The Rotation

by Jim Salisbury

  “I couldn’t think of a worse way to start, really, than putting your team in a hole like that,” Halladay said.

  Once upon a time, Halladay might have been cooked after allowing a three-run home run in the first inning. Once upon a time, his world might have caved in right there on the pitcher’s mound. Of course, those were the days before Harvey Dorfman got hold of Halladay and helped transform him from near washout to perennial All-Star. The famed sports psychologist had died in February, but Halladay still lived and worked by the principles he learned from his mentor. Heck, he still had the guy’s emails in his computer. So as the Cardinals poured it on in the first inning, Halladay remained calm and focused. In his mind, he could hear Dorfman’s voice:

  Don’t worry about what’s already done.

  Control your emotions.

  Stick to your plan.

  Move on.

  Breathe.

  Execute the next pitch.

  Eventually the Phillies’ offense thawed and Ryan Howard and Raul Ibanez hit home runs to lead an 11-6 win.

  The crowd of 46,480 left Citizens Bank Park with a smile on its collective face that night.

  Somewhere, Harvey Dorfman was smiling, too. Halladay’s work that night was a tribute to his guru of the mind. After giving up those three first-inning runs, he allowed just one hit and no runs over his next seven innings. He walked just one, struck out eight, and finished his night by retiring 21 straight Cardinals.

  “You just really have to avoid trying to make up for what already happened,” said Halladay, explaining his key to surviving what could have been a fatal first inning. I can’t go out and subtract runs. You have your moment of frustration and you’ve got to move on. I’m not going to pack it in. I’ve got to stick to my plan.

  “It took a long time for me to be able to learn that,” Halladay added. “You have to put things behind you and move on.You can’t lose your aggressiveness and the feeling that you still have a chance to win.”

  Thanks to Halladay, the Phils were off and running. But there were still miles to go, as Spanish-speaking catcher Carlos Ruiz reminded his mates when he wrote “10 Mas” on the clubhouse white board.

  The Phillies were winning this series. There was no doubt about that.

  When Cliff Lee jogged to the mound in the top of the fourth inning in Game 2, the Phils had a commanding 4-0 lead. They were 72-13 when they scored four or more runs in 2011. Lee was 96-7 in his career when his team scored four or more runs with him on the mound, including 10-1 as a Phillie in 2011.

  “When you’ve got Cliff out there you definitely have a great feeling,” Ibanez said.

  The first three innings could not have gone any better for the largest crowd (46,579) in Citizens Bank Park history. Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa appeared to outsmart himself by pitching Chris Carpenter on short rest for the first time in his career. Carpenter bombed, allowing five hits and four runs in just three innings. Howard struck first with a two-run single in the first inning to give the Phillies a 2-0 lead. Ibanez knocked in the third run of the inning to make it 3-0, and Hunter Pence knocked in the game’s fourth run in the second to make it 4-0. Meanwhile, the Cardinals couldn’t cash in on a leadoff triple in the first or a leadoff double in the second.

  Lee looked primed for another dominant postseason performance. He went 4-0 with a 1.56 ERA in five postseason starts with the Phillies in 2009, and everybody in the ballpark envisioned more of the same in October 2011. Lee had dominated the National League for weeks. He was 7-1 with a 0.93 ERA in his last 10 regular-season starts. He was a Cy Young candidate. There was no whatever about it—he was on his game.

  But as Lee jogged off the mound with runners at the corners and nobody out in the seventh inning, the Cardinals had taken a one-run lead. The lefty allowed three runs in the fourth inning and one in the sixth as the Cardinals tied the game. Then in the seventh, he allowed a leadoff triple to Allen Craig, who scored on Pujols’ single to left-center to make it 5-4.

  The huge crowd, so loud and excited in the early innings, fell silent as Craig crossed home plate with the go-ahead run. Phillies fans were sickened.

  What happened? Four-nuttin’ lead? Cliff Lee on the mound? This series was over, wasn’t it?

  Lee blew a big lead in a shocking loss. He allowed a career-high 12 hits and five runs in six-plus innings. He had the Cardinals in a choke hold, but let them get away.

