PREDICTING THE PHILLIES' FINAL SCENE
The best way to prepare for the baseball playoffs is to rent the classic film “Fatal Attraction” and study the relationship between Michael Douglas and Glenn Close as it slowly leads both of them into disaster.
Welcome to our nightmare, Philadelphia. Great dramas are not supposed to telegraph their endings, but this Phillies season is barreling toward a tragic finish, with Charlie Manuel and Brad Lidge in the principal roles. Manuel’s blind loyalty won this city a championship last year. Now, it’s going to lose us one.
The fatal attraction is Manuel’s affection for a closer who has lost the ability to close. While we cringe collectively at 11 blown saves and a 7.21 ERA, the manager remembers only the 48 games Lidge completed without failure in 2008.
As Lidge’s fickle slider dangles precariously in the strike zone these days, begging to be slammed, Manuel is fixated on the memory of those filthy pitches that disarmed the best hitters a year ago.
To most fans, one of the highlights of the 2009 season was Manuel’s decision to summon Lidge for the final out of the 10-3 clincher over Houston. To me, it was a foreshadowing of the catastrophe that awaits us all. That decision, just days after Lidge had lost his closer job for the second time this season, was a final affirmation that the pitcher has not actually lost the job at all.
The first time the Phillies are holding a lead of three runs or less in these playoffs, prepare yourself in the ninth inning for the emergence from the bullpen of Lidge. And then brace yourself for a lost lead, and probably a lost game. In a short series, that one misstep could be all that is required to end our hopes for another parade.
If you haven’t figured out yet that this Lidge scenario has become an obsession of mine in the past month, you must have missed my last few columns. At least now I am not alone in my fatalism. No day has passed in recent weeks when a caller on my WIP radio show — often many callers — has expressed the same fear. “Lidge is going to blow this season” has become our mantra. We already know the ending of this movie, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
There are no guarantees in sports. The Phillies have a good enough team to overcome the lack of a dependable pitcher in the ninth inning. There is still hope.
But this much I will declare in writing now. If the Phillies win it all again, it won’t be because of Brad Lidge. And if they don’t raise the trophy again this year, it will be because of Brad Lidge.
– Angelo Cataldi is host of 610 WIP’s Morning Show, which airs weekdays from 5:30-10 a.m.
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