I asked Hamels if he felt a lot of pressure as the youngest pitcher in this great four-man rotation. “No, I can be myself now,” he said. “I don’t have to be the Big Guy.” (Palmer and Seaver told me they relished being the Big Guy.) When we finished, he flashed me his charming, boyish smile, scissored his hair off his brow and said, “Thank you so much, and have a wonderful day!”

Eventually I cornered Lee at his locker. I asked him how he developed that southpaw’s motion of his. “What do you mean by that?” he said. I said, “It’s a beautiful motion.” He said: “Oh. I had a lot of coaches.” He referred to his fastball as his “go-to” pitch. Then, defensively, he added: “That’s not the only pitch I throw, you know. My game is locating. If I’m hitting my spots, I’ve got stuff and control. If not, I’ve lost both.”

I asked which batters gave him the most trouble. Punchy hitters, he said, who foul off a lot of pitches, then slap the ball the other way. “Like Ichiro,” he said. “Sometimes you just want to let him hit his ground ball and hope someone catches it. He’s gonna get his hits. The quicker he does, the better for me. The more pitches a batter sees, the better hitters they become.” All four Phillies’ pitchers prefer to face free-swinging home-run hitters — those with “a lot of air in their swing to make them miss,” in Oswalt’s words. Pitchers who rely on one favorite pitch, instead of a variety of pitches, always lose effectiveness the more pitches they throw to a batter. Spahn often set up a batter by deliberately getting behind in the count 2-0, so the batter started looking for a fat pitch. That’s when Spahn went to work on him with his screwball, slider and big curve.

I asked Lee if he pitched to his strength or a batter’s weakness. He said: “If a hitter’s looking for a fastball inside, that doesn’t mean I won’t throw it. You don’t abandon your best pitch because a guy likes it.” Why doesn’t he throw more curveballs? He said, “It’s the hardest pitch to locate.” In fact Lee had his worst year in the majors in 2007 (5-8, 6.29 E.R.A.), when he tried to master a slider. “I focused so much on it,” he said, “it got me in trouble. Some guys put a lot of pressure on themselves because they think they gotta be more than they are.”

As I left, he said, “Sorry it took so long.”

After more than a week, I formulated my opinion about what made these four pitchers successful. A deceptive pitch, great control and the need to stay within the boundaries of their talent. If they strayed too far from those boundaries, they feared that might destroy their success. This has made them very good pitchers, maybe even great pitchers in the game today. But in that pantheon of great pitchers throughout history, they seemed merely one-trick ponies in an age of diminished expectations of greatness. A harsh judgment? Possibly. So before I left the Phillies, I talked to one more man.

Mike Schmidt was standing behind a batting cage, still as trim as during his playing days. A handsome, middle-aged man with swept-back, silvery hair and a thick mustache. I asked him what he thought of the four Phillies pitchers

“Well,” he said, “now when the Phillies come to town, the other team knows they’re being challenged by four No. 1 pitchers. They have to amp up their mental game. I used to see my at-bats the night before a game when I laid my head down on the pillow. Gibson, Seaver, Ryan. I had to have a plan. When I went to Houston, they had three good pitchers. The fourth was Nolan Ryan. I could go to sleep with the other three, but Ryan kept me awake. Ryan! Ryan! Ryan! My plan was, don’t miss his fastball if he threw it over the plate. If he got two strikes on me, I’d have to face his curveball.” He turned and looked at me with his small blue eyes, which had fear in them. “Ryan was scary!” he said. He shook his head, as if seeing Ryan on the mound. Ryan began his motion and fired the ball at his head. Schmidt had a split second to make a decision. Was it a 100 m.p.h. fastball that could kill him if it hit him in the head, or was it that wicked curveball? If he dove away from the plate and the pitch was a curveball that broke over the plate, he’d look like a fool and a coward. But if it wasn’t a curveball, if it was that 100 m.p.h. fastball, and he didn’t dive away from the plate . . . well, he didn’t even want to think about that.