WHEN, AFTER GAME 2 OF THE SERIES, I TALKED ABOUT HOW much I wanted to see a matchup between Carp and Roy Halladay, I wasn’t kidding. As a fan, and as the soon-to-be-outgoing manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, I wanted to see those two great competitors go at it. The word great may get overused. I have some very specific criteria I use when talking about pitchers who have earned that description. In my mind, you have to become great. It’s something you work at turning yourself into. It involves doing the things necessary to improve yourself in all facets. You have to work at your craft. You have to work at your demeanor. You have to work on your competitive instincts and refine them. You have to work at becoming an invaluable teammate and leader.
Similarly, for a game to be considered a classic, other criteria have to be met. To me that means that the game has to have serious stakes. The competition between the two teams has to be both fierce and equal. The performances of individual players have to be of extremely high caliber. The outcome should be in jeopardy until the final moments. The action has to arrest your attention because of the brilliant, the surprising, or the unique nature of the performances or the personalities.
Game 5 of our National League Division Series against the Philadelphia Phillies in 2011 saw an overlap between individual greatness and a classic baseball game. I may have planted the seed about my desire to see that confrontation between our club and theirs, between their ace and ours, but I had very little, if anything, to do with shaping the forces that produced the result on the night of October 7, 2011.
One unique feature that made this game a classic is that Roy Halladay and Chris Carpenter share a lot of similarities, beginning with the superficial: they are both right-handed pitchers, they’re both listed as being the same height and weight, and it’s interesting that they both began their careers as first-round draft picks (Carp the fifteenth and Halladay the seventeenth in 1993 and 1995, respectively) by the Toronto Blue Jays. Each had made his major league debut and spent the formative years of his career with that team. Halladay had only been with Philadelphia since 2010, while Carp had been with us since 2003.
As I said, greatness is developed. I don’t think it’s any accident that Carp and Halladay were molded into the top-of-the-rotation starters and serious competitors that they are today while inside the Toronto organization. Carp’s first two years and Doc’s first year in the big leagues coincided with the two years that Roger Clemens and Pat Hentgen spent in Toronto. All other issues aside regarding Roger, he was a legendarily hard worker, an intense competitor, a power pitcher, and a fierce presence on the mound. Whether by word or example or both, Carp and Doc benefited from being exposed to Roger Clemens in his prime.
Of course, the moment Carp arrived in the big leagues everyone was talking about him. You can’t be six feet, six inches tall and weigh 230 pounds, throw serious heat, and have great command of your pitches without attracting some attention, but Carp didn’t set the league on fire during his time in Toronto. He was a combined 49-50 with a 4.83 ERA in those first six years. In 2002 he was injured and went only 4-5 with a 5.28 ERA in thirteen games. He was going to be a free agent at the end of that injury-shortened season and didn’t pitch in the majors in all of 2003 after having more surgery.
Carp and Doc had also benefited from being around Blue Jay pitcher Pat Hentgen during those crucial first few years in the big leagues. Like Roger, Pat was a former Cy Young Award winner, having earned it in 1996. We were fortunate that we’d signed Pat in 2000. He’d come over as a free agent and won fifteen games for us that year. We were also fortunate that Pat’s agent, Bob LaMonte, represented a few ballplayers, such as Toronto’s Dave Stieb as well as Carp. When Carp was rehabbing, and a free agent, Pat mentioned to Bob that he thought that the Cardinals would be a good fit for Carp. Pat had had a positive experience working with Dunc, he knew our training staff and facilities would help Carp with his rehab, and he felt that St. Louis was a great place to play.
The first time I saw Carp pitch up close and in person, I had the rain to thank for it. Despite Carp not being able to pitch for us in 2003, owing to the surgery he needed to repair his torn labrum, we signed him as a free agent. Actually, we hoped that he’d be ready by midseason, but a part of Carp’s competitive nature got the best of him. In June 2003, we were down in Florida to play the Marlins. Carp was there rehabbing, and one afternoon Dunc and I were scheduled to watch him throw off the mound. Unfortunately, the rain forced us inside. Fortunately, the rain forced us inside. Because of how the indoor cage was configured—a long rectangular net with the pitcher at one end and the hitter at the other—we were able to sit several feet behind the plate.
