninth for his second career Major League save, and he retired all three Mets batters he faced.
Ryan Howard's home run off Bartolo Colon in the fifth was the only offense Velasquez (and the bullpen) needed.
Featured Card: I really don't want to make this a habit, but for the second time so far this season I needed to use an image in a game summary post of a baseball card not actually in my collection. This was never an issue during the glory days of 2009 through 2011, and it wasn't even an issue during the slow collapse of the last four seasons.
But now that the Phillies have gone into full-on rebuild mode, there aren't a lot of cards (let alone Phillies cards) out there of their current roster. I believe Velasquez appeared on just three cards in 2015 - his mainstream releases in Topps Flagship and Topps Heritage, and this minor league card with the Corpus Christi Hooks.
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