It worked. The Phils pounded out a cathartic 19 hits and snapped the losing streak with a 9-4 win.
Of course, for a manager, lineup changes are a little like clubhouse tirades: they work best accompanied by a Roy Halladay start. Halladay pitched six shutout innings that day to finish the regular season at 19-6 with a 2.35 ERA. He would be in the mix for a second-straight Cy Young Award, but maybe not good enough to overtake the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw. One of Halladay’s most impressive stats was his 10-3 record after a Phillies’ loss. That’s the definition of a stopper, and on September 25, in the waning days of the regular season, the 2011 Phillies needed a stopper more than ever before.
And so did the writers who cover the team.
They would have gotten carpal tunnel syndrome if they’d had to transcribe another of Manuel’s rants.
Baseball is a game steeped in tradition. Fans will throw back an opponent’s home run in Wrigley Field, everyone will stand for the seventh-inning stretch, and rookies will do what the veterans tell them to do on the last road trip of the season. After eight losses, laughter finally filled the clubhouse when the Phillies won that series finale in New York. Rookie players arrived at their lockers to find their clothes had been replaced by wacky outfits that were to be worn on the flight to Atlanta. The September rookie hazing ritual is one of baseball’s most enduring traditions. Sometime during the last trip, veterans sneak out and buy frilly dresses that embarrassed rookies have to wear in public. The tradition used to be funnier back in the days when teams flew commercial and rookies had to parade through airports with all the regular schlubs. Now, baseball teams fly charters and seldom see an airport terminal. The bus takes them onto the tarmac and right to the door of the plane. Only a handful of flight attendants see them.
But even in the era of charter flights, the rookie hazing event is still good for a few laughs, and this one was no exception. The Phillies rookies were good sports as they dressed in costumes cleverly conceived and purchased by Brad Lidge and Ryan Madson. Domonic Brown was resplendent in a pimp’s outfit. Erik Kratz, dressed as a beer wench, looked ready to serve up some brews. Michael Schwimer was so perfect as a rabbi that Lidge said, “We forgot to get Schwimer a costume.” Justin De Fratus’ face was so obscured by his Pulp Fiction gimp mask that TSA officials insisted he take it off as they checked his ID before the flight. Hunter Pence took a picture of the group next to the plane and Tweeted it for the world to see. Pence is one of a number of Phillies who communicate directly to fans through Twitter. Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino, and Vance Worley are also members of the Twitterverse.
All this Twitter stuff was kind of foreign to the old-school manager. Back in spring training, Charlie Manuel was briefing a group of reporters on some minor developments. One of the reporters said, “I’m going to Tweet that.”
Manuel pointed at the guy and in his Southern drawl said, “Yeah, you go ahead, tweak that.”
It was one of the many simple but hilarious things that Manuel said in the course of the long season. In March, the day after Domonic Brown suffered a broken hamate bone in his right hand, Manuel reported that “Domonic broke his hambone.” Later in the year, he talked about how his team couldn’t let success spoil its desire and hunger to win. He was trying to say that the club couldn’t afford to get too giddy and it came out as, “We can’t get too gay.” Hey, once upon a time, the words had a similar meaning, right?
Three wins in New York had allowed the tight Phillies team to exhale, to breathe, to smile, and to loosen up as it headed for three days of unexpected intensity in Atlanta. Technically, the Phils had nothing to prove in Atlanta. Yeah, they were still reaching for 100 wins.Yeah, the club record for regular-season wins was still within reach. But both milestones were hood ornaments and wouldn’t impact things in October. The trip to Atlanta was three final days to run the engines and make sure everything was set for October. The Braves provided a little intensity and that was a welcome intangible.
The Braves were the second-best team in the National League for much of the season, but had sputtered down the stretch. They had led the NL wild-card race by 8½ games over St. Louis on Labor Day, but their lead over the Cardinals had dwindled to one game entering the final three days of the regular season.
