The Rotation (40 page)

“All of a sudden we want to get our guys who are hurting well,” he said. “All of a sudden, we start giving them two and three days off, on one, off one, start deciding when to play them. Look around, and pretty soon you lose your mojo.You lose your timing and you lose your rhythm. I know what I'm talking about. I've been in the damn game for fifty years. I know exactly what I'm talking about. I preach about it every day. People hear it, but they look at me like I'm stupid or crazy. Maybe I am. But that's what's happening. That's what you're seeing. We're out of sync. We're out of focus. We're searching, and nothing's going right.

“We've got 98 wins. We were set to have the biggest year of any Phillie team and we got out of sync. We keep bouncing around, we keep doing things, we keep getting well, and all of that. We've played all year with people hurting. Every day you play the game of baseball, you hurt. Somehow, you hurt. You have aches and pains—ankle, knee, elbow, whatever. Headaches. Believe me. You can ask anybody who ever played this game. I played this game for twenty years, I can tell you. When you lose focus and you get out of sync, you've got to get it back.

“Do we have time [to turn it around]? I don't know,” Manuel concluded. “We'll see. But also, too, it'll be a test of how good we are. How about that? This will be a good test. This is the first time this year that we've actually gone bad. And it's not a real good time to go bad. But at the same time, we'll see. This is a good measuring stick for us. You might not like it, but it is. We've created it ourselves, so we'll see. That's all I've got to say.”

That was plenty.

Some managers do crossword puzzles to kill time. Manuel doodles lineups. He scribbles them on napkins, dinner receipts, scraps of paper. He might arrive in his office by 11 A.M. for a night game, scribble out three potential lineups, take a walk around the stadium, and scribble out three more when he gets back to his office.

After that eighth-straight loss, Manuel returned to his Manhattan hotel and thought about a lineup he'd been kicking around. The next day he
unveiled it. Chase Utley was moved from third to second in the batting order. Hunter Pence was moved from fifth to third. Shane Victorino would have to bat fifth behind Howard, who was back in the lineup after resting his sore ankle. Placido Polanco, playing with two tears in his groin, was dropped to seventh in the lineup.

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 100
^th
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 10
^th
inning, and rallied again in the 13
^th
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 102
^nd
win, and given Manuel his 646
^th
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.

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.”

C
harlie 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.