The Rotation (43 page)

Halladay threw his first pitch to a huge, accompanying roar of the crowd. The decibel level cooled when Furcal singled on the second pitch Halladay threw. Halladay got the first out of the inning, and then walked Pujols on four pitches. Three batters into the game, the Phillies' ace was faced with his first jam, and it turned into early damage when Berkman smacked a three-run homer into the right-field seats on the first pitch he saw.

It was an almost surreal beginning. The Phillies had been gearing toward this moment for months and now they were behind, 3-0, just four batters into the game. The crowd was silent. Halladay looked stunned as he waited for umpire Chris Guccione to toss him a new ball.

“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:

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.

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 13
^th
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 backfire 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.