Remembering the extraordinary career of Sparky Anderson

Updated on Nov. 4 at 2:10 p.m.

 The news came across Thursday afternoon that former manager Sparky Anderson had died in hospice care at his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. because of the affects of dementia. Anderson was 76.

It was sad to learn about Anderson’s demise not only because he was one of the true gentlemen in baseball/life and a hallmark of the era of baseball many of us grew up following, but also because dementia and Alzheimer’s diseases hit all of us. If we don’t know someone with one of these diseases or a friend with a family member suffering from them, we will. It’s particularly frustrating and sad when someone as sharp as Sparky Anderson goes through this. The man lived to talk and share whatever it was he saw and experienced with everyone. It’s a damn shame.

So for those who weren’t old enough to remember Sparky Anderson or forget some of his extraordinary life, this is for you.

Rod Dedeaux, the mentor and developer of so many well-know major leaguers, also gets credit for “discovering” one of the greatest managers in major league history. As the story is told, most magnificently by author Mark Frost in his book, Game Six, George Anderson’s personality and ethics were in place even when he was a nine-year-old boy running around on the campus of USC with his friends looking for a spot in which to play ball.

See, a baseball—a regular old hardball—was not something every kid had in the 1930s as the Great Depression spread. Even today, baseballs are still hand-stitched, one at a time, in an austere plant in Costa Rica and remain cost prohibitive for a lot of kids. Even though approximately 900,000 baseballs are made each year, and it costs roughly $1 to produce one ball, a decent ball still costs about $10.

In other words, if a baseball is found in a park or grassy field somewhere, chances are it’s going to be picked up.

But hardened by the impecuniousness of the Depression and steadfast in his principles of right and wrong, young George Anderson stood up to his companions when they leapt at the misplaced ball near an outfield fence where the USC team was practicing.

“It ain’t ours,” Anderson said as Frost wrote. “We gotta give it back.”

That’s how Sparky Anderson and Rod Dedeaux met. Anderson wrangled the ball away from his friends and returned it back to the coach as he supervised his team’s practice. After a brief conversation with the coach, Anderson was offered a job as the USC batboy and his life in baseball took off.

Part of that was because of Dedeaux’s influence. Long coveted by major league clubs as a manager or coach, Dedeaux stayed at USC where he worked for a token $1 salary from 1942 to 1986 where he won the college World Series 10 times. The list of players he coached at USC reads like a list of Academy Award winners that includes 59 major leaguers highlighted by names like Tom Seaver, Randy Johnson, Dave Kingman, Fred Lynn, Rich Dauer, Mark McGwire, Bill Lee and a left-handed pitcher named Pat Gillick.

Moreover, Dedeaux’s mentor was the legendary and fabled Casey Stengel. It was Stengel who signed Dedeaux out of USC to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers and when he made his playing debut in 1935, Stengel was the manager. Making his home in Southern California, Stengel spent winters with Dedeaux at the USC field where he would talk baseball while young Sparky soaked it all in.

How’s that for a pedigree? Dedeaux and Stengel are like Socrates and Aristotle. From that, it’s no wonder Sparky Anderson won 102 games and went to the World Series in 1970 in his first season as manager of the Cincinnati Reds at age 36. In fact, Anderson went to the World Series twice and the NLCS three times before he was 40. In 1975 and 1976, Anderson kept the Big Red Machine running smoothly to become the first (and last) National League team to win the World Series in consecutive years since the 1921-22 New York Giants.

The Reds did it with an offense that featured three Hall of Famers (Bench, Perez, Morgan), the all-time hit king (Rose), the best fielding shortstop of the ‘70s (Concepcion), an NL MVP and member of the 50-HR club (Foster), and an All-Star Game MVP (Griffey), and a veritable no-name pitching staff that was worked so often and interchangeably that Anderson was called, “Captain Hook.” In fact, closer Rawley Eastwick pitched the fewest innings on the staff and he went 90 innings. By contrast, the save leader of 2010, Brian Wilson, has never come close to sniffing 90 innings in a season.

When he retired, Anderson won more games as a manager than anyone except for Connie Mack and John McGraw and that earned him election to the Hall of Fame in 2000. But it wasn’t so much about the wins with Anderson than it was about the idiosyncrasies, the character and the dignity. When the Reds hired him before the ’70 season, very few people had heard of Anderson outside of Southern California or baseball circles. After all, he played just one season in the majors where he was a light-hitting second baseman for the last-place Phillies in 1959. Actually, it was the strangest thing… manager Eddie Sawyer put the 25-year-old Anderson into the lineup on Opening Day and kept him there for all but two games for the entire season. Sawyer did so even though Anderson batted just .218 with 12 extra-base hits and a .282 on-base percentage. The only offensive categories he showed up in at the end of the season where in grounded into double plays (15 for 10^th) and caught stealing (9 for 5^th).

What’s strange about that isn’t just because the stats were so poor, after all, Pat Burrell batted .209 in 600 plate appearances in 2003 and manager Larry Bowa kept sending him out there, and, of course, the infamous “Mendoza Line” was named for Mario Mendoza for a reason. What’s weird is that Anderson played all but two games of the major league season at age 25 and never got another sniff of playing in the big leagues.

It didn’t take Anderson long to figure out his days as a player were numbered. He was just 30 when he got a job managing the Triple-A farm club for the Milwaukee Braves. In 1968 he managed the Reds’ Double-A club in Asheville to an 86-54 record before jumping to San Diego to be the Padres’ third-base coach. Meanwhile, before the California Angels could snap up Anderson as manager for the 1970 season, the Reds swooped in and put him in charge of the Big Red Machine.

Sparky who?

That’s what they said in Cincinnati when Anderson was hired. And to his credit, the young manager was right there with the naysayers. Still, at 36 he was already a baseball lifer and it didn’t hurt that his trademarked white hair made him look much older. It also helped that Anderson made it his task to get to know all of his players and their families, further proving that he was ahead of his time.

“You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to respect me. I’m here to earn your respect,” was how Anderson answered the doubters.

Perhaps his ability to be a leader without ego and a progressive thinking man in an age where those management traits weren’t popular will be Anderson’s legacy. It wasn’t about him, Anderson always pointed out. He made sure to drive that point home during his Hall of Fame induction speech:

I want you to take a look at the people behind me and put it in your brain when you look at ‘em; the people that came before them, and these people, and the people that will come after them. That is baseball. All that other stuff you’ve heard about baseball is just makeup. Those people made this game and those people will protect this game, and I hope every manager that follows me will listen very carefully: Players earn this by their skills. Managers come here, as I did, on their backs, for what they did for me. My father never went past the third grade, but there ain’t a guy who went to Harvard as smart as my daddy. My daddy said this: “I’m gonna give you a gift. It’s the greatest gift to take all the way through your life. And if you with this gift, everything will work out perfect, and it will never cost you a dime, and that gift is this: If every day of your life , with every person you meet, you will just be nice to that person, and treat that person like they are someone.

Guess what? It worked. When news of his failing health spread, the outpouring was overwhelming to read. The amazing part about some of the stories about Anderson was that his former players still kept in touch with him decades later.

"I call him every Christmas season," former Tigers' pitcher Dan Petry told the Detroit News. "I can tell you that he did more to prepare me for life after baseball, for the real world."He prepared me to be a person, rather than an ex-ballplayer."

Long-time Tigers coach and player Dick Tracewski echoed those sentiments in an interview with the Detroit News.

"But I have to say this about Sparky, and it probably is the reason many of them love him to this day: I've never known a manager at any level who liked his players as much as Sparky did. I'm not just talking about the players who could play, I'm talking about all the players. He never wanted to hear a comment from us coaches that so-and-so couldn't cut it."

By the end of the 1970s, the Reds were viewed as one of the all-time great teams and Anderson had become one of the most recognizable (and approachable) characters in the game, willing to talk about baseball non-stop with fans, writers, players and regular folks. On top of that, in an era that produced some of the best and well-known managers in baseball history, with names like Whitey, Earl, Billy, Tommy and even Yogi, Sparky won more games, more World Series and more pennants.

Truth is Sparky Anderson very well could be the best manager in the history of the game.

That didn’t make it easy, of course. Baseball is a game where failure is the most prevalent outcome and that goes for managers, too. The Reds fired Anderson before the 1979 season, but he quickly found work with the youthful Detroit Tigers with players like Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Jack Morris and Kirk Gibson, who were just making their way in the big leagues. But by 1984, Anderson turned the Tigers into the fiercest team in baseball.

The ’84 Tigers jumped out to a 35-5 record, whipped out the Royals in a sweep in the ALCS before taking apart the Padres in five games to make Anderson the first man to win the World Series in both leagues. He went on with the Tigers for 17 seasons and was pushed into retirement before the 1995 season because he refused to manage replacement players after the ’94 strike. It wasn’t right, he felt, so he wouldn’t do it.

In retirement Anderson continued to talk about baseball and sing the praises of all his former players, coaches and competitors. He truly loved it all and it unmistakable.

“The game is bigger than all of us,” Anderson said during his Hall of Fame induction.

Indeed it is, but Sparky Anderson helped make that so.

Sparky chats with Charlie Rose

A little youth could serve the Phillies well

The tenets on building a successful baseball club according to the practices put in place by Pat Gillick are complex in their simplicity. The basic idea is to mix in some younger players with the veteran to ensure that everyone on the team doesn’t get old all at once.

“… No one in the game is as patient anymore,” Gillick told writer John Eisenberg for his book, From 33^rd Street to Camden Yards. “But you still have to have somewhat of a program of integrating younger people to your team, because if you don’t, everyone gets and collapses at the same time. …”

There are some trap doors in this approach, though. For one, just when is a player too old? Another is just how much patience is the proper amount for a young player? Certainly that has a lot to do with the veterans on the club and whether or not they are “too old.”

Better yet, just what does all of this mean for the Phillies?

Come Nov. 30 when Shane Victorino turns 30-years old, all eight of the 2010 Phillies position players will be 30 or older. Eleven days after Victorino’s birthday, Joe Blanton also turns 30, leaving only Cole Hamels as the only player amongst the core group under 30. Come Dec. 27, Hamels will be 27 with five big-league seasons under his belt.

In other words, the time is right now for the Phillies. You know that window of opportunity they talk about that opens only so often and closes quickly? Yep, the window has reached its apex and is beginning to make its slow descent. General manager Ruben Amaro Jr. talked about being caught beneath the crush of it all collapsing at the same time when he traded Cliff Lee last December. It kind of made sense, too, considering the Phillies had traded seven of what they labeled prospects. The idea was to replenish the farm system in a Gillick-like fashion so that those prospects could be sprinkled in appropriately.

Ah yes, but there’s the other caveat… what if the prospects aren’t any good? What then?

That’s where the real GMs separate themselves from the pack. It’s one thing to throw money at the best players every winter, but it’s another all together to develop the talent and keep it together for a long time. The Braves did it with some consistency in the ‘90s when they put together a string of 14 straight division titles, but only one World Series title. The Phillies have a good base, too, considering that many of the main group of players came through the ranks together.

However, the question remains if someone like Brown is ready to be sprinkled into the mix right now, or if guys like Howard, Utley, Rollins, Polanco, Ruiz and Victorino are going to collapse at the same time?

That’s what Amaro is going to have to work on this winter when deciding which pieces to add to that rapidly aging core. The Giants’ victory in the World Series should have hammered that point home loud and clear.

Think about it… like the Phillies, the Giants are built around pitching. Of the four pitchers the Giants used during the playoffs, Jonathan Sanchez is the oldest and he doesn’t turn 28 until Nov. 19. Tim Lincecum had two Cy Young Awards before his 26^th birthday and Matt Cain turned 26 just before the playoffs began. Meanwhile, the Giants’ No. 5 starter, Barry Zito, is younger than Roy Halladay and has more career appearances.

The best part for the Giants is that they control all of their starting pitchers until 2012 when Zito’s deal is up. Lincecum and Cain aren’t going anywhere any time soon.

The youth of the pitching staff isn’t the only thing the Giants have going for them. Buster Posey, the 23-year-old catcher has carved out his spot behind the plate and could turn into another Johnny Bench. Better yet, the Giants have a little over $76 million committed to nine players for 2011 and will shed veteran contracts for Aubrey Huff, Pat Burrell, Edgar Renteria, Jose Guillen, and Juan Uribe. Huff likely will return and Uribe probably won’t be too costly to retain, either. So if they do it right, the Giants could become the dynasty everyone thought the Phillies were on the verge of becoming.

Of course they can’t go out and give out another 7-year, $126 million contract like they gave to their albatross, Zito.

So how do the Phillies get better? They have just seven open spots on the 25-man roster and $143 million earmarked already. Plus, manager Charlie Manuel rides his regulars hard. Just look at how much Chase Utley has played even when injured. Or, not to pigeonhole just Utley, look at the offensive production during the playoffs. Did the combination of so many games over the 2008 and 2009 runs to the World Series contribute to the injuries and offensive malaise in 2010?

Maybe. Or maybe some of the Phillies need to get a little younger in time for the 2011 season. Hey, that’s not as strange as it sounds. Check out what Jamie Moyer has been able to do for, oh, say the last three decades. If the Phillies want to stave off the Giants in 2011, it seems like time to get healthy, fit and a little bit younger in time for spring training.

If that happens baseball will go back to lasting until November in Philadelphia again.

Davey Lopes' incredibly important impact on the Phillies

If you were ever going to approach Davey Lopes with a question about something, be ready. Actually, there are a couple reasons for the heightened level of alertness, the first one has to do with Lopes himself.

See, Davey Lopes isn’t at the ballpark to hang out and shoot the breeze, so if he deems what you are asking him idle chatter or small talk, he wants nothing to do with it. He might even size you up to see if you are going to waste his time and then he’ll act accordingly.

But if what you have to offer is something Lopes thinks is an interesting topic, get ready because he’ll fill up your notebook and/or recorder. Lopes loves baseball and he enjoys talking about it in-depth just as much. That makes sense figuring that he has given his life to the game, first as a great player (mostly) for the Dodgers and then as a coach and a manager for the Milwaukee Brewers. Lopes’ passion for the game has an intensity that even the most ardent of the baseball lifers do not possess.

Mostly that gruff exterior is just for show and some of the players love to get the now-former Phillies’ first-base coach worked up over something. A great example of this would be to bring up the pivotal game in the 1977 NLCS known in these parts as “Black Friday.”

“Black Friday,” for those who were not around for the 1977 NLCS between the Dodgers and the Phillies, or for those historically challenged on baseball lore, remembers the game as the one where the Phillies missed their best chance to get to the World Series to date. If you thought watching the Phillies lose to the Giants in the 2010 NLCS was difficult, the ’77 NLCS would cause lesser souls to swear off baseball forever. Indeed, it was that difficult to see unfold.

The game in question was where Greg Luzinski famously misplayed a fly ball against the wall at the Vet during a stage in the game where he had been subbed out in favor of the better defender, Jerry Martin. It’s kind of like the Philadelphia version of Bill Buckner in that a move that is made in most circumstances was ignored for some inexplicable reason. For instance, manager Danny Ozark put Martin in for Luzinski the way Red Sox manager John McNamara replaced Buckner for Dave Stapleton. Only when he decided not to make the routine move for whatever reason is exactly the time everything will go wrong.

