NEW YORK - Every decision Charlie Manuel has made since the postseason began has been with the intent of putting the Phillies in better position to repeat as World Series champions.
October decisions come with risk, however, particularly when they involve messing around with the starting rotation and hanging one's hopes on a string of best-case scenarios.
No one would tell you that more quickly than Manuel himself, who admitted early in the playoff process that he was being forced to make some moves he'd rather not be making.
If all the decisions work, or enough of them, then there's a big parade and a lot of parties and everyone calls you a genius. If not, people will ask all winter why J.A. Happ wasn't in the starting rotation - or something like that.
The Phillies return home for Game 3 of the World Series tomorrow night with the series tied at one game apiece after last night's 3-1 loss in Yankee Stadium. Following Cliff Lee's masterful performance in the opener, they missed the opportunity to take firm control of the series with another win last night.
As it was, they got a decent pitching performance from Pedro Martinez, but not one that matched up against the work of A.J. Burnett. Martinez was good, but he gave up two home runs on mistake pitches and put the insurance run in scoring position with a pair of hits in the seventh inning before departing.
"I felt Pedro did a tremendous job, but he got hurt by the long ball to the left-handed hitters," Manuel said. "It was a very close game. We just couldn't pull it out."
It can be said that Manuel stayed too long with Martinez, sending him back out for the seventh inning having already thrown 99 pitches, but that kind of second-guess is pointless. Manuel had committed to Martinez for this start and he was going to ride him as far as he could, trying to delay dipping into his bullpen as long as possible. He did have Happ out there, warmed and ready, but the pitcher who was the Phillies' most consistent starter all season didn't get into the game.
"He said he wanted to go back out and pitch," Manuel said. "I thought he hadn't lost anything and he went back out."
Two batters later, he came back in.
And so the Phillies come into Game 3 with Cole Hamels as the starter. A year ago, that would have been a really good thing, but this is not a repeat of 2008 - at least not yet.
Manuel passed over Hamels for last night's start, another difficult decision and one that could cut a couple of ways. Either Hamels, in familiar surroundings with a supportive crowd, will seize the opportunity and pitch well, or, shaken by a 6.75 postseason earned run average and his manager's apparent lack of faith, he won't.
It will be a pivotal game. If the Phillies should lose and trail the series, Manuel would then have to decide whether to throw Lee on short rest in Game 4 or trust things to Joe Blanton. Again, it's all about weighing the risk.
Manuel's decision to pitch Martinez last night was based on the pitcher's good start in Dodger Stadium in the National League championship series, but also on the gut feeling that Martinez would charge up the steps of this grand stage.
In any case, Martinez wouldn't be rattled by a setting he has seen many times, which is something you couldn't say for sure about Happ.
"I have frog's blood," Martinez said in an interview with Spanish-speaking reporters.
Cold-blooded or not, pitching in the chill of the Bronx evening wasn't the same as pitching on a summerlike day in Los Angeles when the glare of the sun cut the ball in half.
Would Happ or Hamels have done better than Martinez did? Perhaps, but they couldn't have done worse than a loss, which is what Martinez got.
And now the rotation is set up so that Hamels is on schedule to pitch Game 3 and a possible Game 7 in Yankee Stadium, while Martinez would theoretically return for a Game 6 in New York. The only way that would change is if Lee pitches on the short rest in Game 4, and then does so again in Game 7.
Just as baseball is a game of inches, it is also decided by these domino progressions of decisions. When Manuel came to the conclusion that the bullpen needed a lot of help - and was particularly keen on getting Happ's left arm into that bullpen - it removed a solid piece of the rotation. That led to a cobbling together of a new rotation and, ultimately, to last night's World Series game that didn't quite work out.
Now the attention shifts to the decision to bump Hamels back in the rotation. All of the moves are related, and they lead one to the next like stepping stones across a pond. In this pond, though, if you get your shoes wet four times, you go home.
Contact columnist Bob Ford at 215-854-5842 or bford@phillynews.com. Read his blog at http://philly.com/postpatterns.
Video: Inquirer's Bob Ford debates the Series
