On Lidge's first delivery to Mark Teixeira, Damon bolted for second. At first glance, it looked as if third baseman Pedro Feliz - who was covering the bag due to the shift on Teixeira - might have had a chance to tag him out, but Damon was safe on the short throw.

Damon instinctively realized that no one was covering third base with Feliz standing right next to him.

Damon took off for third before catcher Carlos Ruiz or Lidge could get to third.

"To be honest, it's not something that we go over very often," Lidge said. "I don't know who's supposed to cover the bag there. It was a weird play. It becomes a footrace.

"It's an unusual play. There was just nobody at the bag. Damon is a heads-up player."

"It's the catcher or pitcher that's got to be heads up," Phillies manager Charlie Manuel said. "We've got to shift on like that, Feliz was covering second base, and evidently there was some miscommunication there . . . That's the first time we've had it happen to us this year, but at the same time, somebody has got to be covering third base. Usually it's the catcher tries to get down there."

It was a heads-up type of play that Phillies fans have grown accustomed to seeing from Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley.

This time, it was Damon, at a pivotal moment in the game. Up to that point, Lidge had quickly mowed down Hideki Matsui and Derek Jeter.

"That's instinct," Yankees manager Joe Girardi said.

It didn't directly cost the Phillies a run, but it rattled them. All of the sudden, Damon was on third base - putting the Yankees 90 feet from the go-ahead run with two outs.

Lidge says that the blink-of-an-eye play didn't throw him off, but he plunked Teixeira on the second pitch after Damon stole the two bases.

"We were one pitch away from getting out of there," Lidge said.

That play capped an uncharacteristically sloppy defensive game for the Phillies. In the fifth inning, Utley tried to backhandl the ball to Rollins at second base - without transferring it from his glove - to get the lead runner, Nick Swisher. The ball went straight up in the air and they ended up not getting anyone out.

Two batters later, Rollins couldn't stop a Jeter grounder in the hole from reaching leftfield, a play that would have kept Swisher from scoring.

"It was an unusual, but with two outs it didn't matter at that point whether he's on second or third base," Utley said. "He's going to score anyway. That's baseball. You can never figure this game out."