Bullpen not nearly as mighty as Phillies needed it to be

In Game 6 - with the season on the line for the second game in a row - that bubble popped early. Like a window that bursts inside a pressurized cabin, when J.A. Happ opened the door to the outside world at Yankee Stadium to warm up in just the third inning, the gaping hole sucked everyone out with him.

In all, the Phillies used five relief pitchers to try to stop the fatal hemorrhage that started as a trickle with starter Pedro Martinez.

Pedro Martinez faltered early in the second inning when, after multiple deep fly balls and close calls, Hideki Matsui blasted a two-run shot. The bullpen got fidgety then, but remained in its shell.

Even after a third inning in which Martinez filled the bases and allowed a two-run single to Matsui, Charlie Manuel didn't call on the bullpen. It wasn't until the fifth inning that the normal firefighters, starting with Chad Durbin, were phoned from the dugout.

"[Matsui] was on everything we threw up," Manuel said. "Basically, the two hits he got off Pedro were fastballs. Off 'Happy,' he hit a slider. He had a big night."

It was a night that the Phillies needed Martinez to be good if not great. They needed him to be serviceable. They knew that Martinez, good or bad, wouldn't last deep into the New York night.

The bullpen, on the other hand, needed to be great - not good. Last night, it was neither.

"Baseball is always a learning experience,'' said closer Brad Lidge, who blew 11 save chances in the regular season and did not pitch in Game 6. "If you're here long enough, you're going to have a bad year.''

Durbin got behind, on a 2-1 count, against Yankees captain Derek Jeter. On the next pitch, Jeter belted a ground-rule double that was just a few feet away from turning a 4-1 New York lead into 5-1.

Mark Teixeira swatted a single two batters later to do that. Alex Rodriguez walked, ending Durbin's night.

Happ was brought in to try to solve Matsui with a left-on-left matchup. He couldn't. Matsui's double to deep center brought in Teixeira and Rodriguez to make it 7-1.

"You're not going to find an excuse from me," Happ said. "You've got to find a way. I had no excuses. I gave everything I could."

"It seemed like it was a different guy every night," Lidge said. "Obviously, Matsui had great at-bats. Top to bottom, they have a lot of tough guys in there. They know what they're doing."

By then, the damage was done. The patchwork provided by Chan Ho Park, Scott Eyre and Ryan Madson was largely ceremonial.

In all, the Phillies' bullpen gave up five hits, three runs and three walks over the final four innings.

Joba Chamberlain, called upon to bridge the gap from Andy Pettitte's 5 2/3 satisfactory innings to the ever-reliable Mariano Rivera, was the perfect contrast to the Phillies' bullpen.

Like the Phillies, Chamberlain had his fair share of struggles in the World Series. Chamberlain, who pitched 156 innings during the regular season as a starter, made it clear that he wanted to talk about his role in the offseason. In the eighth inning of Game 4 at Citizens Bank Park, Chamberlain fired two quick strikeouts but gave up a game-tying home run to Pedro Feliz.

Rather than collapse, Chamberlain came back to get the last out of the inning. That enabled the Yankees to enter the ninth inning tied instead of behind, possibly helping spark their two-out, three-run rally.

The Phillies' bullpen didn't spark anything for its lackluster offense. It just made the hole deeper.

Last night, Chamberlain needed 21 pitches to get three outs. He gave up just one hit. If he, or anyone else in the Yankees' bullpen, had previous postseason follies on his mind, he didn't show it.

Damaso Marte, who struck out Chase Utley with two on for the last out of the seventh inning and then fanned Ryan Howard to start the eighth, didn't give up a single hit or earned run all series. He retired all eight batters he faced. The only Phillies reliever remotely as effective was Eyre, who hurled with a bone chip in his pitching elbow.

After Marte struck out Howard, Rivera entered in the eighth - as Yankees manager Joe Girardi said he would - with a 7-3 lead. Rivera, baseball's closest thing to a guarantee, did what he nearly always does. And what the Phillies' bullpen wasn't able to do.