Six innings, three earned runs, another quality start, another win: Phils 6, Braves 4. The bridge to the seventh inning, so often a bridge too far for the Phillies, was built by Kendrick with professional calm. The rookie who started the season in Double A has earned the highest of compliments this year in that people now expect him to be good, expect him not to get rattled, even on a night when Citizens Bank Park trembled and the Phillies pulled even with the stricken Mets.
How best to describe it? Phils manager Charlie Manuel said, "Yeah, I feel like in some ways I'm sending out a kid but, at the same time, he does a man's job. He puts us in a good position to win the game and he keeps his poise good and he keeps working."
Kendrick is 23, born in 1984, 20 years after 1964. Nineteen sixty-four. It is the year that gives Philadelphia sports fans a kind of psychic identity. Even if you weren't old enough to experience it, you still know about it. You couldn't not know about it, even if the details remain somewhere between hazy and mythical: Yes, the Reds' Chico Ruiz did steal home against them to start the slide but, no, Jim Bunning and Chris Short were not the only two pitchers that manager Gene Mauch ran out there during the collapse.
But those details matter little. The epic collapse - the Phils blew a 6 1/2-game lead with 12 to play - remains the sturdy framework upon which this town has hung every one of its sporting insecurities for the last four decades.
