IS BUYING CROSS-COUNTRY SKIS
Photos: 2009 Phillies DENVER - It is a habit now.
As a veritable fraternity party rages in some major league clubhouse, with champagne spraying and beer dumping and grown men in goggles laughing and rolling and wrestling on the floor, the battle-tested skipper retreats to his office and sits in his chair and exhales the stress that tends to accumulate in a do-or-die series. Charlie Manuel doesn't feel the need to hoot and holler and douse himself in alcoholic beverages. Frankly, he'd rather just sit and think.
Last night, after the Phillies manager completed what might just be his most impressive feat to date, piecing together an injury-depleted bullpen just long enough to send his formerly embattled closer to the mound for a one-out, NLDS-clinching save, there was no doubt how he would celebrate.
This time, though, the office in question, the chair in question, held a different meaning.
It was an old nemesis. And, at the same time, an old friend.
"We've come a long way,'' Manuel said as he walked through a tunnel beneath Coors Field following a three-run, ninth-inning rally that lifted the Phillies to a 5-4 victory over the Rockies and a second straight National League Championship Series berth against the Dodgers. "We've come a long way as far as learning how to play in the moment and how to handle the game.''
Two years, six days ago - Oct. 6, 2007 - the Phillies played a drastically different elimination game on this same field. Afterward, Manuel retreated to the sanctity of the visiting manager's office. He shut the door, and he sat down, and he let 165 games worth of thoughts and emotions run through his head. A moment he had worked his whole professional life to experience had ended after only 4 days. His team had not just been defeated, it had been embarrassed, swept out of the National League Division Series by a red-hot Rockies team. Trailing, 2-1, in Game 3, a young slugger named Ryan Howard had struck out looking at a 1-2 pitch, setting the stage for a quick 1-2-3 inning that ended both the season and the dream.
Yesterday, that same slugger stood in the center of the visitor's clubhouse and rejoiced as a teammate poured two cans of beer over his head. Ryan Howard was one of several heroes last night, his two-run, two-out double off Rockies closer Huston Street in the ninth scoring Shane Victorino and Chase Utley and tying a game that just an inning before the Phillies appeared to have blown. Later, Howard scored the game-winning run on an RBI single by Jayson Werth, setting the stage for injured veteran Scott Eyre and Brad Lidge to shut down the ninth for an improbable, 5-4 win.
Two years after one of the most bitter defeats of Manuel's career, his team is headed back to a second straight National League Championship Series, the dream of repeating as world champions still very much alive.
"I think the fact that they did beat us 3 years ago, three straight, I think that kind of told us that we weren't quite ready,'' Manuel said, "and that we had to improve mentally and physically. We used to talk about this. My first meeting in spring training, we used to talk about it, and it used to get a little hot. I'd call guys out and tell them that they couldn't be scared.''
Yesterday, when they had every reason to give in to the fear, the Phillies fought it.
A fielding error on Jimmy Rollins on what should have been a force play at second base set the stage for the Rockies' three-run rally off righthander Ryan Madson in the eighth. When the frame ended, a 2-1 lead had turned into a 4-2 deficit, and the Phillies were down to their final three outs. A second straight brilliant outing from ace lefthander Cliff Lee, who allowed one run in his 7 1/3 innings but left with two more eventual runs on base, seemed to have been squandered. A decisive Game 5 in Philadelphia tonight seemed imminent.
But then the fear vanished.
"I came running off the field with the thought that we were going to win the game, and when I got in the dugout, everybody was on the same page,'' Werth said. "Everybody was cool, calm and collected, I guess you could say. Everybody knew what we had to do, and we did it.''
Rollins, who jump-started the game-winning rally the night before, singled up the middle with one out, then was replaced at first by Victorino on a force out.
After Victorino advanced to second on defensive indifference, Street walked Utley, bringing Howard to the plate with two outs. The player Manuel has dubbed the Big Piece responded, lacing a two-run double to the rightfield corner that tied the game. Werth followed with a single to center for the go-ahead run.
"It was all on my shoulders right there,'' Madson said, "and they took it all off.''
But there was still fear to conquer. First on the part of Eyre, who already was pitching with a painful loose body in his elbow when he sprained his ankle in the seventh inning of Game 3. Although he allowed two hits, putting the tying and winning runs at first and second, he also recorded two pivotal outs. Then came Lidge, the closer who lost his job late in the regular season and finished the year with 11 blown saves and a 7.21 ERA.
For the second straight night - Lidge was forced into action after another Phillies rally in Game 3 - Troy Tulowitzki represented the final out. For the second straight night, Lidge came through, this time striking him out and jump-starting yet another clinching celebration.
"Obviously, winning the World Series is the ultimate goal here and nothing is going to top that, and hopefully we can do it again,'' Lidge said. "But this was a lot of fun for me here.''
And it was a lot of fun for Manuel, who, it turns out, pulled all the right strings, right down to the final out of the series. Afterward, Rockies general manager Dan O'Dowd interrupted Manuel's moment of Zen to offer a congratulatory handshake. A lot has changed in a little more than 2 years.
Outside, the fraternity party raged. But Manuel stayed put.
He likes that office just fine. *
For more Phillies coverage and opinion, read David Murphy's blog, High Cheese, at http://go.philly.com/highcheese.
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