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October 22, 2009

Prospectus Today

Outskipper'd

by Joe Sheehan

It continues to surprise me that we can't get deep into a postseason series despite having evenly matched teams battling each other. The Phillies and Dodgers were the top two teams in the NL this year, and statistically, there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between them. In the NLCS? There was a hundred-dollar bill's difference. The Phillies outscored the Dodgers 35-16. They out-hit them by 60 points of OBP and 140 points of slugging. The Phillies drew 23 walks to the Dodgers' 12, with the converse of that being that their pitchers had a stellar 33/12 K/BB ratio to the Dodger pitchers' much uglier 33/23. The Dodger bullpen was supposed to be its one big edge: it allowed 14 runs in 21 innings, with a catastrophic failure in Game Four and a poor performance in a winnable Game Five.

The Phillies simply beat the Dodgers in every phase of the game. There's no Chase Utley foul ball, no Jim Tracy brainlock, no two-day-long sixth inning to point to and ask, "what if?" The series swung on a four-batter sequence in the ninth inning of Game Four that turned a 2-2 series in to a 3-1 Phillies lead, but Tim McClelland and Phil Cuzzi were nowhere to be found. It was just Jonathan Broxton making critical mistakes, and Jimmy Rollins making him pay for them in one devastating swing of the bat.

Even with the cheers from Monday night's dramatic win still echoing through the ballpark, last night's game didn't have an air of inevitability to it. It didn't feel like a coronation. Even after Jayson Werth gave the Phillies a two-run lead in the first inning with a three-run opposite-field homer, Cole Hamels didn't make 3-1 feel like 8-1 the way he did so many times last October. Hamels struggled with his location and left too many pitches up, giving up one, two, three solo homers. Hamels would be pulled after 4 1/3 innings with a three-run lead, a significant indictment of the pitcher who was the Phillies' MVP during last year's run to a title.

It was Charlie Manuel who was taking the role of aggressor on a night when Joe Torre played far too passively. With my comment about "every phase of the game," let's not forget the dugouts, where Manuel continued to manipulate his complicated and convoluted pitching staff as deftly as anyone named Martin or Herzog or La Russa, while Torre made just enough mistakes to put his Dodgers at a disadvantage. Once again, Matt Kemp and his tremendous ability against southpaws were relegated to the fifth slot in the lineup. Once again, Torre had chosen to push a left-hander back—this time saving Clayton Kershaw for a potential Game Six—in favor of a right-hander, Game Two hero Vicente Padilla. And on a night when Padilla put the team behind, in a game with days off before and after it, giving him a nine-man bullpen, Torre passed up an opportunity to take the lead and instead let a pitcher who had been on waivers 10 weeks ago to effectively end the Dodgers season. Torre allowed Padilla to bat with his team down 3-2 in the second, and after the inevitable out, Pedro Feliz made the mistake clear by hammering Padilla's next pitch into the right-field seats, giving the Phillies back their two-run lead.

It wasn't the last mistake Torre would make on the evening, but it was the one that put the lie to everything I have written about the man this postseason. Torre, the man who lifted Randy Wolf 11 outs into the first game of the Division Series, the man who has spent 14 seasons winning the game in front of him in October, got passive at exactly the wrong time. By the time Padilla was excused in the fourth frame, the score was 5-2, and it was over. Torre's greatest weapon in this series was his bullpen, and he went down with Vicente Padilla with the whole lot of them well-rested.