Bob Ford: Law of averages, age, and baseball finally caught up with Phils

Charlie Manuel finished his last official utterances of the baseball season in front of the national media late Saturday night, and he exited the news conference room by a side door and began a long, familiar trudge through the back corridors of Citizens Bank Park.

"I've said basically the same thing every night," Manuel had said in his valedictory for a team that was consistent in its inconsistencies. "The downside of our club this year . . . is that at times we didn't score enough runs."

There are a hundred strands in the web that finally ensnared the Phillies in the league championship series against the Giants, but that was the stickiest. Their offense, so potent during their ascendancy in the National League the last few seasons, finally let them down.

The door closed behind Manuel, and he made his way down the narrow hallways, loping along in the half-limping, half-meandering gait of a man in no particular hurry. He passed the batting cages where the big problem was never solved, the netting hanging quietly like funeral shrouds, and kept on going.

"It's kind of funny, but you could see this coming. You could see how difficult it was becoming for us to win," Manuel said. "That's what happens when you are winning games the way we were. And a game like this one we just lost. We were winning those games, but sooner or later the laws of baseball come at you. Even though we swept Cincinnati, we were having trouble scoring runs, and it kind of grew on us."

Up the final steps and to the door of his office, Manuel looked across the hall to the quiet locker room and stopped for a moment.

"Our guys hung in there," he said, "but baseball takes its toll."

The price exacted by the game came due against the Giants. With another few breaks here or there, the Phillies could have survived the series, but they had apparently used up the allotment. Teams that bat .216 in a league championship series don't have the right to complain about a bad hop here or a home run that limps over the fence there.

As Manuel said, the Phils had been defying the odds for quite a while. When the team was two games over .500 on July 21, mired in third place and seven games back, the front office was within a day or two of shutting things down. Instead, the team ran off eight straight wins (six of them recorded by Kyle Kendrick, Joe Blanton, Ryan Madson, Chad Durbin, Jose Contreras, and David Herndon), and general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. shrugged a what-the-hell shrug and traded for Roy Oswalt.