Rich Hofmann: Is Rollins able to play like Rollins?

THE PHILLIES have played 15 postseason games in which Jimmy Rollins has scored a run and they have won 14 of them - the last 14, to be exact. In the rest of the games, they are 6-11. The meaning of these numbers is up for debate among the sabermetricians in the audience. Warning: The potential for meaninglessness does exist.

The Phils have played 26 postseason games in which Rollins has reached base. They are 18-8 in those games and 2-4 in the games in which he doesn't get on. Again, maybe it means nothing. There are other players on the team with good correlations, too - and it is a small sample size, after all.

Still, the numbers get your attention - like the man.

And if Rollins is not the guy who kick-starts this lineup - and he really isn't; the issue is way more complex than that - he remains the kind of player who has the ability to turn a spark into a conflagration. He is not their best player and he is not their most consistent player - not in the regular season, or the postseason, and especially not this season - but when Rollins is playing like Rollins can play, he adds a speed component and a power component and a theatrical component that just makes everything, well, louder.

When Rollins is playing like Rollins . . .

This, as we all know, has been his season of woe. He has suffered four injuries to three body parts and been to the disabled list two times. Between the strained calf (twice), the bruised foot and the strained hamstring, Rollins missed 74 games overall. When you consider that he missed only 66 games from 2001 to 2009, you realize just how different this all has been.

Now comes another postseason. The weather has made its customary turn - cold and damp. It is not the weather that would be ordered up by a person with a less-than-100-percent hamstring, but it is the weather that Rollins and the Phillies will deal with beginning this evening against the Cincinnati Reds.

You wonder what Rollins can give them. You will watch him take that first stride out of the batter's box and automatically think about how the hamstring feels. You will see a well-struck baseball dancing down the rightfield line and see him rounding first base and wonder if he dares accelerate into a misty October evening - accelerate in the way that Rollins does when he is the kind of baserunner who imprints his presence upon games.

"I'm very comfortable with Rollins right now," said Charlie Manuel, the Phillies' manager. "I don't see him being . . . real sharp at stealing bags right yet, but I think that could come any day now. I think he's running good enough, definitely, to play."

But there is no way he can be 100 percent. That is one of the givens for the Phillies in this quest for a third consecutive trip to the World Series. It has been a season of patching and filling and making do, and that will be true here for Rollins most of all. There is no avoiding the uncertainty.

He says he is good to go, and that he would steal a base if the game situation demanded it - but he can't really know, not with this lingering hamstring, the kind of injury that demands the two things that Rollins cannot give it right now: rest and time.

Then there is the question of where he will bat in the lineup. It seems obvious that Rollins will not lead off, given the injury, and the way Shane Victorino has filled in at the top of the lineup, and everything else. Manuel, though, wouldn't say.

"As far as my lineup goes, I haven't really decided on it yet," the manager said. "I've been writing lineups down, but I pretty much know what it's going to be."

Whatever it is, Rollins will be in that lineup for as long as he can walk. The man who won an NLCS game last year in the bottom of the ninth inning with a two-out, two-run double off the Dodgers' Jonathan Broxton will give the Phillies what he has, whatever that is.

One thing we learned this season is that they can function without him. One thing we learned a long time ago, though, is what happens when Jimmy Rollins can catch fire.

When Rollins is playing like Rollins . . .

Send e-mail to hofmanr@phillynews.com,

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