Phillies drop fourth consecutive game after listless effort against the Marlins

PHILADELPHIA — Leave it to Taijuan Walker to bring the boobirds back out.

OK, so it wasn’t only Walker. Hardly. He set the discordant tone Tuesday night with a 33-pitch first-inning grind-a-thon in his first start in 53 days. But the Phillies returned from 10 games on the West Coast and looked listless from the top of their $260 million roster to the bottom.

That’s usually how it appears when you scratch four hits and get shut out by a last-place team that sent away one-third of its roster at the trade deadline. But for as poorly as the Phillies have played lately, they haven’t looked so flat as during a 5-0 pancaking by the no-name Miami Marlins.

Cue the boos, then, from the 23rd consecutive sellout crowd at Citizens Bank Park.

— After Walker threw eight balls out of 10 pitches the first inning … boo!

— When J.T. Realmuto popped out with two runners in scoring position in the fourth … boo!

— As Trea Turner struck out to end the eighth … boo!

Make it four consecutive losses — 11 in 15 games — for the former best team in baseball. The Phillies are 7-16 since the All-Star break, worse than only the historically bad Chicago White Sox. They are 69-50, less than 20 games over .500 for the first time since they reached that lofty perch on May 28.

The Phillies no longer have the best record even in the National League. And although the division lead is still 6 1/2 games over the Braves, the Phillies are jockeying with the Dodgers and Brewers to merely finish with a top-two record in the NL and get the accompanying first-round bye.

If all of the winning that the Phillies did through the season’s first three months were intoxicating, the losing has become epidemic. They showed little energy, save for a hustle double in the third inning from Johan Rojas, who promptly was left standing on second base.

The Phillies slow-played Walker’s return to the rotation from a blister on his right index finger because they put him on a program designed to regain his diminished velocity. They welcomed him back now, in the middle of August, to eat innings as part of an eventual six-man rotation that can provide respite to their top four starting pitchers.

Walker was rusty at the outset, walking Jake Burger and Jesús Sánchez before allowing an RBI single to Jonah Bride and a two-out RBI single to Otto Lopez. Both hits came on sinkers, a pitch that Walker used often as an offset to his signature splitter.

Burger gave the Marlins a 3-0 edge with a leadoff homer against a 92-mph fastball in the third inning. And after getting around a two-out walk in the fourth, Walker was finished at 76 pitches, only 44 strikes.

A three-run deficit hardly seemed insurmountable, especially against a pitcher (Marlins righty Valente Bellozo) who was making only his fifth career major league start. But Valente was valiant, and when he struck out Brandon Marsh to end the seventh inning, he pumped his fist and yelled triumphantly.

Guilty of chasing pitches out of the strike zone lately, the Phillies were aggressive against Bellozo. But all it got them were quick outs. They got only one runner to third base when Alec Bohm advanced on a ground-rule double by Nick Castellanos in the fourth inning. But neither got any further.