What a difference a year makes. Last season Brad Lidge could not do anything wrong, and thats the reason for most of his problems this season. Yes the Phillies loss on Tuesday night to the Pittsburgh Pirates was all Lidge’d fault,and resulted in his nineth blown save of the year, which is misleading. Its misleading for the fact that maybe four of those blown saves would not have happened had the Phillies defense had not commited errors. Need an example? Just look at Monday’s Mets game. Remember Eric Bruntlet’s unassisted triple play, that would not have happened if the Phillies didn’t commit 2 errors in the inning. Nobody’s perfect, last year was a rarity, the only other closer that I can think of that may have done it was Eric Gagne when he was with the Dodgers. So if you knock off the 4 blown saves that weren’t his fault that brings the total down to 5, now is that so bad. Another reason not to panic, is its still August. If this were the last week in September, than yeah, I would say the Phillies have a real problem, there is still time for Lidge to get himself straightened out, just like there is still time for Cole Hamels to straighten himself out. Remember Lidge does have 25 saves, and whoo else are they going to use right now? Its not like the Phillies are chasing anyone, they do lead the NL Eats by seven games, yes it could be more but lets not get carried away, a seven game lead going into September is a good thing. All it takes is for Lidge to get hot during a 3-4 week stretch in October, sort of what happened to the Phillies last season, and we all know how that ended.