Rich Hofmann: For Phillies' Hamels, it was a day of expectations

WHEN Grantland Rice was writing this stuff - before baseball had the need to keep day-night stats for pitchers because, you know, there were no nights - it would have been so much simpler. Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, Cole Hamels would have pitched a shutout, gotten a call in the clubhouse that his wife had gone into labor, and rushed to the hospital to await the birth of his first child. They could have made it into a movie. Alas.

Last year was that kind of fairy tale for Hamels. This year, not so much.

On a human level, everyone hopes for the best as Hamels and his wife Heidi await the birth of their son. On a baseball level, the emotions are more complicated. Because Hamels failed for the first time yesterday in a big October spot. After an inconsistent regular season, there was still hope that Hamels would recognize the moment again, that he would be himself again, that he would remember what it felt like to be the most valuable player of the 2008 postseason.

He held the ball in his hand with a chance, pretty much, to put a lock on the Phillies' first-round playoff series against the Colorado Rockies. Instead, he gave up four runs in five innings, again pitching badly in the daylight. He was removed from the game and, minutes later, rushed from the ballpark after receiving word that his wife was in labor.

The public performance will now become entwined with the personal, which no one deserves. But Hamels is a public man with a public wife with a particular personality - and now, for as long as people ask questions, people will wonder how all of these conflicting emotions affected Hamels - and, by extension, the Phillies - on this most important of days.

"That could have had something to do with it, I don't know," manager Charlie Manuel said, about the whole emotional whirl. "I think definitely he was concerned about his wife. I know he was concerned about his wife, and probably his child, too. That's an exciting time, and that's a time that you really look forward to. I know it probably would have been on his mind, but at the same time you'll have to ask him exactly. I don't know exactly what was on his mind and what he was thinking."

Going into the game, we know that one thing Hamels was thinking about was pitching in the daytime, and how he thought the Phillies were insulted by having two day games to start the playoffs - and how, by the by, his own record this year in the sunshine was 0-6 with a 5.44 ERA. Now it's 0-7 with a 5.60 ERA.