Atlanta Wins a Crazy One : NL playoffs: Baylor forced to use pitcher at the plate in crucial, ninth-inning situation of Braves’ 5-4 victory.

Maybe it’s a safety net, a fallback position if this series doesn’t follow form.

The Atlanta Braves arrived in Colorado insisting the five-game concept should be scrubbed, that the true championship challenge is seven games.

General Manager John Schuerholz said it Monday, and Manager Bobby Cox agreed Tuesday.

“You play a 162-game season [144 this year], grind it out, then risk it all in five games?” Cox said. “That’s ridiculous.”

Said pitcher Tom Glavine: “Enough crazy things can happen in a seven-game series to prevent the best team from winning, and that’s more the case in a five-game series.”

So what happened? The Braves won, 5-4, on Tuesday night before a crowd of 50,040 at Coors Field.

Game 1 might as well have been played in an asylum. It was that crazy.

Atlanta survived a struggling performance by Greg Maddux, bases-loaded situations by the Rockies in each of the last three innings and a pinch-hit appearance by Colorado’s starting pitcher in Game 2 tonight after Manager Don Baylor ran out of position players.

With Mark Wohlers lighting up the speed gun at almost 100 m.p.h., Lance Painter, seven for 40 in his career and one for nine this year, struck out on four pitches to end the Rockies’ final bases-loaded threat in the ninth.

“I couldn’t believe how hard he was throwing,” Painter said. “I picked up the ball halfway to the plate, and the next thing I knew it was in the catcher’s glove. I’m not the only guy who would have failed in that situation.”

In a season of 25 saves, Wohlers finally emerged as a dependable and intimidating closer, but he loaded the bases in the final inning by yielding two singles and a walk before striking out Andres Galarraga and the overmatched and out-of-place Painter for a save that belonged to third baseman Chipper Jones.

The rookie-of-the-year candidate showed why with a solo homer off Kevin Ritz in the third and a two-out solo homer off Curtis Leskanic in the ninth to break a 4-4 tie and provide the margin of difference.

It was in the eighth, however, that Jones kept the Braves in business, restricting what might have been a blow-out inning to one run when he made a diving stop of Galarraga’s scorching bid for an extra-base hit down the line and turned it into a force play.

“We’re showered and halfway back to the hotel if he doesn’t make that play,” Atlanta’s Cox said.

Baylor agreed.

“That’s a double down the line, one run in, and runners on second and third with no outs,” he said. “He saved the game right there and won it in the ninth.”

Said Jones: “It’s just a reaction play. Andres has a tendency to hit the ball down the line and I knew the pitch was a changeup, so I was leaning. The only way to make that play is to lay out and hope the ball sticks. Fortunately, it did.”

For the first time this year, Jones bruised the left knee that underwent reconstructive surgery in 1994, sidelining him for the entire season at a time when he was the most touted young player in baseball.

“The leg would have had to be hanging by a thread for me to come out right then,” Jones said. An inning later, he added, “It was like I was running two feet off the ground” after hitting the tie-breaking homer. “I can’t explain the feeling. It was pure adrenaline.”

Maddux went into the game 19-2 for the season and 18-0 in his last 20 road starts but yielded at least one hit in each of his seven innings. He elicited four double plays, however, and was scored on only in the fourth when the big hit was a two-run homer by Vinny Castilla.

“Greg wasn’t completely on top of his game tonight, but he kept them off the board except for the one inning,” Cox said.

The key inning for both Maddux and the Braves turned out to be the scoreless seventh, when Baylor went for the bundle in a 3-3 tie, pinch-running for Castilla, who had homered and doubled, and ultimately watching John Vander Wal, who set a major league record for pinch hits this season, ground into a bases-loaded double play.

Carrying 12 pitchers on his 25- man roster because of the yearlong unreliability of his rotation--he used five relievers after Ritz went 5 1/3 innings in this one--Baylor was ultimately left with Painter, but he said of the fateful seventh:

“I know Bobby Cox is not going to take Maddux out in that situation. If I don’t go for it there we might not get another chance.”

As it turned out, the Rockies had the bases loaded in the next two innings as well.

It finally came down to Painter, but Baylor said: “That wasn’t the game. We kept loading the bases, but our hitters wouldn’t take a base on balls. They kept swinging at ball four.”

Crazy? Indeed.