But that’s not all there was to “Black Friday.” It is also the game where shortstop Larry Bowa made that terrific play to make a throw to first in attempt to nail Lopes on a ball that caromed off third baseman Mike Schmidt. Only first-base ump Bruce Froemming called Lopes safe at first, which paved the way for more miscues as the Phillies blew a two-run lead with two outs in the ninth.

It also opened the door for Lopes and the Dodgers to knock the Phillies out of the playoffs and march on to the World Series and a date with the Yankees.

Nevertheless, when Bowa returned with the Dodgers for the 2008 NLCS—the team’s first meeting in the playoffs since the 1978 NLCS—both protagonists, then on different sides, were marched into the interview room for a formal chat. This is where the normally prickly Bowa played the part of the nice guy in reliving a memorable moment in Phillies’ history.

“They were good series,” Bowa said, clad in his Dodger uniform and that traditional “LA” cap, during the media conference. “We grew up playing them in the Coast League—they were in Spokane and we were in Eugene, Oregon. We had a rivalry going then. They seemed to get the best of us in those games.

“We always made a mistake late. It cost us, but they’re very competitive. You remember when Burt Hooton was pitching and the crowd got into it, he couldn’t throw a strike. Then the rain game with Tommy John. The play in left field where Bull (Greg Luzinski) was still in the game and Jerry Martin had been replacing him and he wasn’t in and it led to a run.

“Davey Lopes. I know Davey says, ‘Let it go.’ But he was out. He knows he was out and he can go look at that all day. A hundred thousand times he was out. But those were good games. They were good games and they seemed to bring out the best in us. I think Garry Maddox dropped a ball which he never dropped. It was just one of those things.”

Lopes, dressed in his Phillies home whites, followed Bowa and put an end to the Philly hand-wringing over the never-forgotten defeat.

“It was 31 years ago. Quit crying and move on,” Lopes said.

Certainly Lopes had a fantastic seat for a lot of great moments in baseball history. He was, of course, at second base the night Hank Aaron hit home run No.715 to break Babe Ruth’s all-time record and was the first person to reach out and shake the hand of the new home run king. Actually, it was a prideful moment for Lopes, who as a man with Cape Verdean descent, was often caught in between two worlds growing up in Providence, R.I. Lopes is not African-American, but is a person of color coming from a small island off the western coast of Africa. As such, he took even more pride in playing the same position for the same team that Jackie Robinson and Junior Gilliam once played.

Howard Bryant, in his new biography about Hank Aaron, recounts a conversation he had with Lopes about why he shook Aaron’s hand after the historic homer.

"I remember when I first came up. We’d be in spring training and Junior would tell me to come with him. I’d say, ‘Where we going?’ and he would just tell me to come on. We’d be in St. Petersburg and he’d point out the majestic hotels. He’d say, ‘That’s where the Dodgers used to stay,’ and I was in awe. Then we’d go farther into a neighborhood and he’d show me some average-looking house and say, ‘And that’s where ­we had to stay.’ And it blew my mind, because it wasn’t long ago. I thought about those things, about where we’d come as people of color, and that’s why I shook Henry Aaron’s hand. It felt like something I had to do.”

It was never as easy as just focusing on baseball, either. Lopes missed time at the beginning of the 2008 season after undergoing surgery for prostate cancer that was discovered during a preseason, routine physical. Then, in April, three days before the Phillies’ season opener in 2010, Lopes’ brother, Michael, died in a house fire in Rhode Island.

He says those events did not figure into his decision to turn down an offer from the Phillies, though. Baseball, after all, is Lopes' life. He just turns 66 in May and doesn't plan on giving up baseball just because the Phillies didn't make him a proper offer.

Lopes played in the World Series in 1974, 1977 and 1978 before finally winning it all in 1981. Later he got to the playoffs with the Cubs as a teammate with Bowa in 1984 and again with the Astros in 1986 where he was teammates with Larry Andersen and Charley Kerfeld. It was in the ’77 World Series where Lopes stood at second base when Reggie Jackson belted three homers in Game 6 to tie Babe Ruth’s record and clinch the Yankees’ victory.

In 1978, Lopes hit three homers, including two in the Game 1 victory, before the Dodgers fell again to the Yanks. Finally, Lopes and the famous Dodgers’ infield of Steve Garvey, Bill Russell and Ron Cey, beat the Yankees in 1981. Lopes contributed to the Dodgers’ World Series victory with four stolen bases against the Yanks, which was his forte.

Better yet, stealing bases and teaching others how to steal bases will be Lopes’ legacy. In 16 seasons in the majors, Lopes swiped 557 bases and led the league twice. In 1975 Lopes set the record with 38 straight successful stolen bases and led the league with 77 steals. In 1985 when Lopes was 40 he stole 47 bases and followed that up with 25 when he was 41. Not even Rickey Henderson stole as many bases as Lopes at that age. Then again, Lopes had a knack for doing things at an older age than most. He made his major league debut when he was 27 and after his 34^th birthday he was as good as any second baseman ever to play aside from Joe Morgan, Eddie Collins or Napoleon Lajoie.

But it wasn’t so much about the amount of stolen bases Lopes racked up as it was his ability to steal bases and not get caught. When he swiped 77 bags in ’75 he was caught just 12 times and that number dipped to 10 times caught in ’76 when he got 63 stolen bases. When Lopes stole 47 when he was 40, he got caught just four times.

Lopes’ 83 percent success rate dwarfs that of Henderson (81 percent) and Lou Brock (75 percent). Ty Cobb’s stolen base rate is incomplete, but even from what information that is available, Lopes is better than him, too.

So with Lopes coaching at first base with a stop watch in his right hand and his eagle eyes watching every move, spasm and twinge by the pitcher, it’s no wonder that the Phillies led the league in stolen base percentage in four straight seasons. In fact, the 87.9 percent rate the team posted in 2007 is still a big-league record.

Want to get Davey talking? Ask him about statistics and stolen bases. Though the art of the stolen base is not popular in some sabermetric neighborhoods, Lopes says stealing bases is the best bet in baseball.

“The Red Sox are a team that uses the computer as well as any team, but Jacoby Ellsbury adds another dimension to them. You utilize that and it changes a philosophy,” Lopes said during a discussion about stealing bases in May of 2009. “Dave Roberts probably had as much to do with them winning the World Series [in 2004] and what did he do? He stole a base at the right opportunity. But when you think about the Red Sox you think about them banging the ball out of the ballpark.”

Besides, Lopes said, stealing a base is less of a risk than sending a hitter to the plate. Even the worst base stealers are a better bet than the best hitters, he says.

“If you do a statistical format, if you have a guy on first base in the eighth or ninth inning and he has a success rate of 68 percent, that’s still better than any hitter getting a hit,” Lopes said. “I don’t give a [bleep] who it is, he’s still not hitting .700. He has a better chance of stealing a base than the best hitter has to get a hit.”

When he came aboard after the 2006 season, Charlie Manuel pretty much turned the running game over to Lopes keeping only the power to put up a stop sign whenever he wanted. Nevertheless, Lopes’ base-running theories pretty much took over unabated and with such an important aspect of the game resting in his hands, Lopes used it to make things happen.

“The running game puts a lot of pressure on teams,” Lopes said last. “It causes teams to make mistakes, not only with stealing, but with the aggressiveness in which you play. If you run the bases aggressively, you can capitalize on a mistake if it’s made by an infielder or outfielder. If you don’t, you can’t. It’s an after effect—‘Oh, I should have ran.’ Too late.”

Too late appears to be the issue between Lopes and the Phillies, too. Lopes told CSNPhilly.com’s Jim Salisbury that he wanted to come back for a fifth season with the team, but negotiations fell apart. Lopes says he wasn’t asking for a lot of money, just more than the regular first-base coach who isn’t entrusted with so much responsibility to the team’s success.

Perhaps general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. and the Phils’ brass didn’t value those talents too much?

“We just had a difference of opinion on what I felt my worth was,” Lopes told Salisbury. “That’s all. It was a really tough decision because I loved my time in Philadelphia, I loved working for Charlie Manuel, and I have the utmost respect for everyone in that organization.
 
“I got more enjoyment out of winning that World Series in 2008 than I did the one I won with the Dodgers as a player. I can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed my time in Philadelphia. I am really going to miss the atmosphere and the passion. The fans were great to me. I went from being a bad guy, a Dodger, to someone they really embraced. I really appreciate that.”

Though the announcement came on Monday, a report surfaced out of Los Angeles that the Dodgers could attempt to woo back their old All-Star. Just think of the ways a guy like Lopes could transform the talents of a player like Matt Kemp. Just think what he did for players like Shane Victorino, Jimmy Rollins and Jayson Werth. Hell, big slugger Ryan Howard even swiped eight bases in 2009 and went from just one attempt to 15 attempts since Lopes’ arrival.

If Lopes can make a base stealer out of Ryan Howard, what can’t he do?

Now think about Lopes doing that for another team in the National League…

Aaron Rowand saw this coming

It’s amazing what a guy can do with his time when he’s been away from the ballpark for almost a week. For me, for instance, I have allowed the charms of the Pacific time zone to wash over me even though it’s been several days since we returned from San Francisco.

Hey, if you can’t beat them, join them.

Nevertheless, in trying to figure out just how the San Francisco Giants beat the Phillies in the NLCS and why we’re not headed to Dallas/Fort Worth for Game 3 of the World Series on Friday, I have been re-reading some notes and old stories searching for ideas and clues. And while I’m not sure if I found an answer, I did find a bit of prophecy from a conversation I had with Aaron Rowand in September of 2009.

Rowand, of course, is the popular ex-Phillies center fielder whose claim to fame was his penchant for recklessness in the field and his ability to hit well at Citizens Bank Park. Though he spent just two seasons playing for the Phillies after being traded from the White Sox for Jim Thome, Rowand was unforgettable. Specifically, the catch at Citizens Bank Park where he smashed his face into the exposed metal on the center field fence remains the greatest catch I’ve seen.

He also broke his ankle trying to make a tough catch at Wrigley Field and belted the ball around as an integral member of the 2007 club that broke the long playoff drought for the Phillies.

My favorite Rowand injury was the one he got while playing with his kids at his daughter’s birthday party. That little shoulder injury tells you all you need to know about Rowand—whether it was a big league game or his daughter’s birthday party, he went all out.

“The next day I got shot up a little bit and went back out there and it was fine,” Rowand remembered for us about hurting himself at the birthday party.

Nevertheless, Rowand left the Phillies for the Giants after the 2007 season as a free agent when San Francisco ponied up the years in a long-term contract he was looking for. The Giants gave him a five-year, $60 million deal that runs out in 2012, while the Phillies countered with three years. The Giants also gave him a $8 million signing bonus though he hasn’t come close to producing the types of numbers he posted in his two years with the Phillies.

Interestingly, when Rowand jumped to the Giants he took quite a bit of flack for it because it was seen as a money grab. Considering that San Francisco finished last in the NL West in 2007 and improved by one win and one spot in the standings in 2008, it’s not tough to understand why it looked like a rush for a pay day.

But all along, Rowand held fast to the theory that when the core group of young pitchers for the Giants—Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and Jonathan Sanchez—developed properly, things would change quickly.

He nailed that one.

Not that it was tough, of course. Anyone could see that Lincecum and Cain were the real deal, though the right-handed Cain's current scoreless innings streak through the playoffs is pretty extraordinary... make that downright Christy Mattewson-esque.

Still, the part that stood out was that Rowand didn't give off any false bravado of a guy bragging about his team. He was calm and matter-of-fact. He also knew that the Giants were better than most of us realized.

Though the Giants finished in third place and faded in September in 2009, they won 88 games and the young pitchers began to show their promise. Lincecum won his second Cy Young Award, Cain pitched exactly 217 2/3 innings for the second straight season with 14 wins, and even veteran Barry Zito showed flashes of his old form.

Teams like the Phillies saw what was going on in San Francisco and took notice. Better yet, Rowand, once again, reminded folks about the Giants’ pitching.

“When you look at teams that have success in the postseason, a lot of it has to do with how they pitch,” Rowand said before a game at the Bank in September of 2009. “And when you have a pitching staff like us that you can line up for a five-game series or a seven-game series, you know you have a chance to win every game.”

Not-so secretly, folks in my line of work wondered what would happen to the Phillies if they had to face the Giants in a wild-card series. There was a chance the Phillies would have used Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels and Pedro Martinez against Lincecum, Cain and Sanchez in ’09 in the same way they sent Roy Halladay, Hamels and Roy Oswalt out there in the 2010 NLCS.

Would the result have been the same a year earlier? Probably not. After all, the Giants’ offense got a serious upgrade with Pat Burrell and Aubrey Huff, which speaks to how bad the Giants were with the bats in 2009. They finished toward the bottom in runs and batting average, next-to-last in homers and dead last in on-base percentage in 2009.

Clearly, pitching will take a team only so far. The Phillies learned that lesson the hard way in 2010.

Interestingly, Rowand told us in September of 2009 that he had spoken with Phillies manager Charlie Manuel about the prospect of a Philadelphia-San Francisco playoff series, which is another bit of Rowand prophecy that came true. Stranger still, Rowand said his Giants reminded him a lot of his 2005 White Sox that tore through the postseason by winning 10 of 11 games to win Chicago’s first World Series since 1917.

“[The Giants] reminds me a lot of the team we had with the White Sox in the year that we won. We had a decent offense but we weren’t a powerhouse by any means,” Rowand said back in ‘09. “We had a couple of guys who could hit home runs, but we were a pitching and defense team. In the postseason the pitching staff stepped up and it carried us.”

That’s the way it’s going in 2010 with the Giants. Rowand may have been a year early with his predictions, but he’s right on time now.

The Texas Rangers and the ghost of Richie Zisk

When you’re a kid, certain things mean more than they would if you were an adult. Before anyone writes in and says, “Duh!” to that last sentence, we’re coming to a point… eventually.

For instance, when I was probably six I got my first baseball glove. It was a Christmas gift wrapped under the tree and when I opened it, I really didn’t know what the hell it was since it didn’t have much to do with Batman, the "Emergency" TV show or Star Wars. But the details of that first glove—the nuance­—explains a lot more than three decades later.

Before that brown, Wilson glove went everywhere with me, the stitching and writing were incredibly intriguing. Below the web were the words, “Grip-Tite Pocket,” which probably didn’t mean anything aside from some marketing schtick. In Rawlings gloves it reads, “Deep Well Pocket,” which is probably the same thing, or a fancy way for the glove makers to say, “If you squeeze it when the ball arrives, you will catch it.”

Nevertheless, the most interesting part about the glove wasn’t the gimmicks, the color, size or even the brand. It was the signature of someone named, “Richie Zisk.”

Why would the Wilson company sell baseball gloves to kids with Richie Zisk’s autograph on the pocket? It sounds like a pretty good question these days, but in the mid-to-late 1970s, Zisk was an above-average player kind of like Andre Ethier, as the Baseball-Reference comparables shows from the stats. But baseball stats weren’t inflated in the 1970s, so Zisk was probably more like Jayson Werth without the speed, or Corey Hart from the Brewers.

Werth and Hart are both All-Star players, but it’s doubtful their signatures are moving much in the way of leather from Wilson or Rawlings. Zisk even spent several seasons primarily as a DH and was top five for outfield errors twice (top three for fielding percentage twice, too), yet his signature stamped on gloves was enough to entice people to buy them. Specifically, my parents.

So just who was Richie Zisk?

