Bob Ford: Slowly, the tide is turning

SAN FRANCISCO - The subtle change that took place in AT&T Park on Thursday night, almost lost amid the din and the towel waving and the amazingly clutch 4-2 win by the Phillies, just might have been baseball beginning to turn its back on the San Francisco Giants.

These things don't always follow through, and the Phils are still deep in the woods of the National League Championship Series - their next loss is their last, with two games potentially remaining - but after a couple days of making things hard for themselves, the game suddenly got easier. This time, it was the Giants who made it a calculus puzzle.

"Momentum is the thing in a short series," manager Charlie Manuel said. "I feel good about our chances going back home."

The Phillies knew this had become a trio of one-game showdowns and they had to win them all, but they also knew that a win on Thursday would put the pressure back on the Giants. Returning the series to Philadelphia, and lining up Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels against Jonathan Sanchez and Matt Cain, was at least a 50-50 proposition for the Phils, as opposed to the long odds they faced while Tim Lincecum was still in the equation.

They took the series home in a game that didn't have many signature moments. But in the ones that counted, the Giants could manage only a scrawl - for a change.

"Well, it was a switch for tonight, and that's all we can ask for," Jimmy Rollins said. "One game at a time. We'll take them as they come."

There turned out to be a significant list of things that went right that could easily have gone wrong, starting with the starter.

When Roy Halladay suffered a slight groin pull in the second inning and had to get by on courage and curveballs after that, the game could have slipped away quickly.

An inning later, when Halladay bunted foul and the umpire let it be played as fair, the Phils could have been bad-lucked into a double play, instead of what turned out to be a successful sacrifice and the start of the pivotal three-run inning.

All those things, and they added up to just enough for the Phillies. Combine them with a bad error from Aubrey Huff of the Giants and, suddenly, the game and the series took on a different feel.

"We weren't that crisp," San Francisco manager Bruce Bochy said. "Against a team like this you've got to play your best, and we didn't."

It is an amazing telescoping of a six-month season that a playoff team will in some ways be remembered only for how it looks in the final glimpses of the postseason. It takes so much to get to this point, but in the end, they remember how you said goodbye, not all the hellos that came before.

"We lead major league baseball in wins. That's the first time in Philly history," Manuel said. "That's got to say something. You just don't cast those kinds of seasons away."

They did indeed win 97 games in the regular season, the most in baseball, and it was the only time the Phillies have ever done so, although they've only been playing since 1883. That isn't the kind of season to be lightly tossed aside, even if they don't succeed in making it to the World Series for a third straight year.

But the telescope effect, at least entering Thursday's game, showed the Phillies to be a team that wasn't hitting, wasn't playing particularly sharp baseball, and was on the verge of unraveling on the mound as well.

"They've got an edge going for them. They've got some stuff going for them," Manuel said of the Giants before the game in what almost sounded like a concession to the lost momentum. "They've got a lot of life."

Those edges can cut both ways, however, and the Giants lost some of theirs when the Phils scored those three lonely runs that stood up for so long.

If Pablo Sandoval had been able to find third base on Halladay's sacrifice, and if Huff had fielded Shane Victorino's ensuing hard shot to first, the Phillies would have been out of the inning without a run.

Instead, they scored three, getting some unexpected help along the way, just as if things were turning their way again. The inning was started by a bloop hit from Raul Ibanez, who had been 0 for 11 in the series, and the final run was driven in by Chase Utley, who had been 2 for 16.

The turning of the tide, coming as it did in the third inning, wasn't guaranteed to hold up. Fortunately for the Phillies, it did, because they managed just one more base hit until the ninth.

On their heels against Halladay's curveball offerings - which were just about all he could muster - the Giants stared up at a 3-2 deficit most of the game, and then the innings began to dwindle, and when the Phillies' bullpen took over, they appeared to mean it this time.

When Jayson Werth sliced the ball into the narrow porch above the right field wall, just a dozen feet fair, the Phillies had their insurance run for closer Brad Lidge, and the fickle game of baseball had completed its about face.

San Francisco should still win this thing. Given the choice, the Phillies would swap situations. But the edge the Giants held is drawing ever closer to their throats.