  “I take full responsibility,” he said after the game. “I had a 4-0 lead and I let it slip away.”

  There were other factors in the Game 2 loss. Charlie Manuel pointed out the Phillies had just one hit after Carpenter left the game. Umpire Jerry Meals had a questionable strike zone throughout the night, prompting La Russa to rip him during his in-game interview on TBS. La Russa was fined by Major League Baseball for his actions, but it was money well spent. The strike zone was much more to the Cardinals’ liking for the remainder of the series.

  But when it came down to it, this was Lee’s game and he blew it. “I somehow squandered it away,” he said.

  The Cardinals didn’t need an airplane to fly home after that game. They were sky-high, feeling great about their chances to win the short series. They had beaten a man they should not have beaten, not with the lead he had.

  “It doesn’t happen very often,” Lance Berkman said. “But neither does coming from eight and a halfback with a month to play.”

  Lee’s catch and release in Game 2 made a lot of people in the Phillies’ camp nervous. The series was tied at a game apiece and the Cardinals had the next two on their home turf. Anything can happen in a short series, even to a team favored to win the World Series. Was that anything about to be a disaster for the Phillies?

  “Is it a colossal failure if we don’t make it out of the first round?” one anxious club official asked before Game 3 in St. Louis.

  The anxiety was felt in the clubhouse, too. Shane Victorino sensed it in his belly.

  “Was there that kind of stomach feeling that this was a big game? Yeah,” he said. “We knew there was a lot riding on this.”

  Victorino’s pregame butterflies turned to postgame euphoria, thanks to Ben Francisco’s pinch-hit three-run home run in the seventh inning that lifted the Phillies to a tension-easing 3-2 win.

  Francisco was amused by the size of the pack of reporters that surrounded his locker after the game.

  “It’s been awhile,” he said with a big smile.

  In truth, it had been a long time since the man known to teammates as Benny Fresh had done anything worth much attention.

  Affable and soft-spoken, Francisco had won the starting right-fielder job with a big spring training, but held that job for just two months and was relegated to the end of the bench by the time Hunter Pence arrived in late July.

  In Game 3, the Phillies’ offense had been shackled by St. Louis lefty Jaime Garcia. The Phils didn’t score a run in the last seven innings of Game 2 and now had gone six innings without a run in Game 3.

  Just 27 years old, Cole Hamels made his 13th career postseason start that day. Hamels had battled shoulder inflammation in August and was now quietly fighting another ailment—loose bodies in his elbow. This may have been why he had trouble commanding the strike zone and keeping his pitch count down. Hamels threw 117 pitches and left the game after sixth innings. He would have liked to have gone longer, but his contribution was immense, nonetheless, as he managed to hold the Cards scoreless before leaving for a pinch hitter.

  Francisco was that pinch hitter, and he went to the plate with a good feeling against Garcia. Three weeks earlier, he had faced the left-hander in Philadelphia and sent a high sinker to the warning track. Had he not hit the ball off the end of the bat, Francisco believed he might have had a home run.

  Victorino was on second base when La Russa opted to have Garcia walk Carlos Ruiz intentionally, putting two men on base for Francisco.

  “Ruiz has terrorized us in the past,” said La Russa, explaining one of the few decisions to bac
kfire on him in the series.

  Garcia’s first pitch to Francisco was a ball. The second pitch was a high sinker, a pitch nearly identical, Francisco said, to the one he’d seen three weeks earlier. He didn’t hit this one off the end of the bat. He got it right on the sweet spot. The ball climbed high over the shortstop as the Busch Stadium crowd fell silent. It jetted over the outfield and toward the Phillies’ bullpen.

  “Come on, get here, ball, keep coming,” Brad Lidge said to himself in the Phillies’ bullpen.

  It got there, all right. The three-run home run was the big blow, the only blow, really, for the Phillies that night, and it came from an unlikely source.

  “It takes twenty-five guys, bro,” Victorino said.

  Francisco spoke to waves of reporters as he described what the greatest moment of his career felt like.

