Five Cuts: Game 5.5 may be tied, but the Phillies have the edge

A rested Ryan Madson is just one reason the Phillies have a big edge once Game 5 resumes. Chuck Solomon/Sports Illustrated

1. The Tampa Bay Rays may feel good about tying Game 5 with a sixth-inning run and about the subsequent suspension of the game effectively knocking Phillies ace Cole Hamels from the game. "We were pretty jacked up after the game," Rays manager Joe Maddon said. But the cold reality is the Phillies still hold the clear advantage in Game 5.5. Here's why:

• The Phillies have four at-bats, or 12 outs, with which to work assuming a regulation nine-inning game. The Rays only have three at-bats, or nine outs.

• The game is now a bullpen game. Philadelphia had the second-best bullpen ERA in the majors (3.19), trailing only Toronto. Do you know how tough it is to beat the Phillies' bullpen? No team has done it since Sept. 3 -- 56 days ago. And no team has beaten the Phillies' bullpen at Citizens Bank Park since Aug. 27 -- 62 days ago.

• The Rays have struggled mightily against the Phillies' bullpen. They have hit .069 against Philadelphia relievers (2-for-29 with 12 strikeouts) and scored one run in 8 2/3 innings against them (1.04 ERA).

• The Phillies have been in this exact position 11 times this year (tie game at home as they bat in the sixth inning). They are 7-4 (.636) in those games.

2. For all the criticism of the weather, TV ratings and this strange World Series -- we've played 4 1/2 games over seven days and still there hasn't been one lead change -- baseball wound up with one of the most exciting nights it ever has seen: a 3 1/2-inning game with the world championship on the line. It is baseball's version of overtime, the shootout or penalty kicks. It is baseball for people who don't have time for baseball. It is baseball for the attention-challenged.

Fox should be working overtime to promote this game. It is an unprecedented situation with the urgency you never get from baseball. It can guarantee viewers that the game, if not the entire World Series, will be decided in the late innings -- without asking anyone to invest the time of watching the first two-thirds of the game. And there's yet another bright side to what people thought was a mess: Kids can watch the end of the game on a school night (assuming no rain delays or extra innings). The first suspended game in World Series history is not bad at all for baseball.

3. Even though it's been announced that Game 6 would take place on Thursday (meaning there's no off-day), Phillies manager Charlie Manuel said he will have Ryan Madson start the seventh inning tonight (wouldn't you like a three-inning game at home with Madson and Brad Lidge as your pitchers?). Madson pitched two innings 15 times this year and he has been almost unhittable for two months. Madson and closer Lidge seem to give Manuel a lock on those nine outs left for the Rays, without any worries about batter-pitcher matchups or who is coming off the bench.

4. Baseball simply got unlucky with all the rain in Philadelphia. Of course the late October weather in the Northeast and the usual late ending times of World Series games have spurred the annual sniping about baseball's greed and its dependence on Fox's money, anyway.

Nothing you can do about the rain. But is there something that can be done about the scheduling? Selig already has talked about finding a way to remove two or three off days from the postseason calendar. What he needs to do is form a committee that re-examines everything about how best to package the sport's most valuable product: postseason baseball. Little by little the baseball postseason has become almost too bloated for its own good. When you keep getting more and more games lasting longer and longer over more and more days, you're going to get games ending near two in the morning, you're going to risk more rain and more cold and you're going to get -- egad! -- the seventh game of the World Series scheduled for Nov. 5 next year, assuming no rain delays.

What follows is a glance at postseason baseball in 10-year increments over the past 40 years. It should concern baseball that in just the past 10 years the average postseason game takes 17 minutes longer to play and that the final game has been pushed out by more than a week. The typical postseason game now ends around midnight Eastern time.

In virtually a like number of games, the 2008 postseason has consumed 719 more minutes of "playing time" than the 1998 postseason. Don't think of those 719 more minutes as more action.

Selig should put everything on the table for discussion: doubleheaders to shave a week off the regular season, any schedule that somehow removes the extra off days shoved in last year to accommodate a midweek start to the World Series, a 6:30 p.m. ET Saturday start for a World Series game (which would mean taking less money from Fox as a tradeoff for the intrinsic value of good public relations and recognizing young fans), limiting catchers' visits to the mound, 8:10 p.m. starts instead of 8:35 p.m., etc. The three-round postseason format was a great idea, but over 14 years the games and the schedule have been incrementally stretched. Postseason baseball is still the greatest show in sports, but that shouldn't be taken for granted. It's time for a checkup.

5. The most sweeping change in sports over the past quarter century is that they have been transformed from athletic competition that happened to be televised to a televised product that happens to be about athletic competition. That's not necessarily bad or good; it's just reality. But once you accept the reality that the money in sports is because of its value as television programming, you have to wonder about this: In this ballpark construction boomtime era, why aren't there more roofs over the playing fields? Why not spend $100 million (the approximate cost of adding a roof to a ballpark design) to guarantee the programming of your product, especially against an expected building lifespan of 50 to 80 years? Baseball could even help underwrite the cost with capital from its central fund or as writedowns against a franchise's revenue-sharing status.

New ballparks without roofs have been or are being built in Minneapolis, New York (two of them), Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. The retractable roof isn't some far-flung, cutting edge technology. (Toronto's Rogers Centre was designed 23 years ago.) It should be considered a basic standard when it comes to baseball's infrastructure planning and investment. The Twins, for instance, should not have been allowed to build a ballpark with no roof. The same industry standard should apply eventually to the Marlins in Miami and the Rays in the Tampa Bay area.