Bob Ford: Night didn't go right for Phillies
MILWAUKEE - Baseball is a fickle friend, and it turned away from the Phillies a little bit last night. It had its reasons, though.
The Phils were just one win from advancing to the National League Championship Series with a three-game sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers. As the sun comes up this morning, they are still one win from advancing.
It wasn't that the Brewers played so much better than they had in the opening losses at Citizens Bank Park. They didn't, stranding a dozen runners while their pitchers gave the Phillies plenty of opportunities to get something going.
But the Brewers did enough to win, 4-1, against a team that played as if the series already had been decided.
"They did a better job than us," Jimmy Rollins said, "but we're going to come out and find a way in the next one."
They'd better. The crowd, which was more nervous than fanatic last night, will be at full throat this afternoon when the Brewers take their hacks against Joe Blanton. One more win and the Brewers will force a deciding fifth game in Philadelphia on Tuesday that would match CC Sabathia against Cole Hamels.
For October theater, that would be a great game, but the Phils would just as soon cancel the production with a win today.
"I've been ready for this game," Blanton said.
If he isn't, the Phillies face the possibility of a meltdown after taking a stranglehold on this series. The Brewers still don't look all that good, but they aren't done yet, and they stand one more victory from really placing the pressure on the Phils.
"We've got to come back and try again," said Ryan Howard, who got his first two hits of the series last night, which was a good sign. "We wanted to finish this off as fast as possible, but that didn't happen."
Last night, even though Jamie Moyer struggled to find the strike zone and piled up pitches in the early innings, Milwaukee didn't really break through against him. The fans responded when Moyer walked the first two batters in the bottom of the opening inning and then wild-pitched them into scoring position. And while the Brewers got the runners home, with a sacrifice fly and a base hit to amp up the crowd, they didn't turn the inning into anything more.
"I finally started to get a feel for the ball around the third inning, but by then the damage was done," Moyer said. "They had a 1-2-3 first inning and got a little momentum, and I wanted to match that and take it from there, but I didn't get it done."
Nevertheless, the game felt as if the Brewers were letting the Phillies hang around, which should be dangerous business. But through the middle innings, the Phils squandered their chances to get back into the game and wrap up the series quickly. They had a runner in scoring position in the second, third and fourth innings and couldn't get any of them across. They had hits to lead off three innings as well and didn't get a run home until Jayson Werth got the fourth leadoff hit, a triple in the sixth that barely fell out of the glove of rightfielder Corey Hart. Werth scored on a groundout and the Phils were on the board, but not with much authority.
Baseball likes to punish teams that don't take advantage of their opportunities, but both teams were guilty last night. The Brewers needed the game a lot more, though, so their misses should have been mightier, particularly when they left the bases loaded in both the fifth and sixth innings.
It didn't matter on this night against the Phillies. The Phils struggled against starter Dave Bush and kept struggling against what often has been an undistinguished Milwaukee bullpen.
Even when they finally got aggressive, they messed up. Shane Victorino threw a hip check trying to break up a double play in the ninth, and a Phillies run was taken off the board. That wouldn't have changed much, as it turned out, but it reinforced the feeling that nothing was going right here.
So, the ledge they walk got a little narrower and the stakes for the next game got a lot higher. The Phils still need to merely win one of the final two games, while the Brewers need to take both, but only one game will be played today, and it will match Blanton against Jeff Suppan. If you have a solid idea about how that will come out, that makes you the only one.
It would be the ultimate tease of fate to make the Phillies wait this long for a postseason series win - 15 years and counting - only to yank it away when it appeared such a sure thing.
Baseball is like that, though. It is fickle and sometimes not a friend at all.
Contact columnist Bob Ford at 215-854-5842 or bford@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/bobford.
