"It was a fascinating time and fitting place for the Phillies to finish the 2010 regular season.

Turner Field, home of the Braves, has a line of wooden banners in left field that represent the various titles Atlanta has won, including a string of 14 straight from 1991 through 2005. The majority of that unprecedented success came courtesy of the Braves' terrific pitching trio of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz, and those three future Hall of Famers were in attendance Saturday when Atlanta honored Bobby Cox, the retiring manager who ran the Braves' dugout during their era of National League dominance.

Watching from the visiting dugout was the Phillies' own trio of pitching stars who are about to embark on their first postseason together.

Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt, and Cole Hamels are the primary reason the Phillies, for the first time in franchise history, are going into the postseason with the best record in baseball. After Oswalt joined the team in a trade with the Houston Astros that completed the pitching triumvirate, the Phillies went 41-17 and turned Atlanta into a small speck in their rearview mirror on their way to a fourth straight National League East title.

"They are the best team," a National League scout said Sunday. "It has been neat to watch this team because the last several years they've pounded people into the ground, and they don't have to do that now."

Instead, they can rely on The Big Three.

What the Phillies and their fans should realize from watching Cox's Braves through all those years is this: The Big Three does not come with a World Series guarantee.

Only one World Series title banner hangs among those in the left-field rafters that celebrate Cox's reign of divisional domination. Giving the ball to Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz did not make the Braves' invincible when the autumn air cooled and the heat of the postseason intensified.

"All I can say is that anything can happen in a short series," said Pat Gillick, the general manager of the Phillies' 2008 World Series team and now a senior adviser.

Gillick knows this all too well. He was the architect of a team that won 116 games in Seattle in 2001 but was eliminated by the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series.

Phillies manager Charlie Manuel knows it too. He was the hitting instructor for the Cleveland Indians when they went 100-44 during the strike-shortened 1995 season. The Indians lost to the Braves in the World Series.

"I guarantee you the Braves had the best team in baseball in some of those years they didn't win," Manuel said. "But for one reason or another they didn't get there. It just goes to show how hard it is to get to the World Series."

Having a Big Three such as the Phillies do now and the Braves did in the past does not guarantee anything, but it is a lot like having an expensive new car: You'd rather have it than not have it.

Besides, if you listen to people talk about the Phillies' trio, you get the impression that they are even more dominant than the three guys who led Atlanta to all those division titles.

Both Manuel and the National League scout said that Halladay, who will start Game 1 of the Phillies' NL division series against the Cincinnati Reds on Wednesday, reminds them of Maddux, but a bigger, better version of a man who won 355 games and four Cy Young Awards."