Zisk, from Northern New Jersey, a Seton Hall alum and a longtime hitting coach in the Florida State League for the Cubs, was an MVP candidate with Pittsburgh in ’74 when he batted .313 and had 100 RBIs, and belted 30 homers with 101 RBIs and a .290 average for the Chicago White Sox, better known as the Southside Hitmen, in 1977. He’s better known, however, as the Pirates’ replacement in right field for Roberto Clemente after his death on New Year’s Eve of 1972. He was a September call-up for the World Champion Pirates in ’71 and batted .400 in the NLCS from 1974 to 1975.

After the 1976 season the Pirates traded him to Chicago for Goose Gossage and Terry Forster, mostly because they had Dave Parker, Al Oliver and Omar Moreno ready to play the outfield. But they also traded him because, according to Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh, Zisk was a "lazy dreamer." Apparently Murtaugh didn't realize that when we think about it, a lazy dreamer is all anyone really wants to be.

“He’d stand out in the field and think about a movie he’d seen,” Murtaugh said, unaware that sometimes that's all a guy can do in the outfield.

Dreamer or not, the trade worked out pretty well since Zisk was a cog in the middle of the White Sox lineup and 20 of Gossage’s 26 saves were longer than one inning and nine were more than two innings, including a September four-inning save while the Pirates were trying to catch the Phillies in the NL East.

But when kids like me where getting Richie Zisk gloves for Christmas it was 1978 and Zisk and Gossage were the big free-agent acquisitions that winter. Goose, of course, signed on with the Yankees and won the World Series, while Zisk jumped to the Texas Rangers for a 10-year, $3 million deal where it was hoped he would be the difference for a team that won 94 games and came in second place in 1977.

Things started out well for Zisk in Texas in 1978. Firstly, reunited with Oliver in the outfield, the Rangers were a strong mix of speed and power. Most baseball analysts saw the Rangers as the team to beat in the AL West and maybe even the team to represent the American League in the World Series simply because they signed Zisk, got Oliver and had lefty Jon Matlack to pitch alongside Hall of Famer, Fergie Jenkins. There was nothing to dispel those notions when Zisk hit a walk-off homer off Gossage in the bottom of the ninth on opening day to beat the Yankees, 2-1.

It only got better for the first half of the season. The Rangers were in first place in late June and hanging around the top of the standings by the All-Star Break. Meanwhile, the fans voted Zisk to be the starting right fielder in the 1978 All-Star Game in San Diego where he batted cleanup and 1-for-2. It wasn’t quite like the 2-for-3 showing with a two-run double he belted off Tom Seaver in the 1977 All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium, but Zisk was a solid All-Star who hadn’t quite reached his prime.

Still, an eight-game losing streak to end July with a 10-20 record proved to be too much to overcome despite the fact the Rangers ended the season with 15 wins in the final 17 games.

Needless to say, before the 1980s had begun, Zisk and the Texas Rangers were worth buying high.

Only that was as good as it got.

The Rangers went backwards in 1979, finishing third. In 1980 they came in fourth and finished under .500. Zisk, didn’t exactly fade off statistically, rather, he just stayed the same. In 1978 he was an All-Star with 22 homers, 85 RBIs and a .262 average. In ’79 he went 18/64/.262. In 1980 Zisk hit 19 homers, drove in 77 and batted .290, but by then it was time to rebuild for the Rangers. Texas used him as the centerpiece in an 11-player deal with Seattle.

Zisk played just three seasons for the Mariners before retiring at the end of the 1983 season. In 1981 he was named Comeback Player of the Year when he batted .311 in the strike-shortened season. Though he played in approximately 100 fewer games for the Mariners, Zisk posted better advanced stats in Seattle than he did for Texas. When he retired at age 34 he hit 207 homers and had an .818 OPS with a .287 batting average.

All told, it was a nice career.

But was it the type of career where the guy’s signature is pressed onto baseball gloves and then sold to parents to give to kids for Christmas? Probably not in the age where a player’s Q-rating matters more than his slugging percentage. The generations that followed kids like me likely had gloves modeled from Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez or Ken Griffey Jr. Big stars signed gloves in the ‘70s, too. In fact, I still have my Johnny Bench Rawlings catchers’ mitt from way back and it’s still as good as ever. A little thin in the pocket, but ready for game action.

So what’s the deal with Zisk? Here’s my theory… maybe gloves, bats and iron-on shirts (I had a Luzinski decal… it was cool) are comparable to the modern day jersey-shirt, or “shirsey” in the popular parlance?

Either way, it’s possible that Zisk would have been able to move a whole lot of gloves if his Rangers got to the World Series the way this year’s club finally did. Since replacing the original Washington Senators in 1961, and then moving to Arlington, Tex. in 1971, the Senators/Rangers never won a playoff series… though they surprisingly find themselves trailing in the World Series to the Giants, 2-0.

Jon Miller, the current ESPN and Giants play-by-play man started out calling Rangers’ games and figured if any of the teams he worked for (the Orioles, Red Sox and A’s for a year) would have been able to get to the World Series, it would have been Zisk’s Rangers in 1978. Maybe that’s why Wilson put Zisk’s name on the gloves. Maybe they figured that the Rangers were going to get to the World Series so they might as well get ahead of the curve.

Who would have known that it was going to take the Rangers until 2010 to finally get there?

Why can't we quit Cliff Lee?

It was a preposterous idea. Know how they say truth is stranger than fiction? Yeah, well this one was just too strange for even that. In the most sordid and obscene of tawdry ideas, just the thought of it should make one’s skin crawl and spine shiver.

Cliff Lee pitching in Game 1 of the World Series at Citizens Bank Park? Against Roy Halladay?

It was just too good to be true, wasn’t it?

“I pulled for a lot of those guys, but it’s weird, when a team gets rid of you, you kind of like seeing them lose a little bit. I know that’s weird but part of me wanted them to win where I could face them in the World Series, too. It would have been a lot of fun. You’d like to think that they need you to win type of stuff, when that's really not the case,” Lee said from Tuesday’s media day at AT&T Park in San Francisco, 3,000 miles away from South Philly.

“When a team gets rid of you, it's funny how you have a knack for stepping up a little more when you face them. There’s a little more incentive to beat them, and that’s definitely the case with me watching the game. I was in between. I didn’t want to have to face them or want to have to face the Giants. I let that series play out, and I pulled for those guys individually, but I didn’t mind seeing them get beat, either, just because they got rid of me. That is what it is.”

Oh that Cliff… telling the Phillies they got what they deserved?

Nevertheless, while folks lament the Phillies’ offensive (used as offensive as in a segment of a baseball game and offensive as in deplorable) flop in NLCS, it’s almost like a little, sarcastic dig at the team’s oh-so sensitive brass that Cliff Lee will pitch on Wednesday night. Only instead of pitching for or against the Phillies, Lee will pitch against the not-so celebrated hitters of the San Francisco Giants at AT&T Park.

Coincidentally, the last time Lee pitched at AT&T Park he pitched a complete game, four-hitter to beat the Giants in his debut with the Phillies on July 31, 2009. They weren’t the same Giants that Lee will face on Wednesday night, but they were not too far off. If anything, Lee was different then… he walked two batters.

“It does seem like a long time ago, but I remember I went through all nine innings that was pretty good,” Lee said of his Phillies’ debut. “And I remember I almost went out of this park opposite field, too. That was fun.”

Yes, he’s still as cool as ever. Unflappable might be the best word because he never, ever changes his approach or his routine. He still runs on and off the field, still pantomimes a throw into center field from behind the mound before he begins to warm up before an inning, and still throws that low 90s-mph fastball.

Of course he throws that cut fastball exactly where he wants it to go. He throws it no matter what the situation is or if he’s behind in the count. Hey, the ball is in his hands so everyone else will have to adjust to him. Better yet, he was in charge after games, too. He didn’t treat his arm with ice like most pitchers. Even after a career-high 272 innings pitched (counting the playoffs) in ‘09, Lee never strapped his arm in an ice pack after a game. In 16 of his 39 starts Lee pitched into the eighth inning. He averaged 104 pitches per start and hardly walked anyone.

And then he got even better.

It might be that mindset that helped the Rangers through the ALDS for the first time and then to the World Series for the first time in franchise history, and yes, that includes when it started out in Washington as the Senators in 1961.

“Tremendous work ethic. You know, you see him from afar, you never see him prepare to do what he does out there,” Texas manager Ron Washington said during his media day press conference. “He has tremendous work ethic, and more than anything else, he brings influence. The way he goes about his business, the energy which he plays with, the passion he has for the game, the things he goes out there and never let affect him, those are the type of qualities that a No. 1 guy brings, and it just influences every other pitcher that follows him or that's on that pitching staff. That's what he brought to us. That's one thing I didn't know.

“I knew he was a quality pitcher, but I never got a chance to see how each day that he prepares for his starts. It's amazing the work he puts in to go out there and then accomplish what he accomplishes.”

Washington is Lee’s fourth manager since the start of the 2009 season and he is also the fourth manager to say the same thing about the lefty. The Phillies gushed over Lee a lot during the postseason, too.

Of course where Lee endeared himself the most to the fans and his teammates in Philadelphia was during the playoffs. Sure, there was a bit of the dreaded “dead-arm” phase toward the end of the regular season, but when properly rested thanks to the dark nights in the playoff schedule so the networks could regroup[1], Lee also re-gathered himself, too. All he did was put together the greatest postseason by a Phillies pitcher, ever.

Better than Cole Hamels, Steve Carlton, Robin Roberts, Tug McGraw, Jim Konstanty and maybe even better than ol’ Grover Cleveland Alexander against the Red Sox in the 1915 World Series. Lee didn’t make his playoff debut with a no-hitter like Halladay, or end his maiden postseason game with outs against Hall of Famers Babe Ruth or Harry Hooper, but Lee was a lot more consistent.

He allowed one run against the Rockies in Game 1 of the NLDS and took the lead into the eighth inning of the clinching Game 4 before errors and the bullpen cost him a win. Had Lee held on in that one he would have become just the third person in Major League Baseball history to win five games in a single postseason.

Added all up, Lee went 4-0 with a 1.56 ERA, including a masterful 10-strikeout, three-hitter in Game 3 of the NLCS and a 10-strikeout gem in Game 1 of the World Series where the best the Yankees could do was score an unearned run in the ninth.

No, there wasn’t a no-hitter in there, but Lee got the Phillies to the World Series and won both of the team’s games there.

So it makes sense that there is some sensitivity amongst guys like Ruben Amaro Jr. in regards to Lee. In fact, the 2010 season was almost a mirror image of 2009 for Lee. He was again traded in July from an American League doormat to a contender. Again he had some back and arm issues where he missed both the first month of the season and a handful of starts late in the year.

But when the playoffs started, Lee has been even better than he was last year with the Phillies. Going into his Game 1that will not be played in Philadelphia on Wednesday night, Lee is 3-0 with an 0.75 ERA with 34 strikeouts and one walk in 24 innings.

Pretty good, huh?

Now here’s the thing… give up on Lee at your peril. The Yankees couldn’t swing a deal for him and paid for it during the regular-season and the playoffs. Tampa Bay could have used him, too, but in the end he beat them twice in the postseason. Sure, the Phillies picked up Roy Oswalt and he was spectacular during the second half of the season. But if Amaro thought for a second that the offense would be outdone by the Giants’ lineup in the NLCS, do you think he would have given up on Cliff Lee?

Maybe the better question is just what was about Lee that keeps folks in Philly talking? After all, he arrived at the end of July and was gone by the second week of December. That’s not a long time at all and yet we’re still talking about the guy and paying attention whenever he pitches a big game.

Just what was it about Cliff Lee?

---

[1] It’s not exactly top-notch planning that the first game of the World Series will be played on the same night as the opening of the NBA season. Hey, I’d rather watch baseball over just about anything, but I understand why a person would want to watch LeBron James and the Miami Heat play the Sixers on Wednesday night. LeBron made a little news earlier this year and people love/dislike him so much that they can’t take their eyes off him. Apparently the MLB brass and the networks whiffed on this one.

Have the Phillies seen the last of Jayson Werth?

Ed. Note: This story has been revised from its original form from Saturday night.

Jayson Werth didn’t think it would end this way. Not with these guys, on this team. This was supposed to be the glory stretch where he celebrated one more time with his friends and teammates in the place where it all came together for him.

But Jayson Werth is a star now. The Phillies helped make him one, of course, but in doing so it might have made re-signing him much too cost prohibitive. Baseball players put in all the hard work and lonely evenings in the weight room and batting cage for the winter where they can test the open market. Werth is no different from most ballplayers in this regard.

After this winter, with the help from super-agent Scott Boras, Werth will be set up for the rest of his life. His children will probably be set up for the rest of their lives, too. That’s the reality. That’s why Werth made sure not to waste his big chance in Philadelphia where general manager Pat Gillick picked him up from the scrap heap when the Dodgers were too impatient in waiting for his injuries to heal.

When he was cut by the Dodgers, Werth didn’t know if he would ever play again or if any team would want him.

Now he’s so good that the Phillies probably can’t afford to keep him.

"I haven't had any discussions with Scott [Boras] yet," general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. said. "I obviously will over the next 48 hours, we will make contact. I guess the following question is, do we have enough money to do it? And would we like to bring him back? I think the answer to both questions is yes. However, that will all kind of depend on what the ask is and ultimately how that will affect us with other possible moves to do it."

That was a popular sentiment in the Phillies’ clubhouse after the 3-2 loss in Game 6 to eliminate the Phillies two games short of a third straight trip to the World Series. Certainly the players know the reality of Werth’s situation and how the business of baseball works, but they also understand the dynamics of the team’s clubhouse, too. It’s not easy to do what the Phillies have done over the last few years and Werth has been a big part of that. Before the NLCS began, Werth talked about the bitterness he had from losing in the World Series to the Yankees and how “empty” he felt and how that surprised him.

In a sense, it seems as if there is some unfinished work left in Philadelphia for Werth. It’s as if he is part of a nucleus of players like Utley, Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino, and the powerful pitching staff that got together to build a strong foundation on a house, only they haven’t put a roof on it.

Who would have thought that when the Phillies signed Werth before the 2007 season that it would come to this? When Gillick signed him in December of 2006, it was a move that slipped under the radar. The acquisitions of Abraham Nunez and Wes Helms made more news that winter.

Then, Werth was injured much of the 2007 season, appearing in just 94 games after missing the entire 2006 season with a wrist injury. But by the end of the 2008 season, Werth was an everyday player. He answered every question and rose to every challenge. Werth was so good during the playoffs in ’08 that the Phillies knew they could let Pat Burrell walk away because they had a capable right-handed bat to put in the lineup behind Howard and Utley.

When doubters wondered if he could handle the rigors of playing the full slate of games in 2009, he belted 36 homers, got 99 RBIs and made the All-Star team. Moreover, he’ll leave as the franchise’s all-time leader in postseason home runs with 13, including two in the NLCS.

 “When he first came here, he came here with a lot of talent. Pat Gillick always liked him, and he definitely was the one that kind of like wanted him and kind of persuaded him to like to come with us,” manager Charlie Manuel said. “It took him a while to really, I think, adjust to our team and really kind of get things going. I think that he was like he needed to play. He hadn't played in like a year, year and a half or something. And once he got started, he earned a spot and he actually beat Geoff Jenkins out of right field. He earned a spot to play, and he definitely enjoys playing here. He’s been a solid player for us, and he's got a ton of ability.”

