Phillies overcome pitching woes; Rockies going wild

Jimmy Rollins and the Phillies scratched and clawed their way to the NL East crown -- with a little help from the Mets. AP

By all rights, by every sacred baseball cliché ever uttered by a single-minded manager or regurgitated by a lockstep player, the Phillies should not be the National League East champions. They shouldn't be winning much at all.

How can a team with a rotation like this one -- it consists of an old guy, a castoff, a rookie and a sore-armed ace -- be in this position? No matter how many runs that ridiculously strong lineup piles on. No matter how badly the Mets choke. (And, man, did the New Yorkers swallow their tongues on this one.) No matter how much Jimmy Rollins imposes his MVP-sized will.

It flies in the face of reason, of all that we've been taught about good pitching shutting down good hitting. It's this simple: If pitching wins ballgames, the Phillies shouldn't be winning. Not like this. Not this much.

Yet the champagne that flowed like Gatorade on Sunday and the players dancing on the infield and all the throaty yells at Citizens Bank Park during the Phillies' 6-1 win over the Nationals confirmed it: For the first time since 1993, the Phillies are NL East champs.

It's something you had to see to believe. Or at least see on SportsCenter.

"Look at the scene on the field," said the Phillies' longtime announcer, Harry Kalas, after the final out was recorded Sunday. "Look at the scene in the stands. Just incredible."

From the start of the season, the Phillies have been a team that has mocked the standard thinking about pitching. After three starts they took their Opening Day starter, Brett Myers, and stuck him in the bullpen. They lost Jon Lieber and Freddy Garcia to injuries ... and got better. They coaxed 10 wins out of Adam Eaton, even with a 6.29 ERA. They traded for Kyle Lohse, who had 12 losses with the Reds. He has yet to lose in a Philly uniform.

The Phillies have a 4.76 team ERA, 13th in the NL. And they have -- did we mention this? -- 89 wins, tied for the second-highest total in the league.

All season long, Charlie Manuel, the Phillies' often hang-dog but always good-guy manager, has known what he faced. For weeks he has openly wondered if his team had enough pitching. You could tell, just by the slump of Manuel's shoulders and the look in his eyes, that he really wondered about it at times. Just like everyone else around the team. Just like everybody in Philadelphia. Just like everyone who has seen the Phillies patch together the staff from the start of the season.

"You gotta stop them," Manuel told me earlier this month, shaking his head. "You got to be able to stop them."

The Phillies have, somehow, stopped everyone just enough to win in one of the most unlikely climbs to a division title ever. When it counted most, the Phillies found the pitching that Manuel worried so much about. In the last 17 games Philadelphia starters -- the old guy (44-year-old Jamie Moyer), the castoff (Lohse), the rookie (Kyle Kendrick) and the ace (lefty Cole Hamels) -- were 6-2 with a 3.90 ERA. The bullpen was even better (7-2, 2.40). In those 17 games the Philly bullpen -- notably Myers, Tom Gordon, Geoff Geary, Clay Condrey and lefty J.C. Romero -- has held opponents to a .200 batting average.

It helps, of course, when the team's overly jacked-up lineup scores like it has down the stretch. In those final 17 games -- 13 of them wins -- the Phillies scored an average of six runs a game. It helps, too, when the team that the Phillies finally chased down -- the sad, cursed Mets -- blew a seven-game lead by giving up an average of 6.7 runs a game. The Mets went 5-12 in the clutch, losing six of their last seven at home.

Whatever it took, though, the Phillies managed to scrape their part of the bargain together, just as they have all season. The Phillies, remember, have the best record in the NL since mid-April, when they stumbled to a 4-11 start. They've been playing this way, and winning, for just about the entire season.

Do they have enough pitching? The question is as pertinent as ever as the Phillies gear up for their first playoff game since John Kruk was their mulletted first baseman and Curt Schilling was the ace of their staff. But the real question should be this: Do the Phillies really need any more?

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