A Tale of Two Bullpens in NLCS

LOS ANGELES – Any comparison between the Dodgers and Phillies has to start at the end.

The end of the game, that is.

One of the axioms of baseball is that good bullpens win in October. That would no doubt help explain why the Phillies won the World Series last year, when they were led by Brad Lidge capping a perfect season of ninth innings. This time around, though, it is the Dodgers who have the lights-out bullpen, a group with two All-Star closers, and the Phillies who have, well, good memories and all the optimism they can muster.

"They make it a six-inning game over there," Phillies lefty Scott Eyre told FanHouse. "You've got to see how you stack up. I think if we do our job, we stack up with anyone actually."

For now, that remains a huge "if." Predicting the playoffs is always dicey, but one prediction that is safe is that the team that pitches better late in games is going to be the team that wins. Poor hitting, bad work by the starters, bad defense -- all of those are easier to overcome than bad work by the relief pitchers.

Of course, the Phillies have already shown that they can do that. They won the division despite a bullpen than ranked ninth in the National League in ERA -- the Dodgers were first -- and a closer who blew 11 save opportunities and had a 7.21 ERA. Doing that in the playoffs is another matter. Since 2001, there has been only one team to advance to the World Series after a regular season in which its bullpen ERA ranked in the bottom half of its league (the 2003 Marlins were 11th). Twelve of the 16 pennant-winners ranked in the top four.

From the Phillies' perspective, the regular-season performance is meaningless now. That is especially true around Lidge's locker.

Lidge said that he was not 100 percent physically early in the year, and that caused him to "get out of whack mechanically," which led to poor performance, which led to a loss of confidence. Late in the year, he tweaked some things. He raised his leg kick back to where it was last year. He started experimenting with a cutter, which he hadn't used much since leaving Houston.

In his last three appearances of the regular season, Lidge retired eight of the nine batters he faced. In two playoff appearances, he's converted two saves, although there were a couple baserunners mixed in to one and he needed only one out to get the other.

"Toward the end of the season I felt better physically and and fell back into a groove," Lidge said. "Everything has kind of come together a little bit now. Obviously we have a long way to go, and I want to keep it locked in."

Lidge is still not the Phillies' slam-dunk closer. Manager Charlie Manuel said he'll continue to mix and match his relievers, sometimes using Eyre for a lefty or two (as he did in Game 4 in Colorado) and sometimes using Ryan Madson.

"We've had to kind of match up and shuffle some things and take guys out of their comfort zone or their roles, and things have worked pretty good for us," Manuel said. "That goes to show you how good a team we actually have."

Meanwhile, if Torre does any shuffling with his bullpen it's because the Dodgers have two closers: Righty Jonathan Broxton and lefty George Sherrill. Broxton, a 2009 All-Star, had 36 saves and a 2.61 ERA. Sherrill had 20 saves and a 2.40 ERA in Baltimore, and then an 0.65 ERA as the Dodgers' primary setup man after coming in a July 31 trade.

"Sherrill really made a difference in our bullpen, no question," Torre said. "He sort of put things in order."

Sherrill, an All-Star in 2008, joins Hong Chi-Kuo to give the Dodgers two hard-throwing, late-inning lefties. Last year in the NLCS against the Phillies they had Kuo and the less-inspiring Joe Beimel, along with Clayton Kershaw, pitching in the middle innings.

"They are going to be tough," Phillies slugger Ryan Howard said. "We've been dealing with tough matchups all year. We have no choice but to get in there and do what we can."

Torre said he's probably not going to use Sherrill in the ninth instead of Broxton, though, for the sake of matchups. That's because the Dodgers, unlike the Phillies, have a firmly established eight- and ninth-inning alignment.

"When [Sherrill] came over here, the first thing we addressed was who's the closer (and) who's the setup man, and he had absolutely no problem with what his job was here," Torre said.

Broxton hasn't needed the help. The beefy right-hander chucks fastballs in the upper 90s and misses plenty of bats, which is another asset in the postseason. His rate of 13.5 strikeouts per nine innings was the highest in the major leagues among pitchers who worked at least 20 innings. Broxton said the explanation for his success in his first full year as a big league closer is simply "trust your stuff."

Torre sees something more, though. The stuff was there last year, but this year Broxton has come out with a new attitude, bolstered by his performance last year and an invitation to the World Baseball Classic in the spring.

"That was a step of recognition for him," Torre said. "When he was back from that, he was just a completely different pitcher. He was much more confident in throwing all his pitches any time. And, more important than anything, when he's had maybe a bad outing, he's rebounded from it well."