The Phillies’ opponent in the division series was directly tied to the outcome of the series in Atlanta. If Atlanta won the wild card, the Phils would play Arizona in the division series; if the Cardinals won the wild card, the Phils would play them. While Phillies fans debated who the better matchup for their team would be—Arizona was considered a more favorable matchup than the rampaging Cardinals—Manuel made it clear that he did not care which club his team played in the first round. In his mind, it was how the Phillies played, not whom they played, that would determine the team’s October success. He was headed to Atlanta to get his regulars some at-bats, his pitching staff some innings, and to go into October with the momentum that comes with winning a few ball games. Former Philadelphia Eagles player and New York Jets coach Herm Edwards once famously said, “You play to win the game,” and that was Big Chuck’s mind-set heading to Atlanta.
The players shared that view.
Lee allowed just two runs and struck out six—raising his season-total to a career-high 238 strikeouts—as the Phils won the opener, 4-2. It was their 100th win of the season, marking just the third time in franchise history that they had reached that plateau.
Oswalt pitched six shutout innings as the Phils equaled the franchise record for wins in a 7-1 victory the next night.
Manuel liked what he saw in the game. Jimmy Rollins continued to come alive at the plate and reliever Antonio Bastardo, who had shined for five months only to unravel in September, delivered his first clean inning in a month.
“I think we’re playing with better focus,” Manuel said after his team’s third-straight win. “We’re more into it. We’re playing the Braves and we’re getting ready for the postseason.”
As Manuel spoke, the Cardinals were finishing off a 13-6 win in Houston to pull into a tie with Atlanta in the wild-card race.
The stage was set for the final day of the regular season and it would prove to be one of the wildest and most entertaining in the history of the game. Not only was the NL wild-card race even heading into the final day of the season, but so was the AL wild-card race. The Boston Red Sox, the team so many had predicted would play the Phillies in the World Series, the team that Ruben Amaro Jr. called the best in baseball back in spring training, had blown a nine-game lead in the AL wild-card race and were now in a tie with surging Tampa Bay.
As tension filled the Braves’ dugout in Atlanta, the Cardinals’ dugout in Houston, the Red Sox’ dugout in Baltimore, and the Rays’ dugout in St. Petersburg, the Phillies remained loose. They rallied in the ninth inning to tie the game, got a game-saving catch from rookie Michael Martinez in the 10th inning, and rallied again in the 13th on their way to beating the Braves, 4-3. In Houston, the Cardinals had already won, 8-0, on the strength of Chris Carpenter (that guy again) and his 11-strikeout gem. In Atlanta, Freddie Freeman crossed first base after making the final out of the game and final out of the Braves’ season, and then smashed his helmet to the ground in anger and frustration. The lights had gone out in Georgia. The Braves lost 20 of their final 30 games and were overtaken by the Cardinals, who won 23 of 31 to earn a trip to Philadelphia, where they would be sacrificial lambs—wouldn’t they be?—for the Phillies in the first round of the playoffs.
Content to have ended the Braves’ season, picked up their record-setting 102nd win, and given Manuel his 646th career win as a Phillies manager—moving him past Gene Mauch for the most wins by any manager in team history—Phillies players retired to the clubhouse at Turner Field and gathered around the big-screen TV for what turned out to be the wildest 3½ minutes of the season. Players watched in amazement as Baltimore rallied to beat Boston, and then turned their attention to the drama in St. Pete, where the Rays had already rallied
from a 7-0 deficit against the Yankees to tie the game on Dan Johnson’s pinch-hit homer with two outs in the ninth. Boston’s loss had assured the Rays of playing at least a one-game tiebreaker against Boston for the AL wild card. Evan Longoria made that game unnecessary when he lined a home run over of the 315-foot marker in left field to give the Rays a surreal 8-7 win in 12 innings and the AL wild card.
You think major-leaguers are jaded? You think they aren’t fans of the game? Think again. Phillies players were riveted to the action on the TV.
“Oh, oh, oh,” Shane Victorino shouted as Longoria connected. “Did he get it? Did he get it? He did! Oooooh! What did that ball go—three fifteen and a half?”
Victorino’s ruckus brought Manuel out of his office. It brought banged-up players out of the trainers’ room. Everyone strained to get a look at the TV and the Rays’ celebration. The highs and lows of a baseball season, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, had been encapsulated in one 3½-minute snippet inside the visiting clubhouse in Atlanta, and everyone, well, nearly everyone, on the team had witnessed it.
