In poker, four aces is a winning hand. In baseball, the Philadelphia Phillies thought so, too. But this year it turned out than one ace tops four aces.

A Year of Baseball Drama

This has certainly been a year of drama for Major League Baseball.

  • The two wild card teams were not decided until that very intense last night of the season.

 

  • Three of the four first-round playoffs went to the fifth game

 

  • All four of the final games were decided by one run

 

The Best of the Best

But the best of these dramas so far was saved for the fifth game between the Phillies and the Cardinals. By that time, eight of the top nine payroll teams were gone from sight, with only the Phillies $173 million payroll left standing. Roy Halladay, one of the Phillies’ four aces, and arguably the best pitcher in the game, was up against his friend Chris Carpenter. Halladay went 19-6 in the regular season, had 220 strike outs and a WHIP just over one. Carpenter finished the regular season at a modest 11-9, and had been knocked out of an earlier game in the series after just three ineffective innings.

 

But this night, it was a classical pitchers’ duel: ace against ace, with the Cardinals’ one run looming larger as the game progressed. 

  • Would Carpenter be able to protect the one-run lead?

 

  • Would the Cardinals have to use their spotty bullpen that had troubled them all year long, and almost cost them their shot at the playoffs by giving up six runs in the ninth inning in the brutal loss to the Mets on September 22?

 

  • Would either team be able to scratch out another run?

 

  • Would Carpenter run out of gas, since he had gone at least seven innings in each of his last five starts in the regular season?

And then it came down to the ninth inning, with the meat of the Phillies lineup due up, the same part of the lineup that had scored three runs in the first inning against Carpenter earlier in the series.  With Utley, Pence, Howard, Victorino and Ibanez, there were four out of five left-hand hitters.

  • Utley had the Philly crowd screaming with the long fly ball to deep center,

 

  • Pence grounded out to third,

 

  • and, Howard couldn’t even make it to first base

 

So there you had it: one ace beat the four aces. 

All of the top nine payroll teams are gone. All of the East and West Coast big-city teams are gone. So middle America gets a chance to fight it out for the World Series crown, in a season to remember.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com