Now Andy Pettitte will likely pitch for the Yankees in Game 6 on short rest. Now Pedro Martinez will pitch for the Phillies on regular rest.
And the Phillies can see daylight.
Manuel has been second-guessed, exhaustively. Forget that almost nobody wanted to deal with the predicate: that if Lee pitched Game 4 on short rest instead of Joe Blanton, Blanton still would have had to pitch Game 5. The only question was the order.
Manuel made this unspoken calculation: that the risk of starting Lee on short rest for the first time in his career was greater than the risk that his team would be irreparably demoralized if it fell behind in the series by three games to one. It was absolutely the right call. To do anything else would have been to panic.
Yet the second-guessing resounded.
"That doesn't bother me," Manuel said. "Like I said, I've seen it both ways. I've seen it work, and I've seen it not work . . .
"If we would have pitched Lee [in Game 4] and he would have won, we'd still need to win today's game. I mean, that's kind of the way I look at it. And who's to say that if Lee pitches tonight and we win, who's to say - he might pitch again."
And after watching Lee give the Phillies seven reasonable innings (five runs), and watching Burnett completely go ka-boom, failing to get an out in the third inning before departing, Manuel's words just hang there:
I've seen it work and I've seen it not work . . .
After the Yankees won Game 4 and took their 3-1 series lead, Girardi did have a decision. With his hard-earned cushion, the question was if he would insert lightly used starter Chad Gaudin into the Game 5 slot, moving Burnett back to Game 6.