  “Excitement, joy, a big adrenaline rush,” he said. “We won the game and getting a big home run means a lot to my family and friends who’ve supported me through kind of a tough year.

  “I came to spring training trying to help us win a World Series and I can still do that.”

  The victory put the Phillies one win away from their fourth-straight NLCS, but it wasn’t like they didn’t have issues. Despite their stress-relieving win in Game 3, a major concern was brewing around the club. The offense was sputtering again. The team had scored in just one of its previous 16 innings, and those runs came on one swing from an end-of-the-bench pinch hitter.

  The Phils were ahead in the series, but they weren’t going to stay there if they didn’t start hitting.

  Roy Oswalt wasn’t convincing as he spoke to the pack of reporters surrounding him in a corner of the visitors’ clubhouse at Busch Stadium.

  “The pressure is back on them,” he said defiantly.

  How so? The Cardinals beat the Phillies, 5-3, in Game 4 to even the series and send it back to Philadelphia for a deciding fifth game. The Phillies, who had been World Series favorites since Cliff Lee’s signing in December, suddenly found themselves one loss from elimination in the first round of the playoffs.

  The Cardinals were the unlikely participants in this postseason tournament, the club that had little to lose, the club that was playing with the house’s money after being 10½ games out of the playoff chase in late August and 8½ back at the start of September.

  The Phillies were the team that had carried heavy World Series expectations since there had been snow on the ground. The pressure would be squarely on them in Game 5.

  Oswalt could have prevented all this, but he gave up five runs in six innings to take the loss in Game 4. He allowed a run in the first inning and two runs in the fourth inning when he walked Lance Berkman, hit Matt Holliday with a pitch, and gave up a double to David Freese to give St. Louis a 3-2 lead. Freese got Oswalt one final time when he hit a two-run homer in the sixth to make it 5-2.

  “Two pitches, I guess,” Oswalt said. “I don’t know. I thought I had pretty good stuff.”

  But pretty good doesn’t get it done in the postseason.

  For 162 games, starting pitching had been this team’s great strength, the weapon that was going to carry the Phillies to the World Series. But in two of the first four games of the postseason, the starting pitching was lackluster, as Lee and Oswalt allowed 10 runs in 12 innings in their two starts

  Not that the offense was shining. In Game 4, the Phils scored two runs in the first inning, but failed to build much after that as Cardinals right-hander Edwin Jackson retired 17 of the final 20 batters he faced. The Phillies ended that game having been held scoreless in 22 of the previous 25 innings, conjuring up nightmares of the previous October. It looked ugly, too. While Cardinals hitters put on a clinic, working counts and having quality, grinding at-bats, Phillies hitters showed poor plate discipline, and it drove Charlie Manuel, not to mention the folks up in the executive suite, crazy.

  “What’s that saying?” Manuel said before the game. “I could have missed the pain, but I’d have to miss the dance?”

  The agony of those poor Phillies’ at-bats would be forgotten if they could win Game 5 at home. History had already proven that. The Phils had just one hit in their first 32 at-bats with runners in scoring position in the 2008 World Series, but few remembered because it all ended with a parade.

  “It’s a pressure situation,” said Jimmy Rollins, looking ahead at Game 5. “This is what we play for. This is also what we get paid for—to play in these situations. I don’t think anyone in here is afraid of it.”

  Rollins spoke those words in an almost empty clubhouse in St. Louis. Most of the Phillies, including Roy Halladay, had already made their way to the bus for the ride to the airport and flight back to Philadelphia. Halladay would get the ball in Game 5 against his old friend and Toronto teammate Chris Carpenter. Suddenly, it didn’t look as if Tony La Russa had outsmarted himself. His decision to use Carpenter on short rest in Game 2 allowed the right-hander to be ready for the decisive fifth game—on full rest.

  The thought of Halladay taking the mound was comforting for Rollins.

  “You get your big boy on the bump,” he said. “This was the reason why he was brought there, for games like this, for him to come out and be the man. Be Doc. Go out there and perform a little surgery.”