This past season he lead the league in doubles and posted career-highs in runs (106), batting average (.296), slugging (.532) and OPS (.921). Gone are the questions about whether Werth can play every day. Now folks wonder which team is going to break the bank and pay him.

Victorino, another player let go by the Dodgers that the Phillies snagged up, marvels at how far his friend has come.

“I remember him calling me in 2006 and telling, ‘Hey, I’m on a boat and I’m battling my wrist injury and it hasn’t gotten better and I don’t know if I’ll ever play again.’ He said that. That’s crazy,” Victorino said. “He was so frustrated with his wrist injury that he doubted it would ever get better. And now to see where he is today, I’m happy for the guy. I’m overly happy for the guy. Whatever he goes out and gets he deserves.”

The numbers are definitely there for Werth and there are a few teams that have the cash to spend that the Phillies probably won’t. The Yankees and Red Sox will probably make a presentation. So too will the Cubs and Angels.

The Phillies? They already have more than $143 million committed to 18 players, which is more than they spent for the entire roster in 2010. Joining Werth in free agency are Jose Contreras, Chad Durbin, Mike Sweeney and Jamie Moyer. Plus, Ben Francisco, Kyle Kendrick and Greg Dobbs are eligible for arbitration. Come 2012, Ryan Madson and Rollins are free agents and Cole Hamels will be eligible for arbitration.

With a handful of roster spots to fill and up-and-comers like Dom Brown ready to for their chance, Werth’s last at-bat for the Phillies was probably a strikeout against Tim Lincecum in the eighth inning, Saturday night.

“We all want what we think we should get, but sometimes you go into free agency and play somewhere I don’t want, or do you want to go somewhere like Philly?” Victorino said. “Jayson is loved here. I’m not him and I know what goes on and I was an acquisition that could have gone year-to-year and held out. But I looked at the big picture. I wanted to play in a city where I was loved and where the people are behind me.

“Jayson is in a different place than me because he hasn’t gotten anything yet. So I’m happy for him and whatever he gets he deserves.”

How much that will be seems open for debate. Amaro clearly isn't going to break the bank for Werth when the negotiations begin.

"Jayson had a good year," Amaro said. "It wasn't an extraordinary year. He had a tough time with men on in scoring position. It wasn't as productive a year as he's had in the past. But I think if he's not with us, there are players we can either acquire or are in our own organization that can help us."

Werth didn’t seem ready for it to end. When Juan Uribe’s eighth-inning home run barely cleared the right-field fence and dropped into the first row of seats, Werth stared at the spot where the ball disappeared in disbelief for what felt like hours.

It’s was as if by staring he could add another foot to the top of the fence.

When it finally ended, Werth didn’t want to leave. He was one of the last guys to walk into the clubhouse and change into a yellow t-shirt with his black cap turned backwards on his iconic hairstyle. He informed the media that he would talk later in the week and slowly made his exit, taking time to hug some of his soon-to-be ex-teammates. Ross Gload wrote down Werth’s e-mail address and as he walked through the clubhouse exit for the last time, he heard words from Gload that will make Phillies’ fans cringe…

“Don’t let those Yankees boss you around.”

If only it were that easy. There will be a lot of talking before Werth settles on his new team and understands that it probably won't be as much fun as it was with the Phillies the past four years. 

So when asked if there was the one thing that would tip the scales in favor for Philly if everything else was close, the answer was easy for Werth.

"Teammates," he said.

Was Scott Boras listening?

... and Cliff Lee is ready to go in Game 1

Let’s just cut right to it…

The Phillies choked. They blew it. Worse, they choked and blew it with what might have been the best team ever assembled in franchise history—at least after Ruben Amaro Jr. traded for Roy Oswalt.

Yet the idea that the 2010 Phillies were as great as advertised doesn’t really matter anymore because the best team won’t be representing the National League in the World Series this year. Oh sure, the Giants deserve credit because they responded to every bit of gamesmanship and intimidation the Phillies threw at them. Between that phony, Pat Burrell, and Tim Lincecum shouting at Phillies’ players, and Jonathan Sanchez calling out Chase Utley, causing the benches to clear in Game 6, the Giants deserve some credit.

But let’s not give a team with Pat Burrell, Cody Ross and Aubrey Huff in the middle of the batting order too much credit. After all, the Phillies pitchers held them to a .249 average with just two different players hitting homers. The Phillies even outscored the Giants in the six games, 20-19. This was the same Giants that batted just .212 against the Braves in the NLDS. You know, the Braves that the Phillies manhandled during the regular season.

Frankly, it was a sickening display of offensive futility during the playoffs. They batted .212 against the Reds in the NLDS and .216 against the Giants. Sure, Lincecum, Sanchez and Matt Cain are solid pitchers. Lincecum is a bona fide star, in fact, and manager Bruce Bochy has enough versatility in the bullpen to match up, hitter by hitter, late in the game.

Oh yes, the Giants can pitch. In fact, they pitch very well. However, imagine how great a good pitching team will look against a bunch of hitters who were lost. How lost? Take a look at the schizophrenic postseason from Ryan Howard and compare it to his typical production.

It was just last season where Howard set the record for consecutive postseason games with an RBI and was named MVP of the NLCS. That was the postseason of, “Just get me to the plate, boys,” in Game 4 of the NLDS when the Rockies were just an out away from sending the series back to Philadelphia for a deciding Game 5. Moreover, 10 of Howard’s 15 postseason hits in 2009 went for extra-bases and the 17 RBIs in 15 games were one of the big reasons why the Phillies got back to the World Series.

This year Howard had good looking stats, batting .318, posting a .400 on-base percentage and a .500 slugging average. But Howard hit no home runs and got no RBIs. No, it’s not Howard’s fault that there were runners on base when he hit, but when there were men on base he struck out. Seven of Howard’s 12 strikeouts in the NLCS came with runners on base and five of those came with runners in scoring position.

Strikeouts only equal one out, sure, but there are productive outs where runners move up and fielders are forced to make plays. Considering that Howard had three three-strikeout games, including back-to-back triple Ks in Game 5 and 6, the heart of the Phillies’ order was punchless.

“If the production is there, you can tend to get away from strikeouts,” manager Charlie Manuel said. “But I feel especially after Ryan got hurt that he didn't find his swing. I feel like I know that he’s a better hitter than what we saw at the end of the year.”

The same goes for many of the Phillies’ hitters, especially Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley. Utley’s swing looked off most of the postseason as if it were difficult for him to complete it. The question many asked of Manuel was about the second baseman’s health, which is always an issue late in the season. However, straight answers never were offered and the assumption was Utley was properly healed from the thumb injury he suffered in June.

But the Phillies finished the season with the best record in baseball and closed the year by going 49-19. They had Halladay and Oswalt and Hamels lined up and all three lost in the playoffs. Sure, the Phillies pitched as well—maybe better—than the Giants, but that was it.

“I don't think we ever got our offense clicking,” Manuel said. “It always went up and down. We hit a hot streak, especially after Houston swept us earlier in the year. From that period on, we started winning a lot of games. But we weren't blowing people out and weren't really hitting like we can. It seemed like we never put up runs like I know we can.”

Maybe there was something to the injuries or maybe the preparedness. Even the victories in the postseason came in games where something extraordinary occurred. Halladay pitched a no-hitter in one and Hamels a five-hit shutout in another. In Game 2 of the NLDS the Phillies scored five unearned runs and in Game 2 of the NLCS, Oswalt pitched a three-hitter.

Finally, it came down to Halladay pitching six innings on a strained groin just to send the series back to Philadelphia.

But back home where the fans where waiting for hits that never came and runs that never circled the bases, all that was left was disappointment. The team with the best record in baseball fell to a team that batted Pat Burrell cleanup in a NLCS game... Pat Burrell?

When it finally came to an end it was Howard standing at the plate, watching as the third strike buzzed past just above his knees.

“Just get me to the plate, boys.”

“It's kind of a sucky way to end the game, a sucky way to end the year, you know, being that guy,” Howard said. “But I'll have to try and take that and use it as motivation and come back next year.

"I can't say what I want to say.”

No, he can’t, but there will be plenty of talk this winter about that last at-bat and the last series. Plain and simple, the Phillies blew it. Choked. The Phillies were the big bullies on the school yard and they got punched back and didn’t know what to do.

“I just don’t think any of us saw this happening,” closer Brad Lidge said. “I felt like we had the best team in baseball this year. It doesn’t always work out. Unfortunately, we just caught a team that seems to be doing everything right. They got the last hook in there. We just didn’t get our best game out there tonight. So shocked is a good word.”

Shocked like the rest of us that a team with hitters like the Giants could deliver more than the Phillies. Then again, the old, injured sage Jamie Moyer once played for a Seattle club that won 116 games, but lasted just six in the ALCS, To this day Seattle is only one of two franchises never to make it to the World Series.

“We had the best record in baseball, but when you get to the playoffs it really doesn’t mean anything,” Moyer said. “Everything starts just like it did in April. Everyone starts at zero. Now it’s about who is going to play the best, who is going to get the key hits and we fell short. …”

Cliff Lee will pitch in Game 1 of the World Series. Roy Halladay will not.

Do or die

There’s something about the Texas Rangers spraying each other with ginger ale and Mountain Dew that made a lot of sense. Yeah, it was a nod to Josh Hamilton’s addictions and another unifying element for a team that looks like it cannot be beaten.

But there’s something about the entire process where the victorious ballplayers are handed the commemorative cap and t-shirt before they enter the clubhouse and can spray champagne and Budweiser beer. And yes, it’s Budweiser because they probably paid a decent chunk of change to sponsor the not-so spontaneous party with posters plastered everywhere.

Yet for the Phillies to get to do what the Texas Rangers did on Friday night, it’s going to take something the franchise has never done before…

Rally from a 3-1 deficit and force a deciding Game 7. The Phillies have been in a 3-1 hole four times starting with the 1915 World Series against the Red Sox. In the ’15 series the Red Sox closed it out at the Baker Bowl behind Rube Foster’s second win. It was the first World Series ring for Babe Ruth, a Red Sox pitcher who batted just once in the series.

Other names to emerge from the Phillies’ misfortune from trailing 3-1 were Rick Dempsey, Joe Carter and Hideki Matsui. Dempsey and the Orioles ended the ’83 World Series at the Vet in five, disappointing games where the Phillies batted .195 and scored nine runs.

Everyone in Philly already knows all about Joe Carter, Mitch Williams and what happened in Game 6 of the 1993 World Series, and Matsui capped off his MVP run with a homer and a double in Game 6 of last year’s World Series at Yankee Stadium.

Needless to say, the 3-1 deficit and the aftermath haven’t been too kind to the Phillies. When a Game 7 has been needed, the Phillies have not been able to do their part.

“As long as I’ve been here, we haven’t had to,” said the potential Game 7 starter, Cole Hamels. “We’ve been fortunate every time we’ve been in the postseason — we’ve been able to, I guess, get the series done and over early. But in this case, we’re playing a very good team on the other side and they’re doing everything they possibly can.”

Before there was such a thing as a best-of-seven LCS, the Phillies did make it to a do-or-die, winner-take-all game in the playoffs. In 1981 they rallied from a 2-0 deficit in the first-ever NLDS against the Montreal Expos only to lose the fifth game when Steve Rogers out-dueled Steve Carlton at the Vet.

But the mother of all do-or-die deciding games was the fifth game of 1980 NLCS at the Astrodome where the Phillies fell behind 2-1 in the series before taking the final two games on the road. That series featured four extra-inning games, 15 lead changes and one game where the Astros won 1-0 in 10 innings.

The Phillies forced Game 5 by scoring two runs in the 10^th inning, the memorable one coming when Greg Luzinski hit a two-out double where Pete Rose bowled over Astros catcher (and current Giants manager) Bruce Bochy to score the go-ahead run. Actually, the Phillies were two outs away from winning Game 4 in the ninth inning, but reliever Warren Brusstar couldn’t stop Terry Puhl from driving in the tying run.

Puhl went 10-for-19 in the series and if the Astros would have advanced to the World Series, his performance would be more than a footnote of the series. Four of Puhl’s hits came in the deciding fifth game where ace pitcher Nolan Ryan—the current owner of the Texas Rangers—carried a three-run lead into the eighth inning.

Before the eighth inning began Rose told leadoff man Larry Bowa that if he could get on base, the Phillies would “win this thing.” So Bowa singled to center and Bob Boone, perhaps the slowest runner in Phillies history, beat out an infield hit back to Ryan. Still with no outs, pinch-hitter Greg Gross (now the Phillies’ hitting coach) dropped a bunt up the third-base line to load the bases for Rose.

Seven pitches after digging in, Rose forced home a run with a walk and forced Ryan out of the game.

Against lefty Joe Sambito, rookie Keith Moreland grounded into a force to plate another run before Mike Schmidt, in his biggest plate appearance to date, struck out looking on three pitches. But Del Unser followed with a two-out single to tie the game, setting the stage for NLCS MVP Manny Trillo to clear the bases with a triple.

Just like that, Ryan’s lead was gone…

Only to have the Phillies lead wiped out by Tug McGraw.

This was back in the days when the closer would come into the game as soon as possible and since the Phillies grasped the lead with six outs to go, manager Dallas Green turned the game over to McGraw even though he had used his ace in every game of the NLCS, including for three innings in Game 3 and two innings in Game 1, as well as three of the final four games of the regular-season when the Phils were trying to fend off the Expos in the battle for the NL East.

McGraw worked a lot in 1980 with little or no rest. Of the 57 games he appeared in that season, 16 were part of back-to-back games and another 12 were with one day of rest. McGraw also finished 48 games, piled up more than 92 innings and missed most of April and July with injuries.

But when September rolled around, McGraw pitched in 16 games for 26 1/3 innings allowing just one earned run. Moreover, when pitching in back-to-back games, McGraw held the opposition to a .092 batting average. Better yet, 11 of McGraw’s 20 saves in 1980 came when he pitched more than an inning.

In other words, going with Tugger, despite the taxing workload, was the move to make.

In the eighth, the Astros rallied with a one-out single from Craig Reynolds, and a two-out single from Puhl. But after Enos Cabell whiffed for the second out, back-to-back singles from Rafael Landestoy and Jose Cruz knotted it up again.

Green also lost McGraw for the ninth for a pinch-hitter, but Game 2 starter Dick Ruthven was as rested as any pitcher available, so it looked as if the right-hander was in for as long as he could go.

Why not? Ruthven piled up 223 innings, six complete games and 17 wins in 1980. He also pitched eight games on just three days rest in 1980, too, making Green’s choice elemental. Ruthven was going to pitch all night if need be.

Fortunately for the Phillies he only needed to pitch two innings.

That’s because Del Unser came through with a one-out double after Mike Schmidt struck out for the third time in the game. When Manny Trillo flied out for the second out, Garry Maddox belted a first-pitch double to center to drive in the run to send the Phils to the World Series. In the bottom of the 10^th Ruthven needed 12 pitches to retire the side in order.

One more caveat about Game 5… the starter for the Phillies that day was rookie pitcher Marty Bystrom, a September call up only because Nino Espinosa got injured just before the playoffs.

Yes, a September call up with just five big-league starts on the mound in the biggest game in franchise history against Nolan Ryan.

Strangely enough, Bystrom said he didn’t know he was going to start the deciding game until the Phillies won in Game 4.

