This Is How They Roll

His nature is sweet. J-Roll has little cheek kisses for his teammates' girlfriends, chitchat for all the boys on the club. Whenever he comes to Miami , he goes to the cozy home of a Dominican man named Pascual Villalona, a retired garment worker who loves baseball and whose wife cooks oxtail stew, fried plantain and queso frito (fried cheese) for Rollins. As he and Pascual played dominoes last Friday night, Rollins said, "Every time I come to your house, I kill the Marlins ' pitching."

Don't get the wrong idea. He's not Buck O'Neil , all folksy and wise and quaintly superstitious. Rollins can be snippy. He can go to the mall and do some serious damage. He's got his music label, Bay Sluggas Inc. He's a modern millionaire athlete. Rollins has it all—-except the ring.

SOME GAMES are decided in the first, and more are decided in the ninth. Sunday afternoon at Dolphin Stadium , with two outs, the bases loaded and the Phillies trailing by a run, Jimmy Rollins , the Phils' hottest hitter, came to the plate with the game on the line. In Atlanta the Mets had already completed a three-game sweep of the Braves. It was a game the Phils needed.

Rollins , facing Kevin Gregg , took ball one, then ball two, then ball three, except that the home plate umpire, Rob Drake , called the third pitch, above the letters and near Rollins 's shoulders, a strike. Rollins started jawing with Drake , while saying to himself, Don't say the wrong thing. He's the cop. He's got all the power. Don't get yourself thrown out. He flied out to center on a full-count pitch, and the game—and the series—was over. After taking four from the Mets , Philadelphia had lost two of three against the Marlins , the last one 7--6.

"He threw me six straight balls, but the bottom line is I -didn't get the job done," Rollins said. He was wheeling a Louis Vuitton bag, heading to the team plane for a Labor Day game in Atlanta , followed by two more. He was carrying one of his bats, all taped and pine-tarred, with a white handle and a black barrel and his name in gold letters. The Phils had arrived in Miami two games back and were leaving four games back. A disaster, really.

"This one's over—nothing you can do about that," he said. An afternoon shower, a timepiece of the South Florida summer, was passing through. "We've got a little under 24 hours to get ourselves ready for the next one. There's the division. There's the wild card. It doesn't matter how you get there, as long as you're playing for a ring."

He walked out of the stadium and gave the bat and a hug to his Dominican buddy Pascual, and he was gone, off to the next city, the chase and the dream dimmed, but still on.