PHILADELPHIA -- A little more than a week ago the downcast Dodgers clubhouse was so quiet you could hear their pennant hopes drop.
The team hadn't won a series in a month. Hadn't beaten the same team in consecutive games since two days after the All-Star break. And if you had to sum up the atmosphere in the dressing room, it hovered somewhere between desperation and despair.
Today? Well, not so much. After riding seven strong innings from right-hander Chad Billingsley to a 5-2 win over Philadelphia on Thursday, the Dodgers head into Shea Stadium having taken back-to-back series from the Rockies and Phillies while winning six of eight overall, brightening both the team's mood and its postseason hopes.
"You win games and then everyone's outlook is different," Manager Grady Little said. "A week ago we were sitting around the dugout [and] you'd think it was a dead dugout, a dead club. That's natural when you're not scoring runs.
"All of a sudden we're scoring some runs and it looks like everyone is full of life when it's the same human beings."
They're certainly not playing like the same human beings. Take Billingsley. A day after Derek Lowe called out the rest of an unproductive rotation, Billingsley responded with his second consecutive strong outing to win for the first time in a month. And he was backed by an airtight defense and an offense that got two hits and two runs batted in from Ramon Martinez, who has driven in more runs in his last three games (seven) than he had in the previous 3 1/2 months combined.
"Right now hopefully everything's coming together," said Billingsley, who gave up a run and four hits and struck out seven.
"We needed something maybe to get us over the hump. Right now . . . we're coming here knowing that we're going to win. And that's what it takes. Just that confidence."
Added Juan Pierre, whose seventh-inning RBI single extended his hitting streak to 11 games: "It's definitely a more winning-type atmosphere. We're going out there to win games [rather than trying] not to lose them."
As a result the Dodgers have scored 50 runs in their last eight games, as many as they had scored in the previous 19. And they've gotten as many wins from their rotation in the last week -- five -- as they had in the previous five weeks combined.
"Everybody's back cheering for each other," said reliever Jonathan Broxton, whose franchise-record streak of 94 appearances without allowing a home run ended in the eighth inning Thursday, when Tadahito Iguchi hit a solo shot.