What we saw had our jaws dropping. A four-seam fastball that, when up in the zone, rose. A two-seam fastball that he could run to either the third-base or cut to the first-base side of the plate. He also threw a good curveball with fine downward action and could change speeds effectively with a deceptive changeup. Dunc and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Dunc nodded his head and said, “He can pitch. He has a lot of weapons.” For Dunc, that was a ringing endorsement shouted off the rooftops. But as I said, Carp’s competitive nature got the better of him. He was so eager to show his new manager and pitching coach that the gamble on signing an injured starting pitcher was worth it. He wound up tweaking his shoulder again, had to rehab longer, and missed the entire 2003 season.
In 2004 he won fifteen and lost five. In 2005 he won twenty-one, lost five, and won the Cy Young Award as the National League’s top pitcher. How’s that for a pitcher who was one game under .500 for his career? All I can say is, that was a whole bunch of a fully healthy Carp and a strong dose of Dunc. In 2006 Carp went 15-8, but was derailed by injury the next two seasons, after hurting himself on opening day. Again, he bounced back from adversity and went 17-4 and 16-9 the next two years. So, counting his 11-9 season in 2011, he was a combined 95-42 with a 3.06 ERA. Again, those numbers speak volumes about Carp and Dunc’s influence. They also tell you that the man worked his rear end off to come back from those injuries, to win two Comeback Player of the Year Awards, to transform himself from a sub-.500 pitcher into the staff ace and an incredible leader.
It’s not easy to endure those years when you’re sidelined and not contributing on the field. You have so many ups and downs, you have your patience tested at every turn, and on top of that, you’ve got to endure the pain and be smart enough to know when you might be taking too big of a risk too soon. Carp learned the hard way, based on that throwing session he did for us, that he couldn’t rush it. That takes real character to make a mistake and learn from it. He broke down, but he came back stronger. That’s a mark of greatness and toughness. Some of the latter I think he developed as a result of his background as a hockey player. Hockey players are renowned for their ability to play through pain—witness the high cost of their dental plans—and that mentality served him well, though it had to be harnessed. The working at his demeanor part of greatness came into play here, in particular as it related to reinjuring himself. The best expression of that hockey-player attitude in Carp comes out in what a hard-nosed kind of guy he is.
What you see is what you get with Carp. He has a lot of integrity and a take-no-crap approach. He won’t be shown up by an opposing hitter. This may be one of the hidden parts of the game, but the great pitchers can’t stand it when a hitter, after popping up, grounding out, or striking out, acts as if he’s somehow been denied his rightful place on base owing to some act of God, unfair trickery, or his own failure to exert his will and talent over the pitcher. It’s never that he was gotten out; he made the out. A subtle but important distinction. It’s fine for a hitter to think any of the above, but to display that lack of respect for a pitcher’s ability rankles some, and it rankles Carp a whole lot.
I can’t tell you the number of times Carp has told a hitter to shut his mouth—or words to that effect—when he went down the line or back to the dugout grumbling and acting out. That’s not a smart thing to do. You do not want to rile up a Carp. Hitters have made the mistake of doing that and felt the wrath of his vengeance.
The other part about Carp’s personality that I admire is that he’s a great family man. His wife, Alyson, and their children are a frequent presence on road trips, and his son Sam is a lot of fun around the clubhouse. But when it’s time to shut the door and escort the family out, Carp goes into game mode—whether he’s pitching that night or not.
One of the other things he has done as a leader is to institute the practice of having all the starters, with the exception of whoever is on the mound that night, watch the others do their side work in the bullpen. Those little pitching clinics, the give-and-take among the guys that Carp would lead, set the example and sent the important message that every time you step on the mound and deliver a pitch it has a purpose that figures into a larger plan. That leadership from Carp was a huge part of being a number-one starter.
His leadership extends off the field as well. Carp was one of the co-signers, and he took that responsibility seriously. We didn’t arbitrarily set the number of co-signers, and different guys handle the role in their own way. When there’s an issue that affects the whole club—a matter of team policy, for example—the whole group would weigh in. Carp was one of the guys who would help out when issues were percolating—in other words, when something not fully and regularly visible was cropping up. A number of times he came to me and said, “Hey, Tony, I think that something’s up with so-and-so. He just doesn’t seem himself.”