“What happened?” asked John Mayberry Jr. as he emerged from the shower and heard all the noise.
What happened?
What happened?
Well, the regular season went just the way the Phillies had hoped it would when they first assembled back on Valentine’s Day in Clearwater.Yeah, they had some injuries. Yeah, the offense could be sporadic. Yeah, that eight-game losing streak scared the hell out of a lot of people. But September was over and so was the longest Christmas Eve of their lives. The postseason was finally here. This was why The Rotation had been built.
“This is what you play for,” Roy Oswalt said. “This is the fun part.”
ONE OF THE BEST
Charlie Manuel extended his right hand to Jim Palmer, who was waiting for him along the third-base line at Bright House Field before a Grapefruit League game in March 2011.
“Big Jim, what’s up?” Manuel said.
Palmer smiled, quickly breaking into his Manuel impression.
“Jim sent me to Japan,” he said, mimicking Manuel’s thick Virginian drawl.
Both men laughed. For years, every time Manuel saw Palmer he joked that Palmer’s dominance over him forced him to finish his career in Japan, conveniently ignoring his career .198 average in 394 at-bats over parts of six seasons with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Minnesota Twins, and the fact he faced Palmer just four times (he went 0 for 4 with two strikeouts).
“I used to pinch-hit off him and know what he was going to do,” Manuel said. “I would say I wasn’t going to swing at it. Harmon [Killebrew] used to talk to me, ‘Don’t swing at the high fastball.’ I might take one or two, but I’d always swing.”
They laughed again.
The conversation eventually turned to pitching. Palmer pitched for the 1971 Baltimore Orioles, the second of only two teams in baseball history to have a foursome of 20-game winners (the 1920 Chicago White Sox were the other). The 2011 Phillies starting pitchers had hoped to enjoy the same level of success as Palmer (20-9, 2.68 ERA), Mike Cueller (20-9, 3.08 ERA), Pat Dobson (20-8, 2.90 ERA), and Dave McNally (21-5, 2.89 ERA). But while it was fun to imagine Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, and Roy Oswalt each winning 20 games, it would be extremely difficult to accomplish.
“It doesn’t matter,” Palmer said. “They’re both great.”
“Both are great, but we’ve got to prove ours,” Manuel replied. “They proved it. We’ve got to prove it. That’s how they earned the right to say who they are.”
In the end, the Phillies had no 20-game winners. Halladay (19-6, 2.35 ERA) and Lee (17-8, 2.40 ERA) came the closest. Hamels (14-9, 2.79 ERA) missed time because of shoulder stiffness and suffered due to poor run support, which has been a theme in his career. Oswalt (9-10, 3.69 ERA) never had a shot because of back problems.
But that doesn’t mean the 2011 Phillies rotation couldn’t compete with the 1971 Orioles rotation.
“They might be better,” said Washington Nationals manager Davey Johnson, who played second base for the 1971 Orioles, and spent parts of two seasons with the Phillies later in the decade. “We had Cuellar and McNally and they were very good, but I don’t know that they were better than Hamels and Lee. And Halladay is as dominant a pitcher as Palmer, if not more. Oswalt and Dobson? It was more of a special year for Dobson, where Oswalt’s been special for a long time. The Phillies staff is awful good.”
The 2011 Phillies rotation (including starts from Vance Worley, Joe Blanton, and Kyle Kendrick) had a better ERA, WHIP and strikeout-to-walk ratio; averaged more strikeouts per nine innings; averaged fewer walks per nine innings; and struck out 299 more batters despite throwing 107 fewer innings than the 1971 Orioles rotation did.
Of course, the Orioles had a quartet of 20-game winners.
“It’s harder to get twenty wins when you take twenty percent of your starts away,” Johnson pointed out.
Five-man rotations make sure of that. In theory, each of the four healthy starters in a four-man rotation averages 40.5 starts over a 162-game schedule, while each of the five healthy starters in a five-man rotation averages just 32.4. Cueller made 38 starts in 1971, while Palmer and Dobson each made 37, and McNally made 30.
No pitcher has made at least 37 starts in a single big-league season since Greg Maddux in 1991.
