PHILADELPHIA — As we try to always stress here, results trump process. The worst plan with the best execution might get you free New York City dinners for the rest of your life. The best plan with the worst execution might have you shopping your resume.

Yet as we watched Charlie Manuel and Cliff Lee jump through hoops Sunday, explaining why Lee will start Monday night’s Game 5 rather than Sunday night’s Game 4, we couldn’t help but wonder about the process.
“It was a pretty quick conversation, him asking me if I had ever done it and me telling him no and saying that I think I could,” Lee told reporters, speaking of Manuel (”him”) and pitching on three days’ rest (”it”). “Basically, that was about the extent of it. Pretty quick, brief deal ... I think I could do it, but he makes the calls.”
Said Manuel: “You’re asking Cliff Lee to do something that he has never (done) before. But we’re also asking him to do it in a very big, important place, and that’s in the World Series. I didn’t have to think very long about it, and neither did (pitching coach Rich) Dubee.”
It could very well be that the Phillies and Lee aren’t telling us everything here. Or that we just don’t know the specific personalities well enough.
So all we can say for certain is, this isn’t following either of the standard scripts:
Script No. 1: The ace goes on three days’ rest. Or, in the case of the 2009 Yankees, three pitchers — Game 4 starter CC Sabathia, Monday night’s Game 5 starter A.J. Burnett and Andy Pettitte — go on three days’ rest.
“I think when you’re talking about being at this level, and being at this time of year, the competitiveness in these guys is tremendous, and they want the ball,” Joe Girardi said Sunday afternoon. “They want to be out there. They want to help their club, and they want to do whatever it takes.”
Script No. 2: The ace goes on four days’ rest, but he shouts from the mountains that he’s not happy about the situation. And the manager protects his pitcher by taking the hit: “He begged us to pitch, but we just don’t think it’s a good idea.”
But Manuel never provided such cover for Lee. The closest he came was when he said that Lee told his manager he thought he had pitched on three days’ rest previously.
Lee himself didn’t play along, saying: “I’m not disappointed, or mad, or frustrated, or anything. My job is to pitch when Charlie wants me to pitch, and that’s what I’m going to do, and I’m going to make the best of those situations.
“I’m not going to try to second-guess or anything like that. I would have been happy either way.”
The “He’s never done it before” argument is sort of silly. Once upon a time, Sabathia, Burnett and Pettitte hadn’t pitched on three days’ rest, either.
The workload? Lee threw 2312/3 innings in the regular season and has thrown another 331/3 in the postseason. Sabathia threw 230 innings in the regular season and entered Sunday night with 292/3 in the postseason.
Lee threw 342/3 innings in the regular season’s final month, Sabathia 372/3.
Not all pitchers are created equally, of course, and Manuel also made sure to point out how the Phillies knocked around Sabathia during last year’s National League Division Series, when Sabathia was making his fourth straight start on three days’ rest for the Brewers.
“Basically, when you saw him last year, he wasn’t the guy that was throwing 94 or 97,” Manuel said. “He was a guy that threw a lot of changeups and sliders to us, and there’s a big difference.”
Ultimately, if the Phillies didn’t feel comfortable throwing Lee on three days’ rest, they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt. Yet we can break down what they’ve told us, and question whether it all adds up.
The Series result, however, will give us our final answer.