PHILADELPHIA -- Greg Dobbs is the guy who always has a bat in his hands, even if he's not in the lineup. He'll be taking practice cuts in the cage by the fourth inning, even though, he acknowledges, he might be overdoing it. The Phillies' go-to pinch-hitter long ago embraced his role as the man who has to be ready all the time.

It shouldn't have been surprising, then, when Dobbs capped the Phillies' seven-run fifth-inning rally with a pinch-hit three-run homer that helped give Philadelphia a 10-9 win over Atlanta on Saturday afternoon in front of a sellout Citizens Bank Park crowd.

"It's one thing to watch the offense going, start putting up runs," Dobbs said. "And then, to be called upon in that situation, the adrenaline's flowing."

Facing a 9-3 deficit when the inning began, the Phils loaded the bases with nobody out, and took advantage of timely hits by Ryan Howard and Chris Coste to trim Atlanta's lead to two runs.

With Coste on first and Jayson Werth on third, manager Charlie Manuel turned to Dobbs, who is hitting .435 (20-for-46) off the bench this season and .336 (47-for-140) in his career.

Manuel appreciates Dobbs' focus. There are times when the manager will send Dobbs into the on-deck circle to pinch-hit, then try to tell the hitter something about the pitcher he's about to face. But it's too late -- once Dobbs is in the on-deck circle, he's so locked in that he can't even hear Manuel shouting from the dugout.

"It happens a lot," Dobbs said. "I'm so focused on the pitcher and preparing myself for that at-bat that I don't hear him yelling at me, telling me something."

Facing Braves reliever Blaine Boyer in the fifth, Dobbs found himself in a 1-2 hole. Dobbs prides himself on going into each at-bat with a game plan, but when there are two strikes, he said, the plan goes out the window.

He stepped out of the box and tried to calm the adrenaline that had begun to boil when the Phillies' rally began.

"'Get a good pitch and put a good swing on it,'" Dobbs recalled telling himself as he stepped out of the box. "'If it's not a good pitch, try and lay off it.'"

Dobbs stepped back into the box and connected on Boyer's 1-2 fastball, sending it over the right-field fence and pushing the Phils into the lead. It was his 20th pinch-hit of the season, the most by a Phillie in a single season since Doc Miller had 20 in 1913.

It also absolved Phillies ace Cole Hamels from taking the loss in his worst start of 2008. The Braves pounded him for nine runs (four earned) in the fourth inning, which included a three-run homer by Mark Teixeira and errors by Hamels and Chase Utley.

"If you lose, I would definitely be thinking about it a lot," Hamels said, "just because we're in a tough time and you want to be able to be that guy that can get us out of the rut. I wasn't able to do that today, but the team stepped up and they did a tremendous job."

It isn't the first time this year that Dobbs' pinch-hit heroics have saved Philadelphia. On May 20 against the Nationals, Dobbs' pinch-hit single drove in the go-ahead run in a 1-0 win. That win halted a 3-6 stretch by the Phils and set them on a new track -- a 15-4 stretch that ran through June 8, in which the Phillies averaged more than 6 1/2 runs per game.

The Phils are hoping their rally Saturday will be the spark that pushes them past their recent struggles at the plate. They erupted for six runs in a ninth-inning comeback against the Mets on Tuesday night, a rally that Manuel thought would resurrect the team's bats. But they lost the next three games, hitting .188 (18-for-96) and falling out of first place in the process.

"Different things can key a team to get things going," Dobbs said. "Hopefully the win, period, is able to do that."