BASEBALL / ROSS NEWHAN : No Relief in Sight for Braves

The Atlanta Braves resisted a big-time trade for a closer of Bryan Harvey’s stature this year, settling for a bullpen by committee.

Mike Stanton got the closing calls through the first half, Greg McMichael through the second, and Mark Wohlers was the closer-in-training.

In a National League playoff that has found both teams groping for ways to spell relief, McMichael and Wohlers gave up critical home runs on a gray Monday as the Braves first rallied from a 3-0 deficit in the ninth, then lost to the Philadelphia Phillies in the 10th, 4-3 when Lenny Dykstra connected against Wohlers.

The Braves, with their 104 regular-season victories and two consecutive World Series experiences meaning nothing to the brash Phillies, are down, three games to two, and faced with elimination Wednesday night in Philadelphia.

And at this point it will be tough to persuade anyone that the bullpen wasn’t the suspect link it was considered to be throughout the season.

“People always want to point fingers, and if they want to point them at the bullpen, there’s nothing we can do about it,” McMichael said.

“When you lose a game on a late-inning run, there’s always the tendency to say the bullpen lost it, but that may not be true.

“It may have been lost earlier.”

In this one, a Brave had been thrown out at the plate in the first inning and another at second an inning later. They got only four hits against Curt Schilling before rallying in the ninth on a key error and three singles against Mitch Williams, teetering again on the high wire.

Williams has two victories and a save in five games despite seeing 10 of the 22 hitters he has faced reach base, typical of the fuel leaking from both bullpens.

McMichael, who had 19 saves and a 2.06 earned-run average in 74 appearances for a bullpen that totaled 46 saves in 59 chances and had a composite ERA of 3.15, gave up the winning run in the 10th inning of Game 1 and yielded a home run to the first batter he faced Monday.

“It wasn’t one of my best pitches,” McMichael said of the belt-high changeup that Darren Daulton, two for 14 at the time, hit over the fence in right-center opening the ninth. It extended the Philadelphia lead to 3-0 and saved the Phillies from a 3-2 loss when the Braves rallied in the bottom of the inning.

Wohlers then had one out in the 10th when Dykstra delivered on a full-count fastball.

“I got beat with my best stuff,” Wohlers said. “We’re taught here not to sacrifice stuff for location, and I tried to give him by best cheese.”

“I got a little more of the plate than I would have liked, but the last thing I wanted was to walk him with a slider or split finger, my second- or third-best pitches, and set up a situation where he might have stolen second and third and scored on a fly ball.

“I don’t mean to say I’m happy with the results, but it’s easier to look in the mirror knowing I challenged him. It’s a huge loss, but I’ll be tougher mentally in the long run.”

Wohlers has ridden the triple-A shuttle each of the last three years. He throws in the high 90s and has worked this year on a complementary splitter while continuing to refine his control.

He was hit hard late in the season, but the potential is evident by the nine strikeouts in his four innings of these playoffs and the near strikeout-per-inning pace of a career in which he has given up only five homers in 114 major league innings, two to Dykstra in this playoff.

Wohlers made no excuses:

--The 2-and-2 fastball many Braves thought was a strike only to see umpire Jerry Crawford call it ball three?

“I thought he made the right call,” Wohlers said. “I thought it was a little outside. If he made a mistake, don’t we all? I mean, it didn’t affect my approach to the next pitch.”

--The fact his catcher was Francisco Cabrera, who caught only three innings all season and was catching in this one because Greg Olson had been injured in Sunday’s game and Cabrera had delivered a pinch-hit while batting for Damon Berryhill in the ninth?

“I’ve worked with Frankie in the minors,” Wohlers said. “I have no problem with him. He called for the fastball, but if he had called for a split or slider I would have shook him off.

“I wasn’t going to get beat with anything but my best pitch and I wasn’t going to walk him. I’ve done that often enough and had my butt kicked right back to (triple-A) Richmond.”

The Braves might yet use Ron Gant as bait in an off-season run at Harvey, but they also seem to think Wohlers is on target now--as Manager Bobby Cox put it--to emerge as a full-fledged closer with his potentially dominant stuff.

In the meantime, a year after Jeff Reardon contributed to the World Series loss to the Toronto Blue Jays, Atlanta has lost two playoff games in what proved to be the Phillies’ final at-bat. They might have been lost earlier as well, as McMichael suggested, but the weakest link snapped when it had to hold.