“I hadn’t pitched in nine or 10 days and Dallas came up to after Game 4 and said, ‘You got the ball tomorrow, kid,’” Bystrom said. “I said, ‘I’m ready.’”

Bystrom called that NLCS finale “the toughest game I ever pitched.” More than just the pressure of a game with the World Series on the line, Bystrom recalled that the noise from the fans in the Astrodome was deafening.

“I took a suggestion from Steve Carlton and put cotton in my ears,” Bystrom said, adding that pitching with Rose, Schmidt, Bowa and Boone on his side in the field made things a lot easier.

Green later tabbed Bystrom to start the pivotal fifth game of the World Series in Kansas City – a game best remembered for the Phillies’ ninth-inning rally and McGraw’s heart-stopping pitching to win it.

“It was a moment I dreamed about since I was five or six years old,” Bystrom said of pitching in the World Series. “Then, all of sudden, it was today is the day – this is the day I was dreaming about all of those years.”

Now if the Phillies can force the Game 7…

“We’re going to get to tomorrow,” Manuel said. “I don’t want to say if we get there, because we are going to get there.”

Philly boy Roys step up

SAN FRANCISCO — The signals will be evident quickly.

A breaking ball will bounce in the dirt in front of the plate. The fastball will be missing a few ticks on the radar gun without the typical bite. Worse, misses will be large both in and out of the strike zone.

In other words, adjustments will need to be made.

These are the warning signs to look for when Roy Oswalt takes the ball in Game 6 of the NLCS, just two days after his noble relief appearance in Game 4. Oswalt took a peek down at the Phillies’ bullpen as the game progressed into the late innings, saw manager Charlie Manuel’s options and went to put on his spikes. An inning after volunteering his services to the cause, Oswalt was pitching in the ninth inning of the tie game.

Though it didn’t end well for Oswalt or the Phillies, it was easy to admire the pitcher’s moxy. Sure, two days after his start in Game 2 is the day starting pitchers workout with a bullpen session, but Oswalt had already thrown for 20 minutes, iced down and settled in to watch the ballgame.

So that’s the backdrop for Game 6 where Oswalt will be working off two days rest again and the Giants’ lefty Jonathan Sanchez is pitching to avenge his loss in Game 2 where the Phillies scored three runs off him in six innings. Sanchez, the lefty who turned in a 1.01 ERA in six starts in September and whiffed 11 in seven innings against the Braves in the NLDS, will work on his normal rest.

It is with Oswalt, the pitcher who tried to be the hero in Game 4, where the story of Game 6 will unfold.

And just how worried are the Phillies that Oswalt could be slightly spent? Actually, not much. In fact, manager Charlie Manuel says Oswalt should be as ready as ever.

“I think he’s got a rubber arm, he’s kind of different in his style and he’s got a loose arm. That’s why he gets his rise on his fastball,” Manuel said. “He’s one of those guys that goes out there start playing catch and a guy picks up a ball you go out there, watch him, guy picks up the ball and he slowly starts working his way in playing long toss or catch. And Oswalt is one of these guys. He goes out there, gets a ball and starts gunning it right away. Like he’s throwing his warm ups are a guy throwing more than 50 or 60 percent at a time. So I look at that and I see all those things. I don't think it's going to hurt him at all. I think when he tells you he's ready, I think he's ready. He's also one of those guys that if he's got if he's got some kind of problem or something, he's hurt or something like that, I think he'll be the first he'll tell you.”

Oswalt said his bullpen work was just like a bullpen session and he felt no after affects. No, Oswalt isn’t quite like Cliff Lee or Pedro Martinez in eschewing the post-workout ice down, but there is something noble about Oswalt’s desire to help the team. The same goes for Roy Halladay, too, who pitched six innings with less than his best stuff and what turned out to be a strained right groin muscle.

Could Halladay come out of the bullpen in Game 7? That’s tough to know now, but Manuel hasn’t ruled it out.

Of course, October is where baseball legends are created. It’s one thing to take a normal turn and pitch on the assigned day, but it’s the times when pitchers go out there on short rest or in strange roles. Oswalt has jumped in to pitch between starts twice during his playoff career while pitching for the Astros. He was also getting loose during the epic, 18-inning game of the 2005 NLDS where Roger Clemens came in for the Astros and pitched the final three innings to get the win despite pitching two days prior.

Oswalt also pitched the clinching Game 6 of the NLCS where his three-hitter earned him the NLCS MVP and a new bulldozer from Astros’ owner, Drayton McLane.

The difference now from five years ago is that Oswalt understands how tough it is to get to the postseason. So if he’s in it he doesn’t want to go out easily. If he can pitch between starts, pinch run or, shoot, play left field like he did in an extra-inning game in August, he’ll put on the spikes and go to work.

“Once you get to the postseason and get to the World Series like we did in '05 and not get back, and five years later you realize how difficult it is to get back to the situation. So you try to treat it as it's maybe the last time,” Oswalt said. “You never are guaranteed anything. Doesn't matter how good a team you have. You may not ever get back in this situation. So when you are here you try to do everything possible when you're here.”

Which means his approach to Game 6 won’t change from any other game—be it a relief appearance with two days rest in the playoffs or a routine starting assignment.

“I try to pitch every game like the last one,” Oswalt said. “You never know, you're never guaranteed the next day. So it's going to be no different. Trying to attack hitters and make them beat me, not trying to put guys on. No different than any other game. It's a must win game but I treat every one of them like a must win.”

Then again, it’s simpler to just give the maximum effort every time.

And don’t be surprised if Halladay makes another appearance in the series. After all, that’s what the big aces do. There was Curt Schilling and his bloody sock, Randy Johnson pitching a complete game only to come back the next day to get the win in relief in Game 7 of the World Series…

Are we ready for the Phillies’ two Roys to join that list working with a strained groin and short rest?

“It depends on where we're at in the situation,” Manuel said. “Do I want to? No. But at the same time I'm not ruling it out. So don't be surprised and jump on me if I don't use him.”

Hard to fault anyone for trying to be the hero. After all, this is the best time of the year for them.

Phillies' struggles stretch to manager, too

SAN FRANCISCO — We like to give credit where it is due. After all, it’s much more fun to heap praise and be positive than it is to whine, complain and sulk over things that can’t be controlled. Then again, that’s pretty obvious.

As a manager of the four-time defending NL East champion Phillies, positivity is Charlie Manuel’s best tactic. He builds up his players by telling them how good they are and always filling their heads with thoughts that the hits and/or great pitches are going to be there when needed the most.

In fact, Manuel says that before Game 5 he’s going to walk through the clubhouse, look each of his players in the eyes and have a little chat. It won’t be anything as extreme as a pep talk, but maybe just a few words with each guy on the team.

“I don’t know if it will be about baseball or not,” Manuel said.

So yes, Manuel is great at keeping his guys loose as well as gauging the mood of the club. It’s probably the not-so secret to his success.

But as far as the managerial battle of wits with Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy, Manuel is about to get swept out of the series. Indeed, some of the in-game decisions from Manuel have not gone down as his best work and that has been exposed during the first two games played at AT&T Park.

When a manager consistently makes the same types of decisions and they work out, it’s difficult to blame it on luck. Oh sure, it might seem like he’s falling backwards only to nimbly land on his feet like a cat at the last second, but there is a fine line between instinct and luck.

However, in Game 3 and 4 of the NLCS which finds the Phillies on the brink of elimination, Manuel’s instincts have not been at his best. In fact, the choices Manuel made with his bullpen in Game 4 began with seeds sown in Game 3 when he used right-hander Jose Contreras for two innings and 24 pitches. That would have been a fine move had the Phillies been in position to actually win Game 3 rather than be shut down by starter Matt Cain.

Nevertheless, when Contreras went to the mound for a second inning in Game 3, it didn’t take much of a hunch that it would come back to haunt Manuel. As fate unraveled in Game 4, every button pushed seemed to be the wrong one. Knowing that he had starter Joe Blanton for five innings… six if he was lucky, it didn’t seem too well planned out that Contreras finished the previous game. That was evident when Blanton was removed from the game with two outs in the fifth when he was due to bat third in the next inning.

Instead of double-switching or using another reliever, Manuel burned Contreras again when he promptly finished the fifth and then was pinch-hit for.

Perhaps the move in the fifth inning could have been lefty Antonio Bastardo on lefty hitter Aubrey Huff with two outs and the speedy Andres Torres in scoring position?  But we’ll never know because Manuel left Blanton in for one hitter too long and then wasted his most effective setup man.

As it turned out, Manuel called on Chad Durbin to give him an inning or more only to have it explode on him like one of those trick cigars from the old cartoons. The problem with asking Durbin to give some innings in a pivotal game is he’s more than a little rusty. In his lone postseason performance, Durbin walked the only hitter he faced with two outs in the sixth inning of Game 2 of the NLDS against the Reds, only to end the inning by picking off the hitter to end the inning.

Until Game 4, those six pitches and the pick-off was the only work Durbin had in 17 days. Knowing this, why didn’t Manuel divide up the work to close out Game 3 instead of burning out Contreras? Can’t pitching coach Rich Dubee elbow Manuel in the ribs while on the bench to remind him to give his relievers some work?

From there, Manuel used Bastardo and Ryan Madson for the seventh and the eighth, which worked out. Bastardo retired the lefty Huff (two innings too late) and then gave up a double to Buster Posey before Madson closed out the inning with a walk and double play.

If that would have been the end, it was enough. But then the hit… er, misses, kept coming. Like in the eighth when Ryan Howard and Jayson Werth led off the inning with back-to-back doubles to tie it up, it was reasonable to expect a big inning. Except when Jimmy Rollins came up with Werth on second and no outs he didn’t get the runner over to third. Worse, he popped up to third baseman Pablo Sandoval without even a pass at a bunt or a pitch pulled to the right side.

According to the manager, the idea was for Rollins to pull the ball even though he had explained his shortstop was struggling to hit from the left side.

“Rollins usually pulls the ball. If he hits the ball to the right side of the diamond, that’s one of his strong points, he'’ got a short quick swing to the left side that he usually pulls the ball,” Manuel explained after the game. “Not only that, if he pulls the ball, he also has a chance to get a hit or drive the run in, and that's how you play the game. And we do that a lot with Rollins. We let him hit there because that’s one of his big strong suits from the left side is pull the ball.”

It was a strong suit when Rollins was healthy. But in the NLCS when there is a chance to avoid going down 3-1 in a best-of-seven series, it’s the wise move to bunt the runner over when the hitter has struggled and been injured.

Finally, the choice to put starter Roy Oswalt in the game on two days rest after he had iced down following his 20-minute side-day session wasn’t the type of out-of-the-box thinking that Manuel is known for… and it wasn’t this time, either.

Oswalt saw the way the game was unfolding and figured if he didn’t step up, Kyle Kendrick would have started the ninth inning of a big playoff game with the score tied.

Then again, that all would have been avoided if Contreras had not been misused in Game 3. It also would not have been as magnified if Bochy had not been on top of everything. If the Giants finish it off, the manager should get a lot of the credit…

And the blame.

The hard road to history

SAN FRANCISCO — Hours before Tuesday afternoon’s pivotal Game 3 at AT&T Park, Charlie Manuel said to no one in particular a wish that every Phillies fan was probably hoping for as the game progressed.

“I hope we score a lot of runs today—10, 15 or 20,” he said as he passed the time before the game.

However, it’s not known if Manuel was talking about one game in particular or the entire series. Either way, the Phillies appear to be in trouble. After all, in a postseason filled with tepid offensive performances, Tuesday’s was the worst of the bunch.

The Phillies scratched out just three hits, stranded seven runners and left three of them in scoring position on Tuesday as they were blanked in a playoff game for the first time since time since Game 5 of the 1983 World Series. Has there ever been a worse time for the Phillies to go belly-up with the bats?

“You know what? We can talk about the pitching. The pitching might have something to do with their swing. Our guys are trying. I mean, they might be trying too hard,” manager Charlie Manuel said after the the 3-0 defeat. “Look, when you don’t score no runs [or] you don’t get no hits, it’s hard to win the game. But I don’t know what we’re going to do about it. I can sit here and talk about it. I can go in and talk to them about it, but when the game starts tomorrow is when we can do something about it. You know, when the game starts, that’s when you’re supposed to hit. You’re kind of on your own when you leave a dugout.”

Trailing the best-of-seven series 2-1, there isn’t much Manuel can do about his lineup. Moreover, the players really don’t have too many answers for the hitting woes that began as soon as the playoffs started. Against the Reds in the NLDS, the Phillies batted .212 with one homer and two doubles in a three-game sweep. More troubling is that the hitting has gotten worse through the first three games of the NLCS.

With three hits against pitchers Matt Cain, Javier Lopez and Brian Wilson, the Phillies are batting just .195 in the NLCS. Things have reached a point that even the predictably patient Manuel opted to bust Raul Ibanez to the bench for Game 4 and start Ben Francisco in his place. That’s not too over the top considering Francisco, a right-handed hitter, will face lefty starter Madison Bumgarner and Ibanez is 0-for-11 in the series and hitless in his last 15 at-bats in the postseason. However, Francisco has appeared in one game since Oct. 3 and he ended up getting drilled on the helmet by a pitch in Game 2 of the NLDS.

That’s not exactly easing into game action.

“I would say from Raul's standpoint he’s kind of a warrior and he tries hard all the time. That’s who he is. And first of the year he was over-swinging and things like that. I’ve seen that in the last couple of days from him,” Manuel said, pointing out that the right-handed Francisco might be a better option against lefty Madison Bumgarner. 

Again, Manuel doesn’t have too many options. Between ineffectiveness and Chase Utley’s incomplete swing, the Phillies are in a rare position. After all, the recent playoff runs were over rather quickly. As watchers, we’re not used to watching the Phillies fall behind, come back and force the series to go long. Sure, they fell behind 2-1 in the 1993 NLCS to Atlanta to win the series, but that’s ancient history. Plus, the Phillies were underdogs in that series.

This time the Phillies are the overwhelming favorites to win the NLCS with many astute baseball analysts projecting them to reach the World Series with the brute force of the league’s most formidable starting rotation.

Not so fast says Manuel.

The Phillies of 2010 are not the same as they were in 2008 or 2009, Manuel said. The opposition has adapted and adjusted to the Phillies’ offense. For instance, it used to be that hitters like Shane Victorino or Jimmy Rollins would see fastballs because pitchers weren’t too keen on facing Chase Utley, Ryan Howard or Jayson Werth.

That’s all changed now. Instead, the Phillies don’t see too many fastballs at all anymore. Even against hard-throwing right-hander Matt Cain in Game 3 the Phillies didn’t get a single base hit on a breaking pitch.

No, the Phillies aren’t fooling anyone these days.

“One of the problems with our hitting is you’ve got advance scouts and all the TV and Internet and things like that, and nowadays they go to school on your hitters, and they pitch us backwards a lot,” Manuel said. “When I say backwards, that means when we’re ahead in the count they don’t give us fastballs, they give us breaking balls and change-ups and they pitch to us more. Especially our little guys, they don’t throw those guys the fastballs they used to. 

“We’re basically a fastball-hitting team, and a lot of times you see them a count will go 3 and 1 or 2 and 1 or 2 and 0 or something like that they’ll throw us a breaking ball or something like that we swing at it and we put it in play and dribble it. Those counts two or three years ago, those were fastballs because they would look and see the middle of our lineup and they didn’t want to get down to our third and fourth hitter or even fifth hitter in some ways, but at the same time those other guys got more fastballs. They’ve gone to school on us.”

