Philadelphia Phillies Send Arizona Diamondbacks Back To Earth

Tuesday night, the Arizona Diamondbacks were on top of the baseball world.

They had overcome a late lead against the best team in baseball in the Phillies and against the best pitcher in baseball, Roy Halladay. As expected, the loss caused a firestorm of attention across Philadelphia. How could a team like the Diamondbacks defeat our ace in such an impressive fashion? Was it Charlie Manuel’s fault? Should we be worried about an NLDS matchup against them now? These questions and questions like these, were raised, analyzed and re-analyzed endlessly after the game.

A few days after the loss, and the Diamondbacks have been hit by a strong dose of reality. It’s now blatantly obvious that they are still a ways off from competing with Philadelphia, a potential first round competitor.

After the first ninth inning blown lead of his Phillies career, Halladay handed the ball in Game 2 to Cliff Lee, who was able to defeat Arizona with a dominant pitching performance and an offensive outbreak that included nine runs. In the rubber-game, the Phillies won on timely hitting and yet another stellar showing from what has quickly become one of the best bullpens in the game.

The turnaround is a telling story of the very nature of this team. If they fail in one area, they come back and beat you in another. It’s a balance that teams strive to achieve, but rarely ever do.

Maybe Halladay was not himself on Tuesday. Maybe Manuel should have pulled him before he blew the game. Maybe it was Manuel’s fault.

But it was, in the end, just one loss. A small blip in an otherwise smooth path to greater triumphs and achievements.

At this point the Phillies should not be afraid of any team. Not the Giants, not the Braves and most certainly not the Diamondbacks.

Arizona is, undeniably, a good up-and-coming team with a bright future ahead of them. Manager Kirk Gibson has led his team to an incredible worst-to-first season, in which they continue to stave off the defending champion San Francisco Giants. They are good enough to beat anybody in the league, including Halladay and the Phillies.

However, they still remain in a different class of “good.” In fact, it’s an extremely different class of “good.” They simply do not have the players, abilities or experience to make a deep run during the postseason. Not this year, anyway. 

Of course, any team can lose in a short five game series in the playoffs. But the Phillies shouldn’t. They couldn’t. And if they are able to successfully recover from a surprising moment of failure, as they did in this series, they won’t.

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