The 162-episode soap opera that precedes the postseason does more than determine which clubs get a date for baseball's version of the senior prom. In the first two rounds, it also sets up the seeding for the tournament that follows.
The wild card can never have the homefield advantage. Beyond that, it goes to the team with the best record. The Phillies won 92 games this season. The Dodgers won 84. So when both teams survived the gantlet run that is the best-of-five division series, the Phillies earned the extra game at Citizens Bank Park.
During the regular season, geography was the ultimate difference-maker. All eight meetings were played in August. Los Angeles won the first four, all at Dodger Stadium. The Phillies won the next four, all at home.
Throw it all out the window? There were good reasons to doubt that the form would hold once fall ball got under way.
Each of the games in Chavez Ravine in August was decided by one or two runs, and the Phillies led two of the games going into the eighth. So those results could easily have been changed.
And when the Dodgers arrived in Philadelphia, they were mired in a deep slump, but came roaring into the postseason as one of the hottest teams in baseball. This
National League Championship Series shaped up as a blank slate.
Except that through the first three games - and the first seven innings of the fourth - it was the same old, same old.
Then Shane Victorino and Matt Stairs unloaded two-run homers in the eighth inning last night to lift the Phillies to a 7-5 win, changing the entire calculus of the NLCS.
Now they have built in some margin for error, some leeway. And it's impossible to overemphasize what a large swing of the pendulum that represents.
Imagine what it would have been like had the Dodgers won.