Halladay and Lee led the Phillies with 32 starts. Hamels had 31, and Oswalt had 23.
Despite fewer starts for their aces, the 2011 Phillies rotation thrust themselves into the conversation on what were the best rotations in baseball history by putting up, according to Elias Sports Bureau, some historic numbers:• 76 wins (tied for 13th since 1989)
• 2.86 ERA (1st since 1985, 12th since 1968)
• 932 strikeouts (1st since 2003, 7th since 1900)
• 1,064⅔ innings (9th since 1989)
• 7.88 strikeouts per nine innings (12th since 1900)
• 1.87 walks per nine innings (2nd since 1933)
• 1.11 WHIP (1st since 1975, tied for 6th since 1945)
• 4.22 strikeout-to-walk ratio (1st since 1900)
The Phillies also became the eighth team in baseball history to have three top-five finishers in their league’s Cy Young voting, with Halladay finishing second behind the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw, Lee taking third, and Hamels placing fifth.
“No question this year’s rotation is historical,” Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt said. “Unfortunately, Blanton and Oswalt were injured, but the Big Three held up their end.”
ERA+ is a statistic that measures a pitcher’s ERA against the league average and adjusts it for ballpark factors, accounting for a pitcher throwing in pitcher-friendly PETCO Park in the National League vs. hitter-friendly Fenway Park in the American League. A 100 ERA+ is the league average, whether it’s 1966, when pitchers owned baseball’s landscape, or 1998, when juiced-up hitters ruled the day. A 130 ERA+ means the league’s ERA that season was 30 percent higher than the individual pitcher’s.
According to Baseball-Reference.com, before the 2011 season there had been just five teams since 1901 with two starters with an ERA+ of at least 130 who also had 200 or more innings pitched and averaged at least eight strikeouts per nine innings:• 1968 Indians: Sam McDowell and Luis Tiant.
• 2000 Dodgers: Kevin Brown and Chan Ho Park.
• 2001 Diamondbacks: Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling.
• 2002 Diamondbacks: Johnson and Schilling.
• 2003 Cubs: Mark Prior and Kerry Wood.
The 2011 Phillies became the first team ever with three starters (Halladay, Lee, and Hamels) that hit those marks.
“Clearly, you had two guys in Halladay and Lee who weren’t just staff Number Ones,” said Bob Costas, who has chronicled baseball as a broadcaster for NBC, HBO, and MLB Network. “They each were a potential Cy Young Award winner—each guy with a certain sort of throwback toughness, where they weren’t looking to just give you six good innings and get out of th
ere.
“They’re there not just to keep you in the game. They’re there to win the game. The kind of guy that you throw the modern book away, where Charlie would let Halladay go into the ninth with a one-run lead, and even stick with him if the first guy got on base, thinking correctly, ‘He might be in a little bit of trouble, but even after one hundred and ten pitches, this guy is still better than whoever I bring out of the bullpen.”
DOC, CLIFF, COLE, AND CY
For the first time since the 2005 Houston Astros, the 2011 Phillies had three pitchers finish in the top five in National League Cy Young Award voting.
The voting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America:1. Clayton Kershaw, Dodgers (27 first-place votes): 207 points
2. Roy Halladay, Phillies (four first-place votes): 133
3. Cliff Lee, Phillies: 90
4. Ian Kennedy, Diamondbacks (one first-place vote): 76
5. Cole Hamels, Phillies: 17
6. Tim Lincecum, Giants: 7
7. Yovani Gallardo, Brewers: 5
8. Matt Cain, Giants: 3
9. John Axford, Brewers: 2
10. Craig Kimbrel, Braves: 2
11. Madison Bumgarner, Giants: 1
12. Ryan Vogelsong, Giants: 1
Kershaw, Halladay, and Lee were the only pitchers named on all 32 ballots. Two voters from every NL city vote for their top five choices. A first-place vote receives seven points followed by four points for second, three for third, two for fourth, and one for fifth. Halladay is the sixth Cy Young winner to finish second the year after winning the award. The others were Warren Spahn (1958), Jim “Catfish” Hunter (1975), Jim Palmer (1977), Tom Glavine (1992), and Brandon Webb (2007).
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