LOS ANGELES -- Their season is one blowout away from the junkyard, and up next on the mound is the guy who couldn't find the emergency brake in Game 2.
Their team took a wrong turn down a dark alley, and now the Los Angeles Dodgers will hand the baseball to the guy who not only ducked behind the trash cans to hide but, worse, did so in full view of his teammates.
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| Chad Billingsley led his team in ERA this season, but he now has his share of doubters. (Getty Images) |
It might not be fair, because he is only 24 and probably not yet ready to be the No. 2 starter on an NLCS club. It might not be right, because the Dodgers' problems in this series extend well beyond whether Billingsley should have answered Brett Myers' behind-Manny's-back pitch in Game 2.
But it is here, and it is real, and Billingsley will be dragging so much excess baggage to the mound that you would hate to see how much the airlines would charge for this one.
"The Dodgers are a very dangerous team," Phillies slugger Ryan Howard says, his team up 3 games to 1 and nine good innings away from only the sixth World Series appearance in franchise history (they've won only one, in 1980). "Their backs are against the wall. You've got to expect them to come out with everything they've got. I think Billingsley will be a guy who rises to the occasion, a guy who comes out and pitches good."
He won a team-leading 16 games for the Dodgers, and his 3.14 ERA was best among all Dodgers starters. Yet in the span of only 59 pitches in Game 2, he lost a significant portion of a season's worth of good will he had established inside the clubhouse.
Myers buzzed Ramirez up-and-in during the first inning of Game 2, then threw a fastball behind Ramirez with the next pitch. He knocked down Russell Martin, too.
Not only did Billingsley, in the view of several Dodgers hitters, fail to stand up for them, but he continued to be too timid to pitch inside during a span in the second and third innings in which nine of 10 Phillies reached base.
In other words, the young right-hander not only didn't protect Ramirez and Co., he wouldn't even protect himself.
Though the Dodgers were very deliberate in choosing their words publicly, privately, they seethed.
And they all but admitted it when, after Hiroki Kuroda blazed a fastball by Shane Victorino's head in Game 3, several of them -- including Ramirez, Martin and third base coach Larry Bowa -- after the incident unabashedly said it was an issue that "should have been taken care of (in Game 2) in Philadelphia."
Paging Mr. Billingsley ... paging Mr. Billingsley.