That’s big, because as much as we pride ourselves on personalizing, as a staff we don’t see the guys in all the circumstances their teammates do. It would be easy to hide something, easy to just lead us to believe that all is well when it isn’t. Carp and a few others would do this kind of thing, exhibiting great discretion and knowing when it was time to alert us or time to handle things among themselves. As I said, I hadn’t had to use “the Gutless Speech” in a while, and one of the reasons for that was how personalizing, the co-signers, and our open communication channels had all worked in sync.
All that makes Carp one of the great ones.
I don’t know Doc Halladay nearly as well, but I imagine, and based on what I’ve heard, he’s played a similar role to the one Carp plays. Also, if it’s true that you can judge a man by the company he keeps, then Roy Halladay must be a good guy. He and Carp have maintained their friendship over the years. That fact added another interesting dimension to the confrontation in Game 5.
What I do know very well is what kind of pitcher Doc Halladay is. He and Carp aren’t clones, but they do have very similar stuff. What makes them both so difficult to face is that they have a number of quality pitches and have command of them—they can throw them to different spots effectively. That’s a deadly combination. Great starting pitchers have the ability to throw enough different pitches that they can give you a different look each time through the lineup in a game, in a season, and over the years. Carp and Halladay both do that.
One difference is that Halladay’s change-of-speed pitch has more downward action and is more like a forkball than Carp’s, and he throws that pitch more often than Carp does. Halladay, like Carp, also throws two versions of his curveball. The first is what we call a “get me over” pitch. He uses it early in the count; it doesn’t have the same sharp darting action as the other curveball, and it starts out of the strike zone and then finishes in it. The variant on that curveball, the “put away” pitch, is one that starts in the strike zone and breaks out of it, a pitch that he hopes hitters will chase.
It’s funny that guys like Carp and Halladay hardly ever have easy games. That’s because their game is at such a high level that hitters gear themselves up to face them. The best hitters want the challenge; others know they’re overmatched but go at it hard, and a few just want to avoid being embarrassed.
As we stressed with our hitters in facing dominating pitchers like Carp and Halladay, you have to pick your poison. There are several components to that. First, some pitchers are naturally better at throwing to one side of the plate. Some left-handed pitchers work that outside corner and struggle to come inside on right-handed hitters or away on left-handed hitters. When that’s the case, as a hitter, you can look for a ball in that zone that is more comfortable for the pitcher. However, with Carp and Halladay, that’s not as easy to do because they are equally effective at throwing to either side of the plate. They can also elevate the ball and keep it low in the strike zone, changing a hitter’s eye level. As a hitter, you can’t protect both the outside and the inside corner or up and down. Pitching is messing with a hitter’s balance by moving the ball in and out. It’s also about messing with his timing by changing speeds. By pitching inside, the pitcher hopes to speed up the hitter’s bat. Then the pitcher goes soft. If he wants to slow the guy’s bat down, he reverses that pattern.
The other dimension of picking your poison is this: guys like Halladay and Carp love to get ahead in the count. If you’re not up there ready to swing, then he gets ahead 0-1 and that opens up the opportunity for him to work the corners. The problem is, if you’re up there being too aggressive, you may immediately swing at pitches at the edge of the strike zone, which are more difficult to hit hard. So you could end up being behind anyway or having made a quick out.
We also let our hitters in on a bit of pitcher’s methodology. As a hitter, you have to think a bit like the pitcher. What does the pitcher want to do if he has a runner on first base? Get a double-play grounder. What’s the most effective way for him to do that? To throw a pitch down and in to a righty and down and away to a lefty, hoping that the hitter will try to pull it but instead roll over the top and beat it into the ground. If the pitcher’s trying to keep the ball in the ballpark and not give up a home run, he’s going to pitch away. That’s the traditional way to go about it, but today a lot of hitters will look away to extend their arms. If the pitcher or catcher sees a hitter trying to do that, the pitcher has to come back inside. That’s why having the ability to work both sides of the plate is so important.
Guys like Carp and Halladay aren’t afraid to come inside. I’m not talking about moving a guy off the plate, although they have no hesitancy about doing that either. A timid pitcher doesn’t want to go inside because, if he misses, he tends to miss out over the plate. Great pitchers—top-of-the-rotation starters—have to own the inside corner. So there’s the trouble. If you’re looking outside and cheating out there a bit, a great pitcher can bust you in on the hands.
My daughters are both dancers, and they might object to this analogy, but the game within a game that goes on between a pitcher and hitter is a lot like what I think a tango is. A push and a pull, inside and out, come here, no get away. That bit of intrigue, combined with two pitchers performing at the top of their game, is sure to produce a classic.
