"The Phillies are seeing both ends of the American League spectrum on this homestand. The Oakland Athletics are the best pitching team in the AL. The Boston Red Sox are the best hitting team in the AL.

If the Phils have as much success against the Sox as they did the A's, they will be a happy bunch when they board their charter flight to Toronto on Thursday night for yet another interleague series.

Oakland's pitching staff was as formidable as billed. But the Phillies have a pretty fair pitching staff themselves -- you might have heard that a time or two since December -- and despite scoring just five runs in the series, they were able to win two of three to put themselves on the doorstep of 50 wins less than half way into the season. The Phils are a major league-best 49-30 two games shy of the halfway point.

"That's a testament to how good our staff is," said Jimmy Rollins, referring to the Phils' being able to win the series despite scoring just five runs.

Rollins spoke an hour after the Phillies' 3-1 win over the A's on Sunday afternoon. He broke out of an 0-for-15 slump with four hits and scored two runs to help Roy Halladay earn his 10th with in his league-best fifth complete game.

Not long ago, the Phillies were a team of mashers that could throw up five runs in a couple of innings. They're older now. Core players have been banged up. The overall pendulum of the game has shifted toward pitching. The Phillies don't pile up the runs like they used to. But they pitch. (Their starters have an ERA of 3.02.)

That's how they can win a series scoring five runs.

Rollins, the longest tenured Phillie, talked about the team's shift from an offensive-minded club to a pitching-based club.

"If you could combine the two, it would be great," he said. "If we start combining the two we might be the greatest team ever to play this game.

"But usually there is a yin and a yang. When we didn't have the pitching we have now, we had to slug. Now we have the pitching and it just so happens that we haven't been able to score the runs that we used to. But that's baseball. The dynamics of this team have changed. But we're just as good of a team -- if not better.""