No reason to freak out. We go into September 1.5 games out with a chance to make it .5 before the day's done. Back in spring training, if you'd given me a choice between that scenario and whatever was behind Door #2, I'd have taken 1.5 games out and never wondered about what else we might have had.
But still, damn.
Strange game — at the beginning, as we were marching out to a 2-0 lead and looking for all the world like more was coming, this felt like one of those nights when baseball's a sweet dream, when your players can do anything asked of them and look like they know it, too. And it wasn't just the scoreboard that made me think it — it was the crowd roaring and the cool, calm looks on the faces of Beltran and Floyd and Wright and Co.
But things slowly started to turn. Maybe it was the hideous heat, or the slow realization that Pedro didn't have it and was mixing and matching grumpily out there in search of something that worked, or that Brett Myers (who desperately needs a grooming intervention — he looks like a fricking cartoon character with his bald head, Magic Marker-black eyebrows and red chin beard) was mixing and matching and finding somethings that worked, or that the Phillies were approaching their at-bats with demonic concentration and not letting a single mistake pass them by. By the time Kenny Lofton made like it was 1990 out there, for all intents and purposes breaking us, I wasn't even that surprised.
I was surprised, however, to see Pedro back in the seventh. I didn't figure out until later that he was well under a normal pitch count, but then this was no normal night. What made me sure he wasn't coming back was the way he was clearly gathering everything he had left and airing it out in the sixth, bringing the velocity up as far as he could (to 88 — something is wrong, by the way, intensity of wrongness unknown for now) like an exhausted horse that can smell the stable and so breaks into a trot anyway. And when's the last time Pedro J. Martinez forgot how many outs there were? When he came out in the seventh the needle was clearly on 'E,' no matter what the pitch count said.
Oh well. Get 'em tomorrow. Please. Because I hear we got a road trip coming or something.
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