Series gets messy

SAN FRANCISCO - After three games of neat, efficient, if slightly quiet baseball, the National League Championship Series got messy last night. Game 4 between the Phillies and Giants was a test of which team would make fewer mistakes, throw fewer bad pitches, and somehow place their slumbering bats in the path of the ball.

It wasn't pretty, but it was pretty interesting, and the difference in the outcome, after three games of domination by the starting pitchers, was left to a pair of spotty bullpens.

The Phillies' bullpen was so spotty, apparently, that manager Charlie Manuel chose to alter his careful rotation plan by pitching Roy Oswalt in the ninth inning. Oswalt gave up the game-winning run on a sacrifice fly by Juan Uribe as the Phillies lost, 6-5, to fall behind, three games to one, in the series.

If the Phils don't win Thursday behind Roy Halladay, then the decision to use Oswalt won't matter. We'll see on that one.

A messy game? There were three hit batters, three wild pitches, a blown balk call, and an error in the game. There were baserunning blunders and a strike zone from home-plate umpire Wally Bell that appeared to move around from inning to inning and batter to batter. If this had been a game played in May, it would have been as forgettable as the stakes on Wednesday night made it memorable.

It is a measure of big-league baseball at the moment that both starters in Game 4 of a league championship series were able to scribble only 42/3 innings on their pitching lines. Maybe that's all you can expect, but both teams, operating with suspect bullpens, could have used a lot more.

San Francisco rookie Madison Bumgarner earned his exit in quick order, allowing four hits and a sacrifice to start off the fifth. Manager Bruce Bochy had seen enough and went to the 'pen. It might have been either a quick hook or a poor choice of replacement, however, as reliever Santiago Casilla gave up an immediate two-run double and wild-pitched home another run.

Joe Blanton, blessed with the largesse of a 4-2 lead, which is a virtual explosion for the slumbering Phillies offense, didn't get hit around as badly as Bumgarner. But he committed the sin of walking the leadoff batter. Two outs later, when he gave up an RBI single to Aubrey Huff, Blanton was gone.

It was a big move from Charlie Manuel because it meant he had to find 13 outs in his bullpen, and it also meant he had no faith in Blanton to continue. Blanton had thrown only 63 pitches, but he was suffering from death by a thousand paper cuts. The three runs he allowed were all given up with two outs, and he didn't look like a pitcher capable of closing big innings. Manuel wasn't going to wait and see if he could figure it out.

The Phillies have been spoiled, in this series and this season, by their starters eating up a lot of innings and saving the bullpen from exposure. Blanton couldn't do so, and that was part of the argument for skipping him in the rotation and hitching the horses of the starting staff to a three-days' rest schedule.

The alternate argument is that, regardless of Blanton's success, pitching him allows Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt, and Cole Hamels to remain on their regular schedules. And there was always the possibility that he would either throw a gem or the Phils would hit enough to overcome a middling effort. That wasn't the case, and now the Big Three, who were 1-2 in the opening three games of the series, have to be 3-0 in the last three.

Once into the bullpen, Manuel had to make some tough choices trying to protect the 4-3 lead. He obviously thought he might be able to get two innings from Chad Durbin, which would bridge the way to Ryan Madson in the eighth and Brad Lidge in the ninth. The only thing wrong with the plan was Durbin's sixth inning, which didn't allow for a seventh. He started with a walk, double, double, and the Giants had the lead and Manuel had more moves to make.

Of course, Bochy had problems of his own and a leaky bullpen as well. When Ryan Howard chased lefthander Javier Lopez with a double to lead off the eighth, the Giants' own plan of scraping by that inning to get to Brian Wilson for the save in the ninth was in serious jeopardy. The Phils scored that run and the game went into the ninth tied, 5-5.

And it was then that it got really odd. If the entire idea of pitching Blanton was to not mess around at all with the Big Three, to keep them on their regular schedules and protect them from harm, then what was Oswalt doing coming in to pitch the bottom of the ninth inning? The answer is that Manuel was running out of pitchers (largely because Blanton got only 14 outs), the game could have lasted many innings, and Manuel apparently would rather mess up his rotation than put his trust in Kyle Kendrick. If this wasn't a situation for Kendrick - a starter capable of taking a few innings - then why put him on the roster?

Oswalt, who threw his regular between-starts bullpen session before the game, warmed up again and came in. He got only two outs, and the winning run scored on the second, the sacrifice fly by Uribe.

A messy game for both teams, but an ugly, unsettling one for the Phillies, who have to be nearly perfect to pull off the comeback. Great starting pitching can get them out of this, but one misstep and they are merely out.