  Charlie Manuel scheduled a light workout at Citizens Bank Park for the off day between Game 4 and Game 5. The players would have shown up for a workout even if Manuel had given them the day off. The season was on the line and no player wanted to sit around the house stressing about a do-or-die game. Better to get on the field and work up a sweat.

  Outwardly, the Phillies appeared loose. Rollins reached back in time and kept it Philly by blasting some Hall and Oates in the clubhouse before the workout. During batting practice, the stadium sound system prophetically blared Lady Gaga’s “Edge of Glory.”

  One team was indeed on the edge of glory.

  But which one?

  Despite proclamations they were loose and relaxed before one of the biggest games in franchise history, there were signs that the Phillies were anything but.

  A few years earlier, Manuel had said that learning to finally stay relaxed in pressure situations was one of the keys to the Phillies’ winning the World Series in 2008.

  “We got tight,” he said in February 2009, referring to the team’s maturation in 2006, 2007, and part of 2008. “We’d get in a good position, but it was hard for us to take advantage of it because we got tight. I call it fear of failing. When you have never been through it before, fear of failing enters your mind. The fact of the matter was we had never been there before.”

  Chase Utley sensed the tightness during the 2008 season and famously told teammates and the coaching staff to “get the rubber duck out of your ass.” Everyone had a good laugh whenever Utley said it. Manuel loved the expression so much that he bought a bunch of rubber ducks and placed one in each player’s locker before Game 1 of the 2008 World Series, his reminder to everyone to stay loose. A few rubber ducks had resided in Manuel’s office at Citizens Bank Park since. Sensing the weight on his team before Game 5 of the 2011 NLDS, the manager reached for some of the 2008 magic and left a few of the rubber ducks on the counter in the clubhouse. Players reacted with laughs and smiles.

  But they were still tighter than hell.

  At least that’s how they looked on the field.

  The Cardinals, meanwhile, continued to play like a band of wedding crashers. Rafael Furcal opened the game with a triple against Halladay and the next batter, Skip Schumaker, grinded out a classic Cardinals 10-pitch at-bat that resulted in an RBI double.

  Halladay settled down and pitched out of trouble in the inning, pitched like an ace. That first-inning run would prove to be the only one he’d allow in eight innings of brilliance that saw him allow just six hits while walking one and striking out seven.

  As good as Halladay was, his old pal Carpenter was better. He pitched a three-hit shutout and did not walk a batter. The Phillies averaged 4.80
runs per game from July 1 through the end of the regular season, tops in the NL. All they had to do was score two runs for Halladay and they would have lived to have seen the second round of the playoffs. But Carpenter, a tough-minded right-hander who battled years of arm trouble before winning the NL Cy Young Award in 2005, gave the Phils nothing. With each zero he put on the scoreboard, tension in the Phillies’ dugout grew. With each scoreless inning, Phillies hitters squeezed their bat handles tighter and tighter until there was no more season.

  The Phils lost, 1-0, and were eliminated.

  The what ifs started almost immediately.

  What if Halladay hadn’t been victimized by a familiar bugaboo? (Leadoff men were 16 for 33 with a walk against him for the season.) What if Victorino had hit the cutoff man and given the infield a chance to cut down Furcal on that triple? What if Raul Ibanez’s drive to the right-field warning track with two men on in the fourth had been greeted by a friendly October tailwind and landed in the seats? What if Utley’s ninth-inning drive to the warning track in center had traveled a few more feet?

  What if . . .

  What if . . .

  What if . . .

  What if management hadn’t put together the best starting rotation in baseball?

  What if all the hype never followed?

  What if the expectations never soared as high as they did, so high that they’d only be reached with a World Series title?

  Would it have hurt any less had none of this happened?

  Maybe.

  But for now, it hurt. A lot. Especially for Roy Halladay, who pitched his ass off but received no run support.

  The end had come, all too shockingly soon, and, now, where there was once great hope, only numbness remained.

  The last sellout crowd of the season walked quietly out of the ballpark, heads down and hearts broken.