This is not something that can be fixed quickly, either, Manuel said. His hitters are going to have to make some big changes, the manager explained.

“We talk about that a lot. Our guys like to swing, and the whole thing about it is when you get up in the count, you’re supposed to get a good ball to hit. Sometimes we do not get a good ball we can hit or handle,” Manuel said. “We put the ball in play. We try to put the ball in play, of course, with two strikes on you, if you've got to cut your swing, put the ball in play, don’t strike out. We don’t make some of the adjustments.

“And you can talk about these things, but they’ve got to hit home and you’ve got to work on improving on those things. It definitely might take a while. But the league kind of has adjusted to some of our hitters if you sat there and watched the games. If you look at our lineup and you see the adjustments we’ve made in the last couple of years and how the pitchers pitch us now, then we still gotta make some adjustments against how they pitch us.

“Can we? Yeah, definitely we have the talent to do that.”

Teams don’t win 97 games to wrap up a fourth straight division title by accident. But sometimes the best teams don’t win. Remember the Oakland A’s of 1988 and 1990? Clearly those teams were the best in the game, in fact, in 1988 the A’s ranked second in runs and homers, but when the World Series arrived the bats went ice cold. In losing to the Dodgers in five games, the A’s batted .177 and scored just 11 runs while the only victory came in a 2-1 decision thanks to a walk-off homer by Mark McGwire.

It was the same story in 1990, only this time the A’s were swept by the Reds, tallying just eight runs in the series and batting .207. Six of the A’s runs came on homers in the ’90 series.

Are the Phillies resigned to the same fate as the Amazing A’s? Could they become a footnote in history with just one title when it could have been many more?

We’ll find out soon.

Cliff Lee's influence on Cole Hamels

SAN FRANCISCO — Let’s discuss Cliff Lee for a moment…

Alright, alright, we get it. No one wants to talk about Cliff Lee like that. It hurts too much or something. But after he fired a 13-strikeout, two-hitter in Yankee Stadium to give the Rangers a 2-1 lead in the ALCS, we’ll just leave that stuff with one, short and sweet point…

It’s not like the Phillies would be in any different position than they are right now if Cliff Lee were still on the Phillies. They swept the Reds, Roy Halladay lost Game 1 of the NLCS, Roy Oswalt won Game 2, and Cole “Roy” Hamels is ready to go in Game 3. It wouldn’t matter if the Phillies had Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay and Grover Cleveland Alexander—they still would be tied with the Giants headed to Game 3 with Hamels ready to take the ball.

Instead, let’s discuss what Cliff Lee left behind when he was traded to the Mariners last December for Phillippe Aumont, Tyson Gillies and J.C. Ramirez, barely a month after he put together the best postseason by a Phillies’ pitcher since ol’ Pete Alexander. But, strangely enough, Lee’s lasting impression on Hamels and his resurgence in 2010 all starts with a September gem pitched by Pedro Martinez against the Mets.

Remember that one? Pedro dialed it up for eight scoreless innings with just six hits and 130 purposeful pitches. Frankly, it was an artistic and masterful pitched game by Pedro against the Mets. In baseball, there is the nuance and the minutia that the devout understand, but the genius supersedes all. It stands out and hovers over the season in a way that a highlight film cannot capture.

Pedro painted that Sunday night game in September at the Bank. Sure, it was the 130 pitches that opened the most eyes, but that’s just half of it. It was the way he showed off those 130 pitches. For instance, David Wright saw nothing but fastballs in his first three at-bats without so much as a sniff at an off-speed pitch. But in his fourth at-bat Pedro struck out Wright after starting him off with a pair of change ups before turning back to the heat.

After strike three, Wright walked away from the plate like he didn’t know if he was coming or going.

Wright wasn’t alone. After throwing nine total changeups to every hitter the first time through the Mets’ lineup—except for Wright, of course—no hitter saw anything more off-speed than a handful of curves the second time around. That changeup, Pedro’s best pitch, wasn’t thrown at all.

So by the third and fourth time through the Mets could only guess. By that point Pedro was simply trying not to outsmart himself or his catcher Carlos Ruiz, who seemed as if he was just along for the ride. In fact, Pedro said that the he purposely bounced a pitch in the dirt (a changeup) that teased Daniel Murphy into making a foolhardy dash for third base that led to the final out of the eighth inning.

Yes, he intentionally threw one in the dirt on a 0-1 offering. Whether or not he did it thinking Murphy might make a break for third is a different issue, but not one to put past Pedro’s thinking.   

So mesmerized by the audacity, fearlessness and the brilliance of Pedro’s pitching, that I thought it would be wise to ask one of the team’s pitchers to offer some insight from a pitcher who could better understand the nuance of the effort better than me. Sure, it’s possible I was over thinking the performance, but it really was quite fascinating trying to figure out the chess match that occurred on the mound. Needless to say, Cliff Lee was my first choice to pepper with questions, but he had already bolted for the evening.

Then Hamels walked into the room. Certainly Hamels would be able to satisfy my need for overwrought analysis. After all, he is a pitcher, right? A pitcher has to be fascinated by the art of pitching…

Right?

What I learned was that Hamels didn’t see things my way when I asked him my questions.

I said something like, “do you look at a game like the one Pedro just pitched the way a painter or a musician might admire another artist? Was it fun to just watch the pitch sequences and wonder what he might do next?”

The answer?

“No.”

“I don’t look at things that way. I just saw it as a guy going out there and doing his job,” Hamels said.

Certainly there is something to be said for a guy doing his job. That’s an admirable trait for a man to have. But we weren’t talking about a guy who spent all day working in the mines and then went home and helped his neighbor put in a patio. This was Pedro Martinez we were trying to talk about. If Sandy Koufax was the Rembrandt of the mound, Pedro certainly was Picasso.

But at that stage of his development, pitching was just hammer-and-nail type stuff to Hamels. Not even a year after he had won the MVP in the NLCS and World Series, Hamels had just won a game two days before Pedro’s work of art to improve his record to 9-9 and his ERA to 4.21. Clearly those were the numbers of a pitcher fighting against himself.

Eventually Hamels got it. Yes, it took some time away for the field and maybe even some work with a mental guru/coach, but Hamels finally understood what pitching coach Rich Dubee and manager Charlie Manuel had been trying to tell him.

He needed more tools in his belt than just the hammer and nail. Hamels’ arsenal of fastball and changeup just wasn’t enough anymore.

“He’s added a cutter,” Manuel said during Monday afternoon’s workout at AT&T Park on the eve of Game 3. “His fastball, his velocity is up from last year. Basically he sits there right now I’d say he sits there like 92, 94, 95 consistently, and whereas before he was like 88, 92. And I think the cutter’s helped him.”

It doesn’t hurt that Halladay throws a cutter—a pitch that is held very much like a four-seam fastball except for the pitcher’s thumb, which rests closer to his index finger. Halladay (obviously) has had great success with the pitch this season. Mariano Rivera could go down as the greatest closer and the greatest breaker of bats because of his hard cutter. Just like the split-finger fastball that Bruce Sutter and Mike Scott made famous in the 1970s and 1980s, the cutter is the pitch these days.

Still, the light bulb didn’t go off above Hamels’ head until he watched Cliff Lee throw it during the postseason of ’09. Actually, Lee’s cutter has been so good during the 2010 postseason that the Yankees’ announcers have accused the pitcher of cheating by using rosin on the ball. But it was such a silly premise that Yankees’ manager Joe Girardi debunked it.

Adding on his latest gem, Lee is 3-0 with a 0.75 ERA and 34 strikeouts in 24 innings this season. Coupled with his run for the Phillies in 2009, Lee is 7-0 with a 1.26 ERA with 67 strikeouts and seven walks in 64 1/3 innings.

Now the question is if Lee gets some inspiration points to his stat line for his influence on Hamels.

“I think being able to watch Cliff Lee last year throwing the cutter and how much it really helped out this game, and having Roy Halladay come over and seeing what a significant pitch it is to his repertoire, I felt it could be a very good pitch for me to add especially because it goes the other direction as a change-up,” Hamels said. “It’s just a few different miles an hour off in between a fastball and a change-up so it’s just kind of makes it a little bit harder for hitters to really pick a pitch and a specific location to really get there type of better approach.”

Hamels picked it up quickly, too. By the third game of the season his cutter was good enough that the lefty could throw it confidently in any situation or any count. Better yet, the addition of the cutter with a curveball for show, too, has made Hamels’ best pitch better.

And to think, all he had to do was watch what the pitchers were doing out there.

“He can throw the ball inside effectively and it opens up the strike zone for his best pitch, the change up,” said ex-teammate and current Giants’ center fielder, Aaron Rowand.

Of course it’s just one pitch and the selection of when and where to throw it is always important. However, Hamels finally added to his repertoire just like Manuel and Dubee wanted, and all he had to do was watch what was going on.

A look back at the Halladay-Lincecum duel

Pat Burrell and Cody Ross were downright giddy sitting while sitting at the dais to answer questions after Saturday night’s first game of the NLCS. It was no wonder considering Burrell and Ross were the big hitting heroes in Game 1, which made the actual conversing with media types a slight bit tolerable.

At least for Burrell.

There was more to it than that, of course, and it had little to do with the fact that both Burrell and Ross were players that we let go by the teams they began the season with. Burrell, of course, was not re-signed by the Phillies after he led the World Series parade down Broad St. and then was waived by Tampa Bay in May.

Ross was claimed off waivers by the Giants from the Marlins in late August not because he was wanted, but to stop the outfielder from going to divisional foe San Diego. The Giants were 5 ½ games behind the Padres when Ross joined them and didn’t even a need a month to slip into first place. Were Ross and his .286 average for the Giants the difference? Probably not, but the home run in the clincher in Game 4 of the NLDS along with the two bombs in Game 1 against the Phillies made the Giants’ prevent defense against the Padres look pretty good.

No, Burrell’s RBI double and Ross’s homers were most responsible for ruining the expected pitching duel between Roy Halladay and Tim Lincecum. In fact, Halladay looked like he was on his way to another epic performance in his first start since his no-hitter against the Reds in his playoff debut.

Halladay retired the side in order on eight pitches in the first and 11 pitches in the second. He got an out on three pitches in the third until Ross swung at a 2-0 pitch, did a little crow hop and watched the ball sail into the left-field seats. They seal had been broken.

Starting with Ross’s homer, the Giants rapped out eight hits over the next 22 hitters covering 4 2/3 innings. Still, there was the two-strike pitch with two outs to Burrell that Halladay thought was good he began his first steps back to the first-base dugout. Inexplicably to Halladay, home-plate umpire Derryl Cousins called it a ball. One pitch later, Burrell bashed his double off Raul Ibanez’s glove and the left-field wall.

Some duel, huh?

“I made some bad pitches at times. The first pitch to Ross I didn’t think was that bad, but the second one I left a ball over the plate. And then in the sixth a couple pitches there cost me,” Halladay said. “At this point you make a couple mistakes and they end up costing you.”

Ah, but maybe there was a pitching duel after all. You see, after Halladay gave up the homer to Ross, Lincecum served up one to Carlos Ruiz. He also gave up a homer to Jayson Werth to help the Phillies crawl back to within a run. That’s exactly where Lincecum was better than Halladay because he was able to recover from the initial home run.

That, obviously, was the difference.

Lincecum held the Phillies to an 0-for-5 with runners in scoring position and 1-for-11 with runners on base. Better yet, Lincecum held the Phillies to a 2-for-11 with two outs, which made sure to kill any hope for a late rally.

“It wasn’t about the numbers. It was about giving us a chance to win,” Lincecum said after the game. “I put those home runs behind me. You could squash yourself on that, make some more bad pitches, but I just took it on to the next batter after that, man. It was just enough to squeak by for us.”

Yeah, man.

Now here’s the really crazy part…

With 22 strikeouts (14 vs. the Braves in the NLDS, 8 vs. the Phillies) in his first two playoff games, Lincecum is tied with the great Bob Gibson for the most Ks in the first two games pitched. [1] Yes, Lincecum and Bob Gibson.

Let that soak in for a bit.

Now what’s the first thing a person thinks about when Bob Gibson’s name is mentioned? If it isn’t intimidation, brush back pitches, a nasty fastball and intensity. His teammates were afraid to talk to him and opponents were just afraid of him. Jim Ray Hart, a slugging third baseman for the Giants in the 1960s and early ‘70s, tells the classic Bob Gibson story:

“Between games, Mays came over to me and said, ‘Now, in the second game, you’re going up against Bob Gibson.’ I only half-listened to what he was saying, figuring it didn't make much difference. So I walked up to the plate the first time and started digging a little hole with my back foot... No sooner did I start digging that hole than I hear Willie screaming from the dugout: ‘Noooooo!’ Well, the first pitch came inside. No harm done, though. So I dug in again. The next thing I knew, there was a loud crack and my left shoulder was broken. I should have listened to Willie.”

Hart should have called time out and filled up the hole the way it was.

Now compare Gibson with Lincecum, the floppy-haired 26-year-old right-ahnder from the Seattle suburbs. He kind of blends in with the kids hanging out in the Haight or Mitch Kramer in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, than the typical ballplayer sent from central casting.

But here’s the thing about that—like Gibson, Lincecum can pitch. He has a fastball he’s not afraid to challenge hitters with and has added a changeup to go with it. And like it was with Gibson, sometimes it’s just not fair when Lincecum takes the mound.

Of course there are also other times when Lincecum can be gotten to, like Game 1 at the Bank. The problem for the Phillies was Lincecum gave the Phillies a few chances and opened the door ever-so slightly before slamming it closed before it was too late.

Will Halladay and Lincecum get after each other again?

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[1] Gibson struck out nine in a loss to the Yankees in Game 2 of the 1964 World Series, then came back to get 13 in 10 innings in Game 5. For good measure, Gibson went the distance in Game 7 and got nine more strikeouts to lead the Cardinals to the title.

Werth, Howard know that experience matters

When Jayson Werth got home after last season’s World Series, he didn’t expect to feel the way he did. Sure, losing the World Series to the Yankees is never easy and it would seem that winning it all one year and then falling short in six games the next would temper some of the disappointment, but Werth says he was actually surprised at how emotional he felt.

Granted, Werth didn’t have any expectations of what losing the World Series is supposed to feel like, but when it actually happened it was like a punch in the jaw.

“Looking back I might be a little surprised about the emptiness, but it’s not like I’m sitting around and thinking about, ‘what if, what if,’” Werth explained. “We just have to get out there and start playing. It’s the stuff that comes after—the emotions.”

Perched at a table in a parking lot turned conference hall, Werth went over what he went through during the off-season and how that has shaped the team’s goals for this season and the playoffs. With Game 1 of the NLCS against the Giants set to begin on Saturday night at the Bank, Werth and the Phillies are getting closer to where they want to be, but know all too well how much work remains.

For some reason Werth and his teammate Ryan Howard understand that their experiences have hardened their focus on the current task. They are ready for anything and everything that comes their way. But mostly Werth wants to avoid that emptiness again.

“When I look back to last offseason, I got home and I had a sour taste in my mouth,” Werth said on Friday afternoon. “I definitely have always been the type of person who wants to win and hates to lose, so it probably started last winter. You take a few weeks off and you start to work out and everything hurts and you feel like you haven’t worked out in a couple of years, you slowly build up and you get to spring training and you get ready to go at it again, but the thoughts of all your accomplishments and non-accomplishments are very fresh.