Carp and Doc didn’t disappoint.
I CAME TO THE BALLPARK FEELING THE LEAST NERVOUS I’D EVER been for a big game. I can’t think of a better tribute to Doc and Carp. I knew going in—and I imagine that Charlie Manuel did too—that we weren’t going to have to get involved in the game early with pitching decisions. For most of the year, and in the first four games of the series, I’d had to do that.
This was different.
When you send your number-one starter out there in an elimination game, you’re sending out your horse, and you expect to ride him as long as you possibly can. There’d be no quick hooks.
Not being nervous was a strange feeling for me. Mostly I was calm because of the pitching equation, but I also knew this was likely to be a game in which we’d have few chances to score, so there probably wouldn’t be a lot to do offensively. That said, I’d have to really grind hard on the decisions that did need to be made, just as the players would in their at-bats. I also felt this: if one or the other of these two great starters struggled, the game would essentially be over.
Since you don’t have a quick hook with your number-one starter, if they struggle, it can mean a couple of crooked numbers go up on the board against you before you get him out of there. It doesn’t happen often, but you hope for the best and prepare for the worst. In that case, either well ahead or well behind, the pressure wouldn’t impose itself. Of course, in any game it could happen that both starters struggle, and if that happened here, I’d have to “what-if” the hell out of the situation to figure out what to do, but the likelihood of both these guys blowing up was slim at best.
Of course, I also knew that the deeper we got into the game, my little “vacation” was going to come to an end.
Carp was going on his usual four days’ rest, so we had no concerns about that. He didn’t have a history of starting slow and giving up runs in the first inning, but what he’d said to us about the lessons he learned from Game 2 was encouraging. Whether he’d be able to put them into practice was another matter. Although he learned the lesson while going on short rest, it made sense to apply it anytime he felt he didn’t have his best stuff.
Our hitters did what they were supposed to do immediately. Rafael Furcal tripled to deep right-center to start off the ball game. He was ahead in the count 2-1, and as he later said, he was looking for a pitch to drive in that situation, knowing that Doc didn’t want to fall behind 3-1. He got what he wanted and executed perfectly, stroking the ball into right-center field. When you try perfectly, you often get good results. Next, Skip Schumaker put up one of the great at-bats of the series. We’d come to expect that from one of our best “gamers.” Halladay, realizing that he needed a strikeout or a pop-up to keep the runner at third, went after Schu hard and aggressive early in the count. Down 0-2, Skip fought off two pitches. Halladay was grinding, coming after him with four straight strikes before he threw one off the edge that Schu took for ball one.
As a hitter, down in the count like that and with the runner on third and no outs, you want to make contact. Early in the count, ahead in the count, you’re looking to get a ball you can hit hard. Down 0-2, it’s all about survival and making contact. Another foul, a ball, and another two tough pitches that Schu spoiled, and the count was 2-2 in what was to that point a nine-pitch at-bat. You could almost hear the sound of Schu’s grinding of that at-bat over the crowd’s roar. I watched him, steely-eyed and locked in, level the bat over the plate, waiting.
I’m convinced that the longer an at-bat goes, the more the hitter has an advantage. Pitchers have to show you more of their stuff early, and they get frustrated when a hitter barely makes contact to foul off a tough pitch. The more time the hitter spends in the box, the more comfortable he gets with his looks.
Halladay kicked and fired, and Schu’s bat lashed out and drove it into right field for a double. Furcal trotted home, and the hand claps and back thumps drummed in my ears. Not what Doc had ordered, but certainly what we needed. We wanted more.
We weren’t going to get it.
The Phillies made a nice defensive play on Albert. With Schu on second, Albert played to the situation and, trying to move the runner to third, hit a ground ball to second. Instead of taking the sure out at first, Utley gambled and nailed Schu at third just as he had been nailed in a previous game. Now, instead of a runner at third and one out, another prime scoring opportunity, we had a runner at first and still one away. A wild pitch and then catcher’s interference put runners on first and second with one out. That’s when Doc did what the great ones do. He elevated his game and retired the side on a foul-out and a groundout. Still, for an inning in which only one run was scored, a lot of stuff went on out there. We were encouraged by the fact that we’d forced Doc to throw thirty-three pitches that inning. We wanted into their bullpen.
