After Hard Day’s Work, Some Late Night TV

DENVER —  Greg Maddux leaned back and heckled.

J.D. Drew jumped up and howled.

Marlon Anderson lunged forward and pumped his fist.

Derek Lowe stood up, spread his arms, and unleashed the most passionate sentence he has uttered all season ... in Spanish.

The clock ticking, the calendar ripping, their hearts jogging, the Dodgers were a bundle of nerves and noise.

And this was just in the clubhouse.

After a comeback, 6-4 victory over the Colorado Rockies on the Coors Field diamond Wednesday, the Dodgers retreated to where the real playoff-race action usually takes place.

One team watching their closest rival on television. One team praying for another team to die.

The other team was the Philadelphia Phillies, who began the day one game behind the Dodgers in the wild-card race.

With the Dodgers’ win, a Phillies loss would have probably given the Dodgers enough breathing room to blow their way right into October.

By the time the Dodgers had finished showering, the Phillies had already blown two leads to the Washington Nationals and were locked in a tie game in the top of the 14th inning.

One by one, most of the players departed the showers and threw on their clothes and gathered around the huge television hanging from the center of the room.

Some dropped to the huge couches. Others leaned against an adjoining trash can. Drew bounced on an exercise ball.

Lowe stalked over here ... and over there ... and over here and over there ...

Then there was Maddux, sitting in a plastic chair in front of his locker, sipping red wine from a plastic cup, throwing out comments as poignant as any of his pitches, just another guy in a sports bar.

Soon, all the Dodgers were joining in.

“Run over that catcher!”

“Why aren’t they walking this guy?”

“You gotta make that play!”

The team bus was waiting. The players weren’t leaving. The tension thickened between slaps of shaving lotion and bites of steak and the tossing of towels.

“Uh-oh, Jimmy Rollins, you got to walk him.”

“Who bats after Jimmy Rollins?”

“Mike Schmidt.”

“That ain’t funny.”

Moments later, it really wasn’t funny.

With two out in the 14th, Rollins silenced the room with a two-run triple.

In the bottom of the 14th, after a brief rally, the Nationals’ Brian Schneider emptied the room with a game-ending double play grounder.

Dodgers Manager Grady Little jogged out of his office and headed for the waiting bus.

We can’t print what he said. But, believe it or not, he was smiling when he said it.

“I love this time of year,” he added.

Don’t we all? Especially this year? Especially this team?

Months dwindled to days whittled to moments, three teams fighting for two spots, the San Diego Padres leading the West Division by one game over the Dodgers, who lead the Phillies for the wild card by one game.

Three teams playing Wednesday in three different time zones, everyone’s neck straining between the field and the scoreboard and the guy running out from the clubhouse with the latest.

“It’s really fun ... now that I’m done,” said Lowe, who gave up 10 hits and survived. “But during the game, this time of year, it’s really taxing.”

And really revealing.

Most contending baseball teams spend the summer looking like mechanics in stirrups. Then comes September, when the masks are stripped and the human beings are revealed.

The Dodgers, with their creaking veterans and jittery kids and homespun manager, are more human than most.

And during these last couple of weeks, they’ve showed it more than anyone, from the miracles to the meltdowns to Wednesday night, which powerfully reduced the stars to sweating, sprawling, cheering kids again.

They trailed 4-1, then, in the sixth, the awakened Drew had a two-run triple.

“I’m having fun, are you having fun?” he asked me with a grin.

Then, in the seventh, struggling kid Andre Ethier popped off the bench to knock a ball into right field for only his second run batted in this month.

“I’ve realized, everything gets turned up this month, and you either jump on board, or you buckle under it,” he said.

Two hard slides into second base later -- credit Ethier and Rafael Furcal with the dust -- and the Dodgers ended the rally with three runs, which was all they needed.

And, for all the Phillies’ noise, wins such as these are the only thing they need in these last four games.

“We’ve got a one-game lead, we win the next four games, they can’t catch you, I learned that in high school,” Lowe said,

Not that it makes it any easier to watch.

The best scoreboard watching story thus far occurred Monday night after the Dodgers had landed here, in the steak house in the team’s hotel.

Little was having dinner with coaches Rich Donnelly and Mariano Duncan, when Donnelly’s cellphone rang.

The voice on the other end was Donnelly’s son-in-law, Orlin Dobreff.

“He was screaming, we got two men on base, two men on base,” recalled Donnelly. “I’m like, ‘There’s no game tonight, what are you talking about?’ ”

Turns out, Dobreff was following the Phillies and the Padres on the Internet.

And, it turns out, the calls had just begun.

“We’d get the salad, he would call and scream ... we’d get the filet, he would call and scream,” Donnelly said.

With each update, Donnelly would relay the message to Little across the table with hand signals because their mouths were full.

“We were all chewing, so I just flashed him the scores and gave him a thumbs up or thumbs down,” Donnelly said.

Four games later, and it’s thumbs up. For now. I think.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.