“At the start of the year I definitely had a goal in mind and here we are many months later with a chance to see those goals through with a chance to succeed on the grand stage. It’s an exciting time, but at the same time your ability to focus goes way up and the end result is so near and so close—we’re not many games away. It has a lot to do with a lot of things. You wake up in the morning and you know why you’re going to the ballpark, you know why you’re out there practicing, and you have a sense of what’s going on maybe more than a lot of people realize.

“The old saying that we live for this, I guess it holds true.”

That’s where Werth and the Howard believe the Phillies have an advantage. Experience, especially playoff experience, cannot be measured. Sure, there have been some inexperienced teams that won the World Series, but those runs rarely last more than a season or two. And yes, some seasoned baseball men will tell you that experience rarely supersedes talent or luck, but in the same breath they will explain how it’s the greatest intangible.

The Phillies are loaded with experience. In fact, Werth, Howard, Shane Victorino, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley and Carlos Ruiz have started 35 straight playoff games together. They have been through it all… together.

Oh sure, the Giants have six players with World Series rings, including Edgar Renteria who ended Game 7 of the 1997 World Series with a walk-off single in the 12^th inning, and Pat Burrell whose long double set the table for the Phillies’ clinching victory in Game 5 of the 2008 World Series. But the Giants also have 16 players who are advancing past the first round for the very first time.

“Each year you learn a little bit more—you grow. Starting in 2007 we didn’t know what to expect so we were the new guys, but once we made it again in 2008 we knew what to expect,” Howard said. “We stayed focused and we knew what we wanted to accomplish. From 2008 to 2009, we wanted to do it again and we got there, but fell short.

“Now we’ve seen all the different aspects of it from just getting there, to getting there and getting on top, to getting there and coming up short.”

Losing to the Yankees last year after setting the record for most strikeouts in the history of the World Series bothers Howard. He doesn’t like talking about failure. Never did. Then again, most ballplayers are like that, which is why Werth describing his disappointment at losing last year is significant. When it all came to a close at Yankee Stadium last November, Werth, Howard and their teammates said all the right things. They built a convincing façade that hid the reality that the defeat stung as bad as it did.

Hell, word around the clubhouse after Game 6 was that Werth announced there were 100 days to spring training during the team’s final gathering for a post-game beer.

At the same time, the Phillies would trade that experience for anything. There’s something about calloused and hardened focus that can push a guy. As one Phillie likes to say, quoting a buddy in the Marines, “Pain is weakness leaving the body.”

Yes, experience matters.

“It helps. It definitely does. If you look back at 2007 when we first got into the playoffs we went up against a buzz saw team in the Rockies and we didn’t fare too well. I think experience had something to do with that,” Werth said. “The next year we go to Milwaukee and the first game there—that first night in Milwaukee—it was louder than any place I’ve ever been and it affected us. We were shell shocked a little bit and we lost that game and then the next night we came out and it was just as loud, and it had no affect on us.

“We’re in our fourth year of the postseason now and there’s definitely something to be said for postseason experiences and all that going forward.”

Said Howard: “Being there. Being in those situations from before. We don’t panic. We’ve been in these situations before so we’re not going to panic. We’ve been up, we’ve been down and had to come back. We’ve seen it all.”

That’s what the Phillies are clinging to. Even going up against Tim Lincecum, who threw a magnificent, two-hit, 14-strikeout shutout against the Braves in his playoff debut hasn’t fazed the Phillies. They know Lincecum and respect him.

But then again every pitcher this time of the year is dangerous. All of them. The Dodgers were supposed to have the pitching staff and deep bullpen that was going to outlast the Phillies in 2008 and 2009, but it just didn’t happen that way. Both times the Phillies won in five games.

“We’ve seen him quite a bit. We know what he’s featuring and what to expect,” Werth said about Lincecum, but then again...

“We’ve seen some pretty good pitching over the years,” he added. “When you get to this level they’re all pretty good. We’ve been here before and with the experience we’ve had it definitely helped us along the way.”

A veteran and tested playoff club, the Phillies can’t wait to get started. They want to get back to work.

“I’m feeling good, I’m feeling alright. I’m excited for tomorrow night,” Howard said.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to rhyme. That was my Muhammad Ali moment.”

To be the man...

A couple of years during the height of the off-season war of words between the Phillies and the Mets, I asked Charlie Manuel if the bantering back and forth bothered him. To be fair, nearly all of it was a media creation and no one realized at the time that the Mets were overrated. Simply, the Mets weren’t anything the Phillies needed to worry about.

So the question was broached if Charlie enjoyed the trash talk on any level and if it motivated him or his team.

“No, not really,” he said. “I prefer if we just play.”

Hard to argue with that, though Charlie said he didn’t mind the yapping and wasn’t even considering bringing it up with his team, which, to me, was the most interesting part.

See, Manuel trusted his players and wasn’t going to get wrapped up in any type of silliness. His job was to create an environment where all his players had to do was their job. That’s it. Manuel knows that ballplayers making millions of dollars don’t need someone to motivate them with yelling and bluster. Instead, the Phillies manager tells his players how good they are and how they help the team win games.

He makes them feel like going to work.

Yes, if there is one thing Charlie Manuel knows a lot about it’s how to keep his team motivated. It’s simple, really. He lets his players play and if they do the job better than someone else, they get the job. He also perfectly balances that ideology with one where he doesn’t abandon a struggling player. When Raul Ibanez and Brad Lidge slumped during the second half of 2009 and early 2010, Manuel was in their corner. Eventually, the players returned to their old form and pointed to Manuel’s support as a driving force.

Everything can be used to be a motivator. When the Phillies were underdogs trying to find their way through their early playoff runs, Manuel fell back on a line popularized by Ric Flair, the 14-time heavyweight world champion of professional rasslin’. It’s the same line he used during a media session on Thursday afternoon when discussing the notion that the Phillies had moved past underdog status and to the favorites to win the World Series.

Manuel says he was reminded of the old Ric Flair axiom when he saw old protégé Pat Burrell on television on Thursday morning talking about how the Phillies were the top team until another team knocked them out.

“I heard Burrell in an interview morning, when I woke up and turned the TV on. He said, 'To be the best you've got to beat the best.' That's one of my slogans,” Manuel said. “It's Ric Flair. You’re going to Space Mountain... What the hell? You know what happens at Space Mountain? You’ve got to get there and you’ve got to conquer it. You’ve got to stay there. That’s kind of what we want to do.”

Now for those who have hung around the Phils’ manager a bit, the Ric Flair quote is nothing new. In fact, it comes out a couple of times a year while chatting before a game in the dugout. Manuel, like a lot of us who grew up in the age of limited TV options, loves the rasslin’, though he altered The Nature Boy’s mantra a bit from, “To be the man, you gotta beat the man,” a bit he even used for his autobiography.

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Still, you have to like a man who uses the words of a pro wrestler as way of keeping the troops ready instead of, say, a president. And Manuel knows a thing about presidents, too. After all, the trip to the White House in May of 2009 made Barack Obama is the sixth sitting president that Manuel has met, a distinguished list that includes George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Harry S Truman.

One of the more interesting meetings with a president came when Manuel ran into President Clinton before the first game at Jacobs Field where the President was on hand to throw the ceremonial first pitch. Clinton was waiting in the restroom adjacent to the dugout to go onto the field to make his pitch when Manuel went into the room.

“What are you doing in here?” the president asked Manuel.

“I was going to take a leak.” Manuel answered.

When Manuel was a freshman in high school he attended a parade in Lexington, Va. when then ex-president Truman asked him to hold open a door. The two chatted briefly before parting ways, but who would have known then that Manuel would meet five more presidents along the way.

“Reagan asked me if there is anything he could do for me,” Manuel remembered. “And I said, ‘Yeah, help me get a job as a big league manager.’”

That one Manuel probably did on his own by dropping lines from champion rasslers.

The Big Red Machine of the 21st Century

Baby boomers selling you rumors of their history
Forcing youth away from the truth of what's real today
The kids of today should defend themselves against the ‘70s

-          Mike Watt, “Against the ‘70s”

CINCINNATI — We’re getting closer to a definitive answer. If we are led to believe anything after three games of the NLDS, it’s that the Phillies have the pitching to win the World Series. In fact, the Phillies pitching is so good it doesn’t even matter if they don’t hit a lick.

The Phillies didn’t hit a little bit in the NLDS and cruised to the sweep, but does that tell us how good they are? If there is one question we came looking for during the first round of the playoffs it was that one.

Really, how good are the Phillies?

OK, that’s a loaded question because, obviously the team is good enough to win it all. However, because we are at the point in this era of the Phillies’ Golden Age that nothing less than a World Series title will suffice, we have to think of the question in the historical sense. In that regard there are two measuring sticks for National League teams—the 1940s St. Louis Cardinals and the Big Red Machine of the 1970s.

The Cardinals were the last National League team to go to the World Series three seasons in a row. From 1942 to 1944, the Cardinals won the World Series twice and added a third title in 1946. With Stan Musial, perhaps the greatest hitter in history[1], the Cardinals are the benchmark for which all National League teams should be measured. Sure, the Dodgers of the 1950s and 1960 were juggernauts, as were the Braves teams that won 14 straight division titles. But the Cardinals won three titles in five seasons.

The Phillies should equal the Cardinals three straight trips to the World Series this season, but the team they are most compared to are the Reds.

The Big Red Machine sprang to life in 1970 when they lost the World Series to the Orioles. They lost it again in 1972 to the Oakland A’s, fell short in the NLCS in 1973 and 1979, but came through with back-to-back titles in 1975 and 1976. No National League team has won back-to-back titles since and only the 1921-22 New York Giants and 1907-08 Chicago Cubs have won two World Series in a row from the senior circuit.

So, are the Phillies as good as The Big Red Machine? It probably won’t be a question that truly gets answered with some authority until after the World Series, but make no mistake that folks are talking about it. In fact, resident team baseball historian Jimmy Rollins had called his group The Little Red Machine as a homage to the Reds and gave a nod to both team’s power hitters and speed games. Both teams also had strong bullpens and played great defense with multiple Gold Glovers on both clubs.

Fortunately there are a lot of guys around from the days who both covered and played for The Big Red Machine. In fact, 1976 MVP Joe Morgan attended all three games of the NLDS with Reds’ GM Walt Jocketty and said that the comparisons are fair.

“If you're a good team, you’re a good team,” Morgan said. “You’re supposed to win. That’s the way you look at it. The experience doesn’t really factor into it. When I was with the Reds, we saw ourselves as the best team, so we felt like we were supposed to win.”

Listening to their words and watching the body language at Great America Ball Park for Game 3 on Sunday night, it was clear that the Phillies believe they are the best team in the league. It’s a cliché, but the Phillies have an aura and an intimidation factor that often overwhelms teams. During pregame stretch before the Reds finished up their BP rounds, Phillies’ players stood along the baseline and watched the opponents go through their paces. Typically, teams tend to quietly go about their business and ignore the other team, but the Phillies seem to be staring them down like a basketball team settling on the half court line while the opposition goes through its lay-up line.

Maybe the intent isn’t to intimidate, but these Phillies have a definite swagger. Sure, they are pretty good guys who enjoy being together, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some cockiness when they step on the field.

“With our pitching and our lineup, we match up well against anybody,” Jayson Werth said. “We feel confident whoever we face the rest of the way. Don't get me wrong—we still have to play the games and win them, but we are where we need to be.”

Listening to Morgan speak about the Reds of his day, the sentiment is exactly the same.

“If you think you have the best team, then you have blinders on and you just go play,” Morgan said. “You don’t care who you’re playing. Now, if you’re the 1927 Yankees, and you know [as the opponent] that they have the best team, then you have to have a different approach.”

The consensus amongst some of the old-timers who watched the Reds play and were at the ballpark to cover the series break it down this way… The Big Red Machine had better hitters, but the 2010 Phillies have better pitching.

And pitching wins, right?

Then again, the Reds lineup had Hall-of-Famers Johnny Bench, arguably the greatest catcher ever; Morgan, arguably the greatest second baseman ever; and Tony Perez, a veritable RBI machine and the leader of the club.

But don’t forget Pete Rose, the all-time hit king and bona fide Hall-of-Famer if his lifetime suspension hadn’t fouled things up. Don’t forget guys like Davey Concepcion, the best shortstop in the National League before Ozzie Smith’s emergence; Ken Griffey Sr., a three-time All-Star; slugger George Foster, the one-time owner of the record for most homers in a season by a National League player; and Cesar Geronimo, a four-time Gold Glove Award winner and a .306 hitter in 1976.

Obviously it’s tough to counter a starting pitching staff made up of Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels, and the Reds didn’t have a standout ace until they traded for Tom Seaver in 1978. However, in winning 102 games in 1976, the Reds had seven guys win at least 11 games and a team-wide 3.51 ERA. Meanwhile, the bullpen saved 45 games and turned in a 3.15 ERA. The Phillies’ strength, obviously, is in the rotation, which is the nexus of that swagger.

But whether the Phillies get to the status of The Big Red Machine is still to be determined. There are two more rounds of playoffs to get through, which is something the Reds never had to contend with. In the meantime, the Little Red Machine moniker works… for now.

Needless to say, the Phillies are working to get into that rarified plateau of greatness.

“We’re a veteran group of guys,” Werth said. “We weren’t always that way. As much time as we spend together and the type of guys we have on this team, I would say that’s what you can expect from us, you know?”

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[1] Here it is… Stan Musial was the most underrated player in Major League Baseball history. That’s right. Sure, it’s tough to slip under the radar with 3,630 hits, 475 homers and a .331 lifetime batting average, but Musial hardly gets the due as his contemporaries Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. Unlike Williams, Musial’s teams won championships, and frankly, winning matters. Of course Williams lost years of his prime to military service and there is no telling what could have happened in those seasons—reasonably, Williams could have hit 700 homers and got 4,000 hits. However, the sense from the scores of books and stories written about Williams indicates he was more concerned with his own stats instead of what was good for the Red Sox. Williams’ notable moments were when he hit a home run to win the All-Star Game and went 6-for-8 on the last day of the 1941 season to bat .406. Musial’s best days were all the times he showed up at the ballpark. To this day Musial is known by everyone in St. Louis and regarded as one of the nicest men ever to grace a uniform. Maybe it has something to do with playing in St. Louis instead of Boston, but the point remains… if I was putting together a team and had to choose between Williams and Musial, give me Stan the Man.

Measuring the postseason gems

CINCINNATI — The so-called year of the pitcher has made a seamless transition into the postseason. Obviously, Roy Halladay’s no-hitter against the Reds in Game 1 of the NLDS stands out, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Heading into Saturday’s action, the Texas Rangers had allowed just one run against Tampa Bay in the first two games of the ALDS. That wouldn’t be as extraordinary if the Rays hadn’t finished the regular season with the best record in the American League and were one game behind the Phillies for best record in the majors.

In Game 1 Texas got a 10-strikeouts, zero-walks gem from Cliff Lee followed by 6 1/3 innings of shutout ball from lefty C.J. Wilson, a pitcher wrapping up his first season as a starter in the big leagues and his first real chance to star since 2005 when he was in Double-A.