In comparison to Doc’s struggles in the top half, Carp was on his game from the get-go. He got ahead of the first two hitters 0-2 and retired them. A first-pitch strike to Hunter Pence and then a ground ball ended the inning. Eleven pitches. What a great start. The guys in the dugout were all on the top step waiting for Carp. We’d been excited about scoring the first run, and now about shutting them down so convincingly. Carp sent another message in that first inning, to himself, to us, and to the Phils: this was not the same Chris Carpenter on the hill that night who’d labored so mightily in Game 2. This was Carp, the great Carp, the top-of-the-rotation guy at the top of his game. Would he be able to sustain that? I knew the intensity would be there, but what about his stuff? He’d thrown 237 innings in the regular season, the most since he won the Cy Young Award in 2005, when he threw 241 in winning twenty-one and losing only five. For his part, Halladay’s 233 innings was far below his career high of the astounding 266 he threw in 2003, when he won twenty-two ball games (with a career-high nine complete games) and the Cy Young.
In the opening game, we’d seen Halladay struggle in the first and then be lights-out after that. We weren’t sure if he could do that again. After Freese struck out, Punto hit a bullet to the third baseman, and Carp grounded out. Carp making the last out wasn’t the worst thing—he didn’t have to run the bases and we’d have the top of the lineup batting in the third and getting their second look at Doc.
We were gathering evidence to answer our question about whether Doc would get on a roll like he had in Game 2. He retired us in order in the third, with Schu’s line drive to center the only hard-hit ball. Even with two really good at-bats against Doc, Schu’s evening was over. He left with an oblique injury and was replaced by Jon Jay.
In the bottom of the fourth, the Phillies had a mini-rally going. Carp hit Chase Utley on an 0-2 pitch when he was trying to establish the inside against him. How the Phillies responded reinforces what I said about the great pitchers—you have to pick your poison, and sometimes it can end up hurting you. After Utley was hit, both Pence and Ryan Howard went after first pitches and made outs. That aggressive approach works when you get hits, but leads to low pitch totals when you don’t. On the other hand, if you wait and hold back, you may find yourself in a hole and have to battle back. Not much fun either way. Then, with two outs, Victorino singled, putting runners on first and third. Carp rose to the challenge. In a tough at-bat with Ibanez protecting, Carp finally got him to fly out to right. This was a classic example of Tom Seaver’s “special” outs theory even though we were only in the fourth inning.
Carp and Halladay swapped scoreless innings in the fifth, and at the midway point we still held a 1–0 lead with Carp at a very efficient sixty-eight pitches. We liked what we were seeing: on the one hand, a few more runs would have been nice, but on the other, because the game was so close, Carp had no room to relax at all. Not that he needed that added incentive to maintain focus, but 1–0 games do keep everyone sharp, since all the players know that any play, any potential misplay, could spell the end of that lead.
Of course, pitchers don’t do what Carp and Halladay were doing by themselves. Obviously, they need those infielders to stay alert, and low pitch counts and getting ahead of hitters make it easier for position players to maintain their concentration out on the diamond. The other important element you need as a pitcher is the one player in front of you—your catcher.
Most baseball people will acknowledge that in the National League, Yadier Molina and Carlos Ruiz are the two best receivers. Just as Carp and Doc are strikingly similar, so are Yadi and Chooch. Both guys came into the league admitting that they were primarily focused on their defensive play. They both threw well, blocked pitches well, and took the time to learn their pitchers and develop into great game-callers. Once they established that part of their game as real strengths, they both worked on their offensive game. As I sit here today in 2012, Carlos Ruiz is third in the league in hitting at .354, while Yadi is sixth at .326. That’s just one metric, but both catchers have steadily improved their offensive production throughout their careers.
What a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that, in my estimation, Yadi could always hit. In 2002 he hit .280 in almost 400 at-bats at Class A Peoria. The next year, 2003, he hit .275 in Knoxville, our AA affiliate. He split time between AAA Memphis and the big league club in 2004, hitting .300 in 129 at-bats in the minors and .267 in 135 at-bats with us after being called up when Mike Matheny was hurt. When Matheny signed as a free agent with San Francisco, Yadi took over. We hated to see Mike go, but we’d watched Yadi during his time with the big club and were convinced he could do the job at that level.
