When winning is deceptive

THE SIMPLE mathematics say they are on pace for 106 victories. A lot can slip between the cup and the lip, as Don King used to say, but the math says the 2011 Phillies will win more regular-season games than all but a handful of teams in baseball history, and more than they ever have in theirs.

And this makes you what? Thrilled? Happy? Excited beyond belief?

Of course not. That would be like putting ketchup on a soft pretzel or Gouda on a cheesesteak. You're anxious already. Every time some out-of-town expert comes in here and proclaims that your team can't miss this October, your stomach feels as though you ate one of those cheesesteaks and washed it down with a Yuengling that had been sitting in your trunk since the last homestand. And if the Phillies' first-place lead, which stands at nine games after yesterday, expands into double digits when September baseball begins? Well, close the door to your child's bedroom first, OK?

You've read all those stories by now. The 2001 Seattle Mariners, with 116 victories, banged in five games by the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. The 1969 Orioles, with 109 victories, World Series losers to the late-breaking New York Mets. The 111-win 1954 Indians, swept in the World Series. The 1988 Oakland A's with 104 victories, beaten in five games by Orel Hershiser's Dodgers.

The 1998 Braves, 3 years removed from their one world championship in Atlanta, with exactly 106 regular-season victories, beaten by the Padres in six games of the National League Championship Series.

It happens. And sometimes you should have seen it coming. The 2001 Seattle Mariners had one 20-game winner: Jamie Moyer. Of the bullpen arms that logged more than 40 games, only one was under 30.

Last week, I asked John Kruk to analyze a matchup between his '93 Phillies and these Phillies. His team would lose a seven-game series, he said, but they would make Roy Halladay and the staff work harder than they have for most of this season. "Our team was very patient and we walked a lot," he said. "We were very aggressive in the strike zone early. So if it was strike one, we were hacking at it. But we just didn't swing at bad pitches. And that's where we had the advantage over the Braves, because they didn't have big strikeout guys."

That take on the Braves, who won just one World Series amid 14 straight division titles, is enough to scare anyone hoping for another parade. Like those Braves teams, the Phillies' staff pitches to contact. They are matadors, not bulls. Few pitchers had better control than Tom Glavine and perhaps even fewer could get inside of a hitter's head the way Greg Maddux could. But winning in the postseason is almost always correlated to grinding out at-bats and fouling off a pitcher's best stuff. It's why John Smoltz, who could amass strikeouts, was always at his most effective - and feared - during the postseason.

When the National League's best offense last year, the Cincinnati Reds, were swept by the Phillies, they were no-hit in one game, by Halladay, of course, and shut out on a five-hitter by Cole Hamels in the clincher. In between, five relievers combined for four shutout innings.

The Reds were, in a word, impatient.

Against the opportunistic Giants, the Phillies registered no complete games. Twice the bullpen surrendered the game's winning runs. A lineup filled with veterans and last-chance mentalities, the Giants battled every at-bat. Even now, the box scores from those games underscore the thin line between victory and defeat. Down by just a run with runners at first and second, the Phillies lost when Ryan Howard took a 3-2 called strike on the black (or not) of the plate.

After winning their world championship in '95, the Braves lost the 1996 World Series to the Yankees, 4-2, (sound familiar?); lost in the 1997 League Championship Series to an overachieving team in the Florida Marlins, 4-2; (sound eerily familiar?), and then, after winning 106 games in 1998, lost to another surprising team in the San Diego Padres.

OK, OK, calm down. These Phillies seem to have more in common with that 1998 Yankees team that churned through both the regular and postseason. Like that team, they seem to improve as they go, keep finding solutions to potential problems.

Like that 1998 team, they are a group that has been seasoned and sobered by every postseason experience imaginable. They have lost when they expected to win the last two Octobers. The veterans of this team, guys like Jimmy Rollins and Ryan Madson, were there when that long Braves run finally ended and there was just one title to show for it.

Can't think of a better antidote for complacency.

Or a churning stomach.