Cole Hamels again tore through the Reds’ lineup in Game 3 of the NLDS, clinching the series with a five-hit, nine-strikeout shutout. As a result, the Phillies got their first-ever sweep of a playoff series (they were swept, coincidentally, by the Reds in 1976), posting a 1.00 ERA and holding the Reds to a .124 batting average.

Think about that for a second… the Reds led the National League in runs, batting average, homers, on-base percentage and slugging, but got just four runs and 11 hits in three games.

The year of the pitcher, indeed.

Nevertheless, the pitching performance that everyone has been yapping about since it went down on Thursday night is Tim Lincecum’s 14-strikeout, two-hitter in the Giants’ 1-0 victory over the Braves in Game 1of the other NLDS matchup. Forget that the Giants only scratched out one (controversial) run against Derek Lowe or the fact that the Giants weren’t exactly tearing the cover off the ball, the big theme of this postseason is all pitching.

Then again, that doesn’t make this season any different from any other baseball playoffs. However, through just the first round this year there have been as many top-shelf pitching performances by guys in their playoff debuts in recent memory. In fact, there has even been some chatter that Lincecum’s two-hitter was a better pitched game than Halladay’s no-hitter.

Certainly by the Bill James devised Game Score, Lincecum’s gem registered a 96 and was the second-best pitched game in the history of the postseason. That, of course, is according to the formula that skews toward strikeouts and innings pitched, but gives no credence to efficiency, the significance of the game, or emotion. For instance, the highest rated postseason game ever was a 98 by Roger Clemens’ one-hit, 15-strikeout victory over the Mariners in Game 4 of the 2000 ALCS, a game that gave the Yankees a 3-1 lead in the series.

Meanwhile, Jack Morris’ 10-inning shutout in Game 7 of the 1991 World Series rated just an 84. Hamels’ shutout on Sunday night to beat the Reds scored an 86 and the Phillies’ lefty threw a half-dozen fewer pitches and one less inning than Morris.

Plus, it wasn’t the seventh game of the World Series, either.

Anyway, to rate Lincecum’s two-hitter higher than Halladay’s no-hitter, Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, or even Morris’ gritty gem, is just plain silly. This isn’t to take anything away from Lincecum, who was brilliant in the Giants’ Game 1 victory over the Braves, but it wasn’t nearly as good as Halladay’s no-hitter in Game 1.

Do we really need to spell it out?

Well, OK… try these:

• Halladay threw just the second no-hitter in postseason play. Moreover, Halladay was the first pitcher to carry a no-hitter into the eighth inning of a playoff game since Jim Lonborg did it in the 1967 World Series. The Major League Baseball postseason began in 1903 and has taken place every season since 1904 and 1994. Imagine the tension that goes on in a typical no-hitter, let alone one in the playoffs.

• Halladay threw a no-hitter against the team that led the league in every important offensive category (and even some unimportant ones), while Lincecum beat a team that struggled at the plate during the final month of the season and featured a lineup without Chipper Jones and Martin Prado.

• Did you see the swings the Reds took at the pitches Halladay threw? He owned them. Better yet, Halladay needed just 104 pitches to finish his no-hitter. Lincecum needed 119 pitches to finish his game and gave up a pair of doubles, including a ringing shot by Brian McCann, a hitter who has batted .381 in his career against the pitcher. Conversely, Halladay gave up 13 hits to the Reds in a loss in June, but figured out how to get them out in the playoffs.

• Lincecum gave up a hit to the first batter of the game, removing all the pressure and tension that goes with throwing a no-hitter. The kid could simply settle in and go about his work. Halladay was so good that it would have been shocking for him not to throw the no-hitter.

Frankly, it seems as some have claimed that Lincecum’s gem was better than the no-hitter just to be different or make an argument. Whatever. Either way, it’s not correct. Halladay’s no-hitter was dominant and sublime. It was a work of art—poetry come to life.

However, where Lincecum scores points comes from this interview with Wiley Wiggins, the actor that played Mitch Kramer in the phenomenal Dazed and Confused. Mitch Kramer was a pitcher who won big ballgames, too. That ought to count for something.

Is Roy Halladay ready for the Hall of Fame now?

The press release came out on Thursday afternoon that the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum had accepted a donation from Roy Halladay to display the jersey he wore during Wednesday night’s no-hitter. The curators of the museum already have the cap Halladay wore on that humid night in Miami during May when he pitched a perfect game against the Marlins.

In other words, a visit to the museum on Main Street in Cooperstown, N.Y. will reveal a veritable Roy Halladay wing where baseball fans can inspect a handful of artifacts from the big right-hander’s most memorable season.

So with half his uniform ready to be displayed behind glass at the Hall of Fame, it’s just a matter of time before Halladay heads up to Cooperstown himself to accept a plaque and induction alongside the all-time greats of the game.

Right?

Actually, that’s kind of a tough question and I posed to a bunch of members of the Baseball Writers Association of America with the right to vote for the Hall of Fame thusly:

If his career were to end with Wednesday night’s no-hitter in the NLDS against the Reds, would you cast your Hall-of-Fame vote for him?

The overwhelming consensus of voters polled reported that they would indeed cast a vote for Halladay even if he were to call it quits tomorrow. At worst, Halladay might cause a voter or two to mull over his worthiness for the Hall of Fame for a night or two before finally giving him the nod.

And why not? In addition to pitching a no-hitter in his playoff debut, Halladay has led the league in wins twice, shutouts three times, innings pitched four times and complete games six times. He led the league in all of those categories this season all while wrapping up his third 20-win season and probably his second Cy Young Award. With a 169-86 record with a 3.32 ERA all while averaging 235 innings per year in 13 seasons.

It’s an easy case to make, says Randy Miller, the longtime Phillies writer from the Bucks County Courier Post and Hall-of-Fame voter.

“If Roy Halladay walked away from baseball today, he would get my Hall-of-Fame vote,” Miller wrote to me. “Along with Greg Maddux, he’s the best pitcher I’ve ever covered in my 15 years on the Phillies beat. Yes, preferably you'd like him to get more wins before retiring, but he’s won 20 three times, 19 once, 17 once and 16 twice. He’s been to seven All-Star Games, and this year he’s a lock to win his second Cy Young. I’m a very strict HOF voter. Last year,I only voted for Roberto Alomar. That said, I vote for greatness, and Roy Halladay has been great for a decade.”

Easy, right?

Well, yeah simply because we know in the back of our minds that Halladay will pitch for at least four more years and will soar past 250 wins during that time. But we’re talking about right now. Forget about the future if you can. Has Halladay accomplished enough to be a Hall of Famer tomorrow?

That’s tough.

Consider this… After 13 seasons Halladay’s stat line matches up almost identically with former Yankees’ southpaw, Ron Guidry. In 14 years Guidry went 170-69 with a 3.29 ERA. Like Halladay, Guidry won 20 games three times, including the otherworldly 25-3 with a 1.74 ERA and took home the Cy Young Award in 1978. Also like Halladay, Guidry averaged 235 innings per season and tallied 21 complete games at age 32 in 1983. More notably, Guidry got to the World Series three times, won twice and went 3-1 with 1.69 ERA in four starts.

Now here’s the kicker… Guidry was taken off the Hall-of-Fame ballot in 2002 after nine years where he never achieved more than 8.8 percent of the vote (75 percent is needed for enshrinement).

Are we sure Halladay is a Hall of Famer right now?

Yes, comparing statistics across different eras is usually foolhardy. Hell, it’s even tough to compare stats amongst players on the same team or across leagues in the same year. The great players don’t play the game to achieve stats and sometimes the natural course of the game can skew the numbers is all sorts of directions. However, it’s worth noting that like Halladay, Guidry was viewed as the best pitcher on earth for a number of seasons.

Look at this quote from Guidry’s old teammate Willie Randolph:

“I’ve always said Ron Guidry, pound for pound, was the fiercest competitor I ever played with. Nobody wanted to give him a chance when he first came up. Too skinny, too small, they all thought. They couldn’t see what he had in his heart. He had a big one and a lot of determination.”

Then there’s this one from his teammate Reggie Jackson in an Sports Illustrated story from the 1978 season:

“He and [Jim] Palmer are the two best athletes among pitchers I've ever seen. The few times I've seen him swing the bat make me think he could be an every-day player, the way Bob Gibson could have been.”

And of course this gem from longtime rival manager Whitey Herzog:

“He’s not God, but he’s close.”

The thing about that is Guidry never got a sniff for enshrinement into the Hall of Fame and his 1978 season was one of the greatest of a generation.

Now this isn’t a case for Ron Guidry (or anyone else) or against Roy Halladay—far from it. Nor is it an expose on the knee-jerk tendencies of the Hall-of-Fame vote. Maybe the point is, after all, we going to get a few more seasons to watch Halladay pitch and it’s going to be a blast watching him put the finishing touches on his Hall-of-Fame resume.

Just how great was Roy Halladay's playoff no-hitter?

The thing about unprecedented events is it’s difficult to place it in the proper perspective. Not only is there no historical context in which to measure something, but also it’s tough to wrap your brain around just what it was that occurred.

Then there is Roy Halladay’s no-hitter in his first playoff game on Wednesday night at the Bank against the Cincinnati Reds. Yes, there once was a no-hitter in the post-season—a perfect game, in fact. More notably, Don Larsen’s perfect game came before there was such a thing as divisional play. The first place teams in both leagues went from the regular season straight to the World Series. No fuss, no muss.

So Larsen’s perfect game in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series happened so long ago that it doesn’t really translate to a modern audience. Oh sure, a perfect game is easy to understand. It’s 27 up and 27 down. But can a no-no in the World Series be properly compared to a no-hitter in the NLDS 54 years later? The game is different than it was even a few years ago, forget about more than a half a century.

Plus, consider this… only five players who appeared in Larsen’s perfect game are alive today. Four of those players were on the Yankees (Larsen, Yogi Berra, Gil McDougald, Andy Carey) and just one was from Brooklyn (Duke Snider). Even the eye-witnesses to both Larsen and Halladay’s historical games are few and far between. Dallas Green, the former Phils’ manager and current senior advisor to GM Ruben Amaro Jr., says he saw them both putting him in a class not quite as elite as the other club he belongs to.

That even rarer group? Only Green and Charlie Manuel managed the Phillies to a World Series title.

Nevertheless, just how does Halladay’s no-hitter rank in the history of postseason performances? It wasn’t a Game 7 like the 10-inning, 126-pitch shutout Jack Morris pitched in the 1991 World Series to lead the Twins over the Braves. Nor was it a World Series game, like the epic 17-strikeout shutout the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson threw at the Tigers in Game 1 of the 1968 World Series.

Halladay’s gem came in the opening game of the first of three playoff rounds where teams can play as many as 19 postseason games compared to two rounds in Morris’ day and just one series in Gibson’s. If the Phillies go the limit in all three rounds, Halladay could start as many as seven games.

Halladay has never started more than six games in a single month in his career.

Indeed, the game is played much differently these days, and Halladay’s pitching line from his playoff debut speaks for itself. The only way it can improve is if he cuts down on the walks by one. But in using just 104 pitches, the one walk given to Jay Bruce wasn’t that significant. All it did was create a really weird moment when Halladay had to pitch from the stretch. Now that was awkward. While pitching with a runner on base Halladay looked like a newborn fawn attempting to take its first step. It just didn’t look right.

Anyway, stat wizard Bill James came up with a metric called “game score,” which attempts to measure a pitcher’s outing by giving him points for innings pitched and strikeouts and penalizing him for hits, walks and runs allowed. Game score is measured up to 100, a score never achieved.

What game score does not measure  or even consider is the magnitude of the game. It also eliminates the humanness of the game. For instance, Halladay’s 104 pitches were amazingly efficient, but he needed seven more pitches than Larsen needed in his perfect game in ’56.

Meanwhile, Morris’ effort in Game 7 scored only an 84. Larsen’s perfecto? That’s only a 94 with three games rated higher. In 2000, Roger Clemens’ tossed a one-hitter against Seattle in the ALCS to garner an all-time high of 98. The second-highest scored game was an 11-inning, three-hit shutout by Dave McNally of Baltimore against the Twins in Game 2 of the 1969 ALCS.

A 25-year-old rookie for Billy Martin’s Twins named Chuck Manuel had a pretty good seat on the bench for McNally’s gem.

No. 3 on the list is a 14-inning effort by Babe Ruth of the Red Sox against Brooklyn in Game 2 of the 1916 World Series. The Red Sox beat the Dodgers for their second straight World Series title that year.

Halladay’s playoff no-hitter is tied with Larsen’s epic with a 94. That supplants Cliff Lee’s 86 in Game 3 of the 2009 NLCS for the best postseason score by a Phillies pitcher in the postseason, but is four points less than the 98 Halladay scored during his perfect game against the Marlins on May 29 of this year.

It’s far from a perfect measurement, but given some semblance of a historical perspective only three games in 107 years of postseason history were better than Halladay’s effort in Game 1 of the NLDS.

'Filthy. Filthy. Completely filthy'

Frankly, I prefer to measure great games with my newly devised “talk test.” This is measured by going into the clubhouses of both teams after the game and measuring the hyperbole. In fact, if a player actually uses the word, “hyperbole,” the way Joey Votto did on Wednesday night, give up a million bonus points.

So as far as the talk test goes, the best read comes in the losing team’s clubhouse. In that regard, the adjectives and awed expressions from the Reds were just like those from the Phillies.

“I wonder how many times I would have struck out if I would have kept going up there,” said Scott Rolen, who went 3-for-3 in strikeouts against Halladay in Game 1.

Rolen was a teammate of Halladay’s for parts of two seasons in Toronto and knows what it’s like to be in the field with the big righty on the mound.

“Being his teammate, [a no-hitter] could happen every time he goes out there. You know that,” Rolen said. “You don’t expect it, though. We didn’t draw it up like that in our hitters’ meetings, but we had our hands full. He’s the best pitcher in baseball in my opinion.”

That opinion was the consensus on Wednesday night. When asked what he thought about Halladay’s pitches from his spot at shortstop, Jimmy Rollins shook his head and searched for the words.

“Filthy,” Rollins said, adding that Halladay’s pitches were nastier on Wednesday than during his perfect game in May. “Filthy. Completely filthy.”

Votto probably explained it best.

“When you’re trying to thread a needle at the plate, it’s miserable. It’s not fun up there trying to hit nothing,” Votto said.

So again, what do we compare it to? Sure, it’s easy to compare statistics from games throughout time, but what about the repertoire of pitches? Is it possible?

Probably not, but let’s try anyway. From the Phillies side, rookie Dom Brown said it was like watching a video game the way Halladay’s curve swept from right to left and the way his cutter snapped like a branch breaking off a tree.

Jonny Gomes, the Reds’ left-fielder who struck out twice in three at-bats, said that while he didn’t waive the white flag, he pretty much ceded one side of the plate to Halladay so that he could concentrate on the opposite side in the odd chance that he might get something to hit.

I’ll liken Halladay’s cutter on Wednesday to the splitter Mike Scott threw in the 1986 NLCS for the Astros against the Mets. Scott pitched two complete games in the ’86 series, allowed eight hits against 19 strikeouts and one run. Fourteen of those strikeouts came in the Game 1 shutout and left the Mets scrambling to collect game-used balls in order to send them off to the league office as some sort of proof that Scott was scuffing them in order to make the splitter dance out of the strike zone so effectively.

The difference between Halladay and Scott, however, was the balls collected by the Reds were to keep for the trophy case to show people they were there.