Maybe the questions about his offensive ability stem from the slow start he got off to in 2005. I recall a game early that year when we were down a couple of runs late, and I left Yadi in the lineup to hit in an RBI situation. He made an out. We lost the game. Afterward, at the press conference, I was asked if I had considered at all taking out Yadi for a pinch hitter. I said this, “He’s so good defensively, he could go hitless for the season and he’d still be our catcher.” It was only a slight exaggeration; our staff knew he would hit enough. That label might have stuck with him, even though he wound up the year hitting .252.
What’s most impressive, though, is that Yadi has the ability to raise his game in the postseason and in RBI situations. I have had several managers tell me over the span of time I had the pleasure of putting Yadi’s name on the scorecard that they believe that he is as respected as a really tough out as any of the other big guns we’ve had in our lineup—guys like Rolen, Edmonds, and Pujols. The statistics bear that out. In his career in the big leagues—including the start of ’12, when he’s been tearing it up—he’s a .277 hitter in the regular season. In the eleven playoff series he’s appeared in, he has a .309 average and has driven in twenty-three runs. And the higher the stakes get, the better he gets. He’s hit over .300 in the NLCS and the World Series.
You have to know Yadi and all the intangibles he brings to the ball club to understand why he’s the best. You can’t help but like him. Maybe it’s his electric smile, but guys just gravitate toward him. Though he’s grown more confident in his English over the years, he’s a bit self-conscious sometimes, but his effervescent nature helps make him a great teammate. It’s only natural that the Latin ballplayers spend a lot of time together. There’s a group, Yadi among them, who play dominoes before games pretty regularly. It’s not like they segregate themselves, and a lot of times one of the other guys will play along with them. Of course, a lot of ball-busting goes on, in both languages, and being bilingual myself always helped me a lot. I might not smile and laugh and let on that I’d heard what had been said about who, but I got a good daily dose of private chuckles out of their banter.
Behind that great smile is the heart of a lion. In 2006 Yadi hit a two-run home run in the ninth against the Mets in the seventh game of the NLCS. That and his catching Wainwright helped break a lot of Mets fans’ hearts. Ever since, if I told him that I was thinking of giving him a day off in New York, he’d look at me like I was crazy and say, “No. No. Before or after New York. I like to hear them boo me.” Mets fans took full advantage of the opportunities Yadi provided them to vocalize their displeasure.
But when it’s time to prepare for a game, Yadi, like Albert, is a regular visitor in “the Dungeon”—to prepare himself offensively and defensively. He’s gotten so good at evaluating the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses. When you add in how he processes Dunc’s input, Yadi’s game-calling has gotten so precise that several pitchers have told me they shake Yadi off only as a way to mess with the hitter’s mind. He puts the fingers down, and they go with what he thinks. That does so much to instill confidence in everybody and speeds up the game as well—a big consideration when you have a 162-game season.
Catchers have to do a whole lot for your ball club, and in the sixth inning Yadi showed his stuff. With one out, Utley singled to right field. On the first pitch, he broke for second. Yadi came out of the chute firing and hung a clothesline from home plate to second base that had us all just gasping in awe and shaking our heads. That kind of throw will make a manager think twice about flashing the steal sign again. What made that play so impressive was that Utley chose the right pitch to run on—a seventy-three-mile-an-hour curveball. Utley was fifty for fifty-two in stolen bases over the last three years. Yadi’s throw was great, but another defensive play also helped. Punto got the tag down in a hurry, another subtlety of good defensive play that often goes unnoticed. In 1–0 games, there are few if any bigs—it’s all the smalls that add up to a win.
Carp got Pence on a groundout to end the inning, but the guys all went to Yadi between innings, knowing how big that play was. Not only does Yadi have a strong arm, he has a quick release with incredible accuracy. Because his arm is so good, he’s fearless with it. How many other catchers would try to pick a runner off first when the winning run is standing on second base and an errant throw will bring that winning run home? Yadi would.
Any catcher has to be tough. I’ve seen Yadi get plowed into, to the point where he could barely even stand, and he was saying he’s okay and wants to stay in the game. You might have to question his intelligence based on that, but Yadi is the smartest catcher, the best signal caller, and the possessor of an amazing ability to connect with pitchers. More than anything else, it’s Yadi’s baseball intelligence that separates him from the pack.
In Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS, we went into the ninth inning tied 1–1. After Scott Rolen singled, Yadi hit a home run to put us up 3–1. In the bottom of the ninth, I brought in Adam Wainwright to close it out. He gave up a couple of hits, got two outs, then walked Paul Lo Duca. The bases were loaded, there were two outs, and Carlos Beltran, our Cardinals nemesis, was coming to the plate. With the series on the line, I turned to Dunc and said, “Don’t you think we need to make a trip? Make sure we’re thinking right?”
Dunc nudged me and said, “Yadi’s got it.”
I looked out on the field to see Yadi trotting out to the mound.
We sat there. I can’t stress enough what that means. Yadi was in his second year, and the NLCS was on the line. Sitting there and watching Yadi take care of it was a huge, and well-deserved, vote of confidence. Normally, the manager or the pitching coach would have been out there. We trusted Yadi completely.
Yadi went out to the mound and told Adam that he thought a first-pitch sinker outside was the way to go. On the way back to the plate, though, he had a change of mind. Since strike one was a priority, he was worried about what he’d originally said to Adam, because while Adam had a good running fastball to the third-base side of the plate, it wasn’t a true sinker. He was concerned that the pitch would be up too much and right into Beltran’s wheelhouse. Great thinking on his part.
Since Yadi couldn’t go back out to the mound, in his crouch, he sent the “follow me” sign to his pitcher. Basically, that sign was telling Adam to ignore what they’d just talked about and go with whatever sign Yadi next flashed.
Yadi called for a first-pitch changeup. That’s unorthodox and goes against what a lot of baseball people believe. The point of a changeup is that it is off-speed, but if you haven’t thrown any other pitches before it—and this was Adam’s first time facing Beltran—there is no contrast between fast and slower. Gutsy call—it also worked.
Beltran was knocked off balance and took strike one looking.
I sat there and said to Dunc, “What the hell was that?”
“Changeup.”
“He can’t call that.”
“Just did.”
Beltran fouled off the next pitch, and then stood there frozen as a curveball came in. The pitch was head high, and every hitter in the world would have given up on it. Except this one dropped right in the zone. That pitch is tied for first as the best one to ever end a championship series. Game over. Series over. On to the World Series. Brilliant pitch selection by Yadi. Brilliant execution by Adam.
If it isn’t clear yet, let me say this: in my fifty years in the game, thirty-four of which I spent intensely observing it, Yadi is the best catcher I’ve ever seen. When you have a meeting on the mound with Dunc and Yadi, you have the best pitching coach and the best catcher in the game out there together. Beyond brilliant.
BY THE TIME THE SEVENTH-INNING STRETCH WAS OVER, THE “WHAT-IFS” were in high gear. What happens if Carp has an issue? Who’s coming up? Who’s the best option to come in? You’re counting down the outs, looking at the lineup card, scrambling your brain trying to figure out who is going to get those last outs. What you don’t know is how all of this is going to play out, what all the factors might be. You get ready for as many of them as you can conceive.
I liked our chances with Carp, and I really wanted him to go the distance, since that would mean he was continuing to pitch effectively. In a 1–0 game, the tipping point is so clearly visible, and each pitch and each play have magnified importance. The stress level also goes up a couple of points. Carp showed his competitive nature, and I’m sure he gave his good friend Doc a lot of grief about it in the off-season, when he singled to center to lead off the eighth. We got a break when Furcal bunted and Ruiz’s throw to second was off-line and both guys were safe. We were in a good position to score a so-called insurance run, especially after Jon Jay laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt to advance the runners to second and third. The Phillies did the wise thing and intentionally walked Albert to load the bases and set up a potential double play at second and a force-out anywhere. Their strategy paid off when we stranded both runners with a strikeout and fly-out. Some people didn’t realize that there was a big “what-if” in that inning. Carp having to run the bases added to my questions about his ability to get through the eighth inning. How had his not being able to rest on the bench affected him?
Then, in the bottom half, Rafael Furcal, the guy who was so heartbroken about a regular-season error that he wanted to quit the game, robbed Carlos Ruiz of a base hit. Yadi set up on the outside corner, but Carp’s fastball tailed in on the right-handed-hitting Ruiz. Ruiz hit the ball hard and down up the middle. Rafael saw the inside-out stroke and was leaning that way, took two short steps to his left, and then laid himself out in a dive. He gloved it, got up, spun, and threw a seed to first to barely retire Ruiz. Incredible.
