“It was a slider, outside,” Wilson said. “I was setting him up in, the whole time, and not really executing well — missing up. It was just a pitch I felt like, you know, if the season’s going to come down to it, it’s going to come down to this pitch right here. I’m all in. I’m going for it.”  Howard froze again as the pitch clipped the bottom of the zone, on the outside corner. The plate umpire, Tom Hallion, punched the air: strike three. Howard’s massive shoulders slumped, his bat in his left hand, balanced on the dirt, his back to the celebration engulfing Wilson. The Phillies would not be playing in the first Game 7 in franchise history on Sunday. They would not become the first team since the 1942-44 St. Louis Cardinals to win three consecutive N.L. pennants. Their season was over.  “We know we’re a good-hitting team and a pretty explosive offense,” Howard said. “It just wasn’t there. It’s kind of hard to explain that, and you have to give it up to the Giants.”  The Giants held the Phillies to a collective .216 batting average. Howard hit .318 with four doubles in the series, but he failed to homer or drive in a run in the postseason. He tied an N.L.C.S. record for strikeouts, with 12, a year after setting the World Series strikeout record, with 13.  This is what Howard does, and this is what the Phillies will live with. Like Wilson with his fateful slider, the Phillies are all in on Howard, who turns 31 next month. In April they signed him to a five-year, $125 million contract extension that does not begin until 2012.  Howard is the cornerstone of the National League’s glamour franchise, with a growing public profile that included a recent guest spot on HBO’s “Entourage.” He is proof that teams still pay for power and all that comes with it.  Over the last five seasons, Howard leads the majors in homers (229) and runs batted in (680). He also leads in strikeouts, with 922, a habit that is particularly pronounced against the top-notch pitching the Phillies face every October. In his last 56 postseason at-bats, starting with the 2009 World Series, Howard has a staggering 30 strikeouts.  “If you look up, I think if the production is there, you can tend to get away from strikeouts,” Manager Charlie Manuel said. “But I feel especially after Ryan got hurt that he didn’t find his swing. I feel like I know that he’s a better hitter than what we saw at the end of the year.”  When this was relayed to Howard — the notion that he had not quite found his swing since suffering an ankle injury that cost him most of August — he recoiled.  “Did I ever find my swing?” Howard said. “My swing never left.”  When told of Manuel’s assessment, Howard said: “Well, I guess I didn’t find it. I mean, if you hit 31 home runs and 108 R.B.I.s, you must have found something.”  He recited the statistics perfectly, and they are impressive. But the one that will resonate in Philadelphia is the zero under the R.B.I. column for this postseason. It is not all his fault; in the fifth inning of Game 6, Howard drilled a two-out double to left-center, but Jimmy Rollins, running from first, had to hold up at third.  But with a chance to drive in the runs that would save the Phillies’ season, with runners on first and second against Wilson, Howard stared at strike three. If he wants to know how long that image can live in fans’ memories, he can ask the Mets’ Carlos Beltran.  “I saw the pitch,” Howard said. “I just saw it down. He kind of hesitated making the call, and that’s it.”  Beltran’s strikeout against St. Louis’s Adam Wainwright to end the 2006 N.L.C.S. was much more devastating because the Mets had not won the World Series with Beltran. However the rest of his career unfolds, Howard has already won a championship, in 2008, and the Phillies seem built to contend again, with every impact player except for Jayson Werth signed for next season.  “There’s a lot of positives,” center fielder Shane Victorino said. “Bringing in a guy like Roy Oswalt, bringing in a guy like Roy Halladay, signing Placido Polanco, signing a lot of us to long-term deals. This front office assured us that we’re going to be around a few years and we’re going to stick.  “Yeah, there are going to be pieces that eventually may move, or make the team better, and you can’t keep a team together every year. But we know what we’re going to have as a core.”  Victorino continued: “There’s some emptiness inside of us right now. There’s some things burning up. But we’ve always been able to overcome that.”  The pitching was not the problem this series. Ryan Madson’s role as the loser in Game 6 — surrendering an opposite-field homer to Juan Uribe in the eighth that just cleared the friendly right-field fence — will be a footnote.  The Phillies lost because the Giants held them to a .178 average with runners in scoring position. The Phillies led the majors in regular-season victories, with 97, for the first time in their 128-year history, and closer Brad Lidge said that, on paper, this was their best team of the last three seasons.  But the Giants deserve to move on.  “Complete chaos,” Wilson said, describing the mayhem after the last out. “Everyone’s screaming. I’ve got a catcher running at me with a fist, guys coming at me from all angles. I just put my head down and wore all the punches.”  Howard, likewise, will wear the punches sure to come his way for striking out looking when one swing could have changed so much.
With a chance to force a Game 7, Ryan Howard of the Philadelphia Phillies watched a slider by Brian Wilson of the Giants fly by for a called third strike.