My goodness, that was ugly. The team with the best record in the National League pretty much stunk up the NL Championship Series, and that is why the Philadelphia Phillies, rather than the odiferous Dodgers, are going to the World Series.

And, by the way, that’s 21 seasons and counting that the Dodgers haven’t made the World Series. Not that we’re counting. Oh, I guess we are.

Given a Bums’ rush in five games.  Winners of one game, 2-1 — thanks to an error and a couple of walks in the bottom of the eighth in Game 2, after being shut out for seven innings. Loser of the other four games by an aggregate score of 34-14. Plain embarrassed twice (11-0 and 12-4), embarrassed in the clutch once (Jonathan Broxton’s blown save in the ninth inning of Game 4) …

But, really, what sober onlooker expected this Dodgers team to advance to the World Series, let alone win it?

This was a club that just didn’t have enough pitching. That didn’t play particularly well the final three months of the season. That was lucky to get, in the division series, a Cardinals team that had lapsed into a coma.

First, the pitching.

We can look at this two ways. The Happy Face Approach, which posits that it’s fairly amazing to win 95 games with a starting rotation that was a bloody mess from July forward. Or the Sad Face Analysis, which notes that a team without an ace pitcher … a team without a legitimate No. 2 pitcher, even … a team of about four No. 3 pitchers … did nothing, over a span of months, to fix its most glaring weakness.

To wit: Where were Ned Colletti and the Dodgers when Cliff Lee was being dangled by the Cleveland Indians … and ended up in Philly, where he throttled the Dodgers in Game 3 of the recently concluded series?

Then there was that long, slow stumble/crawl to the finish line. The Dodgers were 61-34 on July 22. From then to the end of the season, they were 34-33. Barely average, that is. And barely good enough to hold off the Colorado Rockies.

Beyond starting pitching, the Dodgers had some other issues. Manny Ramirez, presumably Off the Juice for the first time since who-knows-when, went limp, after coming back from his 50-game drug suspension. He failed to hit 20 home runs for the first time since he was a child (well, since 1994, anyway), and he was anything but the postseason panic-inducing threat he represented during his Red Sox prime. 

Andre Ethier tailed off, at least in batting average. James Loney never found his power stroke. Orlando Hudson sagged markedly, apparently because that bad wrist got worse. Russell Martin never really got it going. Rafael Furcal was a shadow of the guy we saw, pre-injury, in 2008.

The set-up relievers faded a bit, perhaps because Joe Torre overworked them. 

But the biggest issue was the starting pitching. Especially in this series. 

The Dodgers sent out Clayton Kershaw, Vicente Padilla, Hiroki Kuroda, Randy Wolf and Padilla again … and Kershaw got shelled (what do you expect from a 21-year-old in that setting?), Kuroda got shelled (what do you expect from a guy who hadn’t pitched in three weeks?) and Padilla got shelled in the second go-round (what do you expect from a guy who has been a back-end starter his whole career, who gave you seven innings of one-run ball in Game 2?).

The Dodgers need to find their own Cliff Lee, their own CC Sabathia … and they need to rehabilitate Chad Billingsley, their best pitcher for most of the season, who seemed to suffer some sort of mental/spiritual collapse in the second half. By the end of the season, he was almost useless. He either fooled around so much trying to be fine that he got behind in the count and got clobbered … or he pounded the zone so predictably that he … got clobbered. 

He still has the arm, and the stuff … now to get his head on straight.

This Dodgers team isn’t a bad one. The nucleus remains in its prime, and maybe Manny can learn how to become a gap hitter, now that he apparently has misplaced his homer stroke, along with the syringes. O-Dog might be healthy, by April.  Broxton, if not too scarred by that ugly blown save in the pivotal Game 4 (hitting Carlos Ruiz with a pitch? Really?), ought to be a year older and wiser.

But the club needs an ace. It needs to trade for one (Ray Halladay, Jake Peavy), or buy one (John Lackey is better than what they’ve got) … but it needs to have a legitimate stopper to start Game 1 of these postseason things, and give them a chance to get on top of a series.

Until then, and the breakthrough of Kershaw or the rehab of Billingsley, they can’t hope to be much more than a nice regular-season team, and maybe the best in the NL West.  That represents an improvement on a lot of those 21 seasons of not playing in the World Series … but the goal is the Fall Classic, right? Once more before we die?