That play in the eighth was a good example of those points about anticipating and knowing how someone is going to be pitched. Admittedly, we were a slightly better-than-average ball club defensively throughout most of the season, but when we got rolling, the defense picked up considerably. That’s the thing about defense. If you’re a decent athlete and you’re willing to work at it, you can transform yourself into an above-average fielder. When Matt Holliday came over in the trade, and then later when he got a big contract with us, he felt like he had to prove his worth. He worked hard on his offense, but he also put in the time in 2010 to turn himself into a very good defensive outfielder. I’ve heard basketball coaches say that playing defense is all about hustle and you can’t ever let yourself have an off night with desire. Your shooting may be off, but intensity and focus on the defensive end aren’t about skill as much as about desire. Baseball defense takes some skill, but it’s not like hitting or pitching. Guys who excel defensively do so because they make it a priority.
As the bottom of the eighth continued, the Yadi-Ruiz comparison took a bad turn when, with two outs, Carp struck out the pinch hitter Ross Gload on a nasty pitch in the dirt for a dropped third strike. Gload took off for first, but Yadi’s throw was wide of the mark for an error. That brought up Jimmy Rollins, who hit a bullet up the middle. Carp’s hockey days paid off, though, when his deflection of the ball sent it toward Nick Punto, who was charging hard from second base. Punto’s quick release got the ball over to first in time. I felt a bit like we’d dodged a bullet—a low-caliber one that was likely to go wide of the mark, but still one to make your heart skip a beat.
AS BEFITTING THE CLASSIC NATURE OF THIS GAME, CARP’S CHALLENGE in the ninth inning was to retire the heart of the Phillies’ lineup. Utley, Pence, and Howard compare favorably to any 2-3-4 in baseball. Few experiences in our sport measure up to seeing your pitcher on the mound in the ninth with the score 1–0 in a playoff game. Carp was three outs away, and seeing him out there, I felt privileged to be a part of such a classic game. Those thoughts didn’t last long. We needed three more outs.
He retired Utley on a first-pitch fly-out to the warning track on which Jon Jay made a fine running catch. Believe me, our hearts were in our throats on that one. Jay is a major leaguer. Of Cuban extraction, he was born in Miami, and he loves to play the game. He runs well and gets to a lot of balls hit his way, but the thing about that play in the ninth is this: he’s a young guy who wasn’t intimidated one bit by the high-stakes setting of this game. He had positioned himself properly—deep, to prevent a double, given the score—and he got a great jump on a ball that could have easily gotten over his head.
Next, Carp got Hunter Pence to ground out on the second pitch. He then did something I can’t recall ever seeing him do on the mound. He smiled. Most great pitchers like to keep that poised and deadly assassin look on their faces at all times—This is deadly serious business, and I’m a deadly serious guy. That’s why some of them don’t shave and in the past have grown badass mustaches and beards or whatever to make themselves look even fiercer. Goose Gossage used to come in and close games looking like we’d just dragged him away from working a bar brawl as a bouncer.
But there was Carp smiling. And this was even before he retired Ryan Howard on a curveball by getting him to ground out to second. Sadly, Howard lay on the ground in pain after snapping his Achilles tendon. That’s a part of the heartache of a classic game. One team is out there jumping up and down, and Carp is out there no longer smiling but just beaming and shouting, and another man’s writhing in pain. I hated to see Howard get injured, but I loved seeing Carp do something he’d never done before in his career. Under the most pressure-packed conditions, in the 340th start of his career, he’d pitched his first 1–0 complete-game win ever.
I’m not the fastest learner, so after those previous two times relieving Carp in the ninth in a one-run game, the coaches had tied my arms and legs to the bench.
I’ll never forget the look of elation on his face after that last out—that look of complete and unbounded joy captured our club’s feeling perfectly. We’d been the wild-card team that just squeaked into the playoffs, and we’d defeated the team with the best record in the league.
In baseball history, in a winner-take-all game, just two other pitchers, Jack Morris of the Twins in 1991 and Ralph Terry of the Yankees in 1962, had pitched complete-game shutouts in which their team scored a single run. People still talk about those games, and I have no doubt that they will keep talking about our victory over the Phillies.
What seemed like hours later, in the clamor of the clubhouse, I sought out Carp. We’d done our congratulating of each other earlier. I said to him, “What the hell were you smiling about out there in the ninth?”
Carp gave me a puzzled look and an even bigger smile. “What else was I supposed to